Allow me to be frank
from the start, I quite liked David Bowie. I'm not a die-hard crazed
fan, equally, I don't hate everything he did, I quite like some of
his work, but I really shouldn't have shed a tear on Monday when his
death was announced, and, in my defence, I didn't, initially. I saw
it on the news at about 7am when it was announced, and thought 'Oh
dear, another one, how very sad, and he's only just released that new
album,' and thought not much more about it until I got to work and
put the radio on.
Once I heard the
crack in the voices of my constant companions (the radio 6 music
presenters) I began to feel quite sad about it. Then I logged on to
twitter and facebook, and could see the genuine hurt of my friends
and acquaintances, and the odd writer, musician and comedian I
follow. Which is when the empathic nature of these things begins to
kick in (admittedly, I am still quite susceptible to anything sad at
the moment, having only recently lost my dog). It was said that there
wasn't even this big a general outpouring of grief for John Lennon in
1980. I would suggest that this is because the mechanisms for such
huge waves of grief to take hold were not in place in 1980. Had
Lennon been shot in the age of instant messages and social media then
the wave of empathy would have been equal to or (almost certainly)
greater than the scenes we saw in Brixton on Monday.
There was a similar
effect when Michael Jackson died a few years ago. Again, I wasn't a
massive fan, but I found myself caught up in the snowball of grief
along with everybody else. Bad had been my favourite album for a good
fortnight when I was ten years old. But then you change what music
you like more often than your socks when you are ten years old. By
the end of the day's radio coverage, I was almost believing that
HIStory hadn't been a massive load of egocentric tosh, despite the
overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The people on the
radio are your friends though, if, like me, you listen to it all day
long at work. Hearing the genuine catch in the voices of Shaun
Keaveny, Lauren Laverne, Mark Radcliffe and all the six music
presenters on Monday morning made me feel as sad for them as I would
had a real life friend been telling me about a dead family member.
Considering that it was, in fact, people I have never met telling me
about a person I have never met (and neither had they I believe)
dying this is an impressive trick, and it just goes to show how much
more interconnected we are now than we were in 1980. The 'backstage'
insight that one gains from the twitter feeds of radio presenters
makes you feel even more like their actual friends (I realise that
sounds stalky, please don't worry if I am following you on twitter, I
am not that way inclined).
The radio
relationship has always been an odd one, and when I catch the odd bit
of Jeremy Vine, Ken Bruce and Steve Wright on Radio 2, it feels a bit
like one of those awkward moments when you run into an old friend
with whom you no longer have anything in common at a party and
shuffle awkwardly while pretending to be interested in what they are
saying, all the while wanting to move on to find newer, more
interesting friends. It is only natural to feel empathy with these
people that I spend my entire working day with. And it is empathy
that drives us to cry over things that do not affect us directly, I
have been known to cry over a sad bit in a TV show I have never seen
before if they get the soundtrack right and it tweaks a heartstring.
Had I been a little
older, then perhaps I too would be feeling genuine grief over Bowie's
death, but in truth, his work had no real direct impact on me. Had I
been a gender confused teenager in the seventies then I would have
seen him as the messiah-like figure he was for many, a rallying
point for oddball outsider teenagers, and I understand that, and it
is them that I am crying for when I hear the opening of Life on Mars
(although it is one of those songs that'll do that anyway, am I
right?). I was an oddball outsider teenager, certainly, but it was
the 90s, Bowie was doing Tin Machine and irrelevant, and we had
Nirvana by then, though I was utterly unmoved by Kurt Cobain's death,
possibly because I was an arrogant gobshite 17 year old with no
regard for anybody else, and all those who did care had taken the day
off school in heartbroken grief (some of them did the same thing when
Take That broke up later on that decade, only it was work they were
skiving off from by then).
I have no Bowie-like
figure really, Lemmy meant more to me than Bowie ever will, but I did
not shed any tears for his passing. The ever mounting radio, TV and
online grief show brings out our humanity, and reinforces the fact
that when a huge amount of people are feeling something, all those
brought into contact begin to feel it too, as part of the hive mind.
Much as I complain about the regular outpourings of RIPs on my social
media feeds, I have to admit it's a good thing. It shows we do
actually care, even if it is just to be seen to care while riding the
trendwave. It works at Christmas as well, and if we could harness
its power properly (admittedly, this is how religion spreads, and
fascism) we could do a lot of good, and we could maybe all start to
get on as a single species.
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