Ziggy Stardust, a.k.a. David Bowie, a.k.a. David Jones, was born in Brixton, South London, on January 8, 1947. Died in Manhattan, New York City, January 10, 2016.
Beneath the glitter and his untethered to earth weightlessness lies androgyny, exile, alienation and ch-ch-ch-ch changes. The hallmarks of the schizophrenic experience.
According to The Daily Mail:
David Bowie never crossed the divide into mental illness. But he shared a number of the quirks shown by his maternal family. He would suddenly burst into tears, for example, and was said to have had a particularly active imagination.
One family friend told me that, as a four or five-year-old, David had phoned to summon the local ambulance one night, and successfully persuaded the operator that he was “dying”.
That Bowie was conscious of his heritage seems obvious from the number of songs he wrote touching on lunacy or schizophrenia. Of the Oh! You Pretty Things lyrics, Bowie said: “I hadn’t been to an analyst – my parents went, my brothers and sisters and my aunts and uncles and cousins, they did that. They ended up in a much worse state. I thought I’d write my problems out.”
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