The Church of England hasn’t been into canonisations for a while but, judging by the front-page eulogies in the press, an exception may be made in David Bowie’s case.
Allow me first to declare a personal interest in David Bowie: there is none. When he was alive I knew he had something to do either with pop music or the drug trade, not that there’s much difference between the two.
Now he’s dead, I’ve found out he was actually some kind of singer of, putting it kindly, ambivalent sexuality and a strong propensity to snort cocaine. In short, he possessed perfect credentials to be eulogised as ‘a legend’ and ‘a great musician’.
Obeying the dictum of speaking no evil of the dead, I shan’t say much else about his personality, especially since even the panegyrics fail to portray it as anything other than trivial. I’m interested in Bowie not for what he was but for what he represents.
Judging by the scraps of his songs one can’t help hearing on every broadcast channel, he wasn’t a great musician. He wasn’t a musician at all. His ilk are merely both the totems and the shamans of a pernicious, toxic cult.
The purveyors of this cult overtly or implicitly favour satanic paraphernalia to dress up their rites, a cross between a Nuremberg rally and an orgy. Typically they perform in clouds of billowing smoke, hinting at hell with little subtlety.
Their puny musical content is drowned in the clinically deafening din of electric and electronic instruments, belting out the same three chords on which the whole structure of pop ‘music’ rests.
The accompanying roar coming from thousands of throats doesn’t reflect fine musical sensibilities. It’s a hateful chant of cult worshippers, the battle cry of victorious barbaric modernity.
Pop music expresses the true nature of modernity, which is more or less circumscribed by its hatred of Western tradition. Both the shamans and the worshippers of the cult seek, wittingly or unwittingly, to destroy our civilisation, even though they don’t mind availing themselves of the riches it can deliver.
In fact, pop has become big business, perhaps the biggest of all. Illiterate, tone-deaf adolescents can become billionaires overnight, provided they can tickle the naughty bits of culturally inept audiences in a particularly effective way. They belch their anti-capitalist invective all the way to the capitalist bank, oblivious to the paradox, perhaps even unfamiliar with this three-syllable word.
At the beginning pop remotely resembled music, but that was quickly lost. More and more, it began to acquire overtly satanic characteristics. More and more, it began to appeal not just to the darker side of human nature but to the sulphuric swamp concealed underneath it. Pop went the weasel of our civilisation.
Pop’s appeal is quasi-religious, in the same sense in which the antichrist is the negative image of Christ. While Jesus died on the cross to redeem our sins, the apostles of the new cult would commit suicide or else die of alcoholism, drug overdose or in due course of AIDS. At a pinch even cancer, of the kind that killed Bowie, can qualify as a trampoline to redemptive immortality.
Improbably, the dead shamans are portrayed as a kind of innocent victims of some unidentified enemy who contextually can only be ‘the establishment’. Worshippers of the new cult pretend not to realise that they themselves are the establishment now. Iconoclasm always lives on even after the icons have been smashed.
Hence all those Jimmy Hendrixes, Freddie Mercuries, Amy Winehouses and David Bowies gave their lives for a good cause. They are martyrs at the altar of anomie and hatred.
Amazingly, even our formerly reputable newspapers not only praise the cultish martyrs but claim they set a great example for Christian churches to follow. Hence Hugo Rifkind, whose idiocy stands out even against the generally abysmal level of The Times, says the late Bowie could teach the Anglican Church the meaning of tolerance towards LGBTI people:
“LGBTI stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex’. Bowie, at times, appeared to be at least three of those things, and arguably four. Still… those whom the church left ‘abandoned and alone’, he championed and made his own.”
Tolerance means accepting with equanimity something one dislikes. You and I may be tolerant of cannibals, but a cannibal wouldn’t be. He’d be one of them.
Thus those who practise sexual perversions find it easier to be tolerant of such practices than would those who find them distasteful. Obviously, Mr Rifkind is so carried away by his own anomie that he’s unable to notice that he’s talking in logical solecisms. He’s just dying to state his credentials as someone who belongs.
That the Bowies of this world find mass adulation indicts not so much them as all of us. A society that can see them as anything other than an unpleasant sideshow fails aesthetically, culturally and philosophically. Above all it fails morally, and that is a truly serious matter.
Still, those of us who know how must pray for David Bowie’s soul – which will be a true test of tolerance.