The Ramones are dead, Lou Reed is dead, Lemmy just died. It was hard to loose my musical childhood heroes, my companions through adolescence. And now David Bowie. For some strange reason I thought David Bowie would never die. He had an aura of immortality. To hear about his death was not only a shock, it left me with a slight feeling of abandonment, that I hadn’t experienced when one of the others had died. Musically, I am not even the most die-hard fan of his. I love 70s Bowie and listening to him singing ‘Heroes’ in German was definitly an awe-inspiring moment, but the 80s Bowie getting all electronic was not 100% my thing. Let alone the video clips. But I always did and still do love his presence. Even in the his most esoterical artsy fartsy videos there was Bowie performing Bowie, whatever that was. There is a transcendence about the artist David Bowie that gets to me and inspires me. An independence from the current. A constant phoenix-like emerging from something else. Not from this earth. That’s what makes it so unbelievable that he will rise from the ashes no more.

Illustration by Julia Richter

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©Julia Richter

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