Sunday, August 16, 2015

Creative Heroes: The David Bowie Exhibition, Melbourne 2015

Went to the David Bowie exhibition today. It's had a big impact on me. This man is a great artist and I'd forgotten how much I have loved his music over the years. I came away from this exhibition feeling the same way as when I've walked away from a Picasso exhibition or the Joan Miro museum or anything that Gaudi has had anything to do with. These are my creative heroes.

But David Bowie is within my lifetime, unlike the others. Heroes... I was a young boy when I first heard this song. Heroes was the most epic song I had ever heard. I didn't know what it was about at the time, but I heard a passion in it that I hadn't encountered before.

A few years later in the 70s, I said something about how much I liked Bowie's music, and a suburban relative asked me, "Do you mean in his boy phase or his girl phase?"

Confused? Fuck yeah. As naive as I was, I knew this person was making some kind of point. I knew she knew more than I knew. It dawned on me that maybe my musical idol maybe different to the norm of suburban Australia. I realised at that moment that maybe as-yet-non-sexual me was missing some point, but there was also this: I don't fucking care. I just like this music.

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