Final Blog Post - My affinity for David Bowie comes to a head

 For this reading, you will need Lyric Genius and the song 'Five Years' by David Bowie playing in the background. 

David Bowie is a nostalgic artist for me. I remember my decent into loving his music very well, and for that I have a lot of memories that I can associate with different songs of his. It's a really wonderful way to create an album of memories, an amalgamation of songs that can take us through time. This song, 'Five Years,' is one of my favorites, for a long while because I thought it was masterfully composed and lyrically powerful. I have reanalyzed this song more closely for my music theory class this semester and doubled down in what I believed, because the class has given me the words to describe it's artistry, but I think in looking at the song so analytically it has taken away from the most amazing part of the music. 

For a bit of background, the song is featured on Bowie's album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. 'Five Years' is the opening song of the album and introduces what would become one of Bowie's most famous characters. Bowie plays an alien named Ziggy who is coming to Earth and experiencing the human race for the first time. With his arrival, comes the 'end of the world,' a reaction to an alien race (spiders) that are "invading," and a lack of natural resources (the release aligned with the Cold War). The title itself was a chosen time based on a dream Bowie had in which his late father came to him and told him he only had five years left to live. 

Knowing this, it becomes more obvious as the song plays, that Ziggy is desperate for to feel fulfilled in the short time he has left. The lyrics, "My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare, I had to cram so many things to store everything in there," sums up this experience, and in turn I think it sums up how we all tend to feel going through life. We can become so desperate to feel as though we are living our lives in the best possible way, experiencing everything we possibly can, and stockpiling moments and memories within the short time we are allowed to experience on this earth. 

The end of the song, as decided by Lyric Genius, explains that the oversaturated noise being played at the end (it's uncomfortable at first but I stand by my previous statement, it's a musical masterpiece) is this album of memories that now exist inside Ziggy's head, playing over each other and clashing until all that is left is the beating of Ziggy's heart. I think that really illustrates what I've taken away from this semester as a whole: the time we are granted does not have to be utilized with excess; there is a beauty to a simple life, and the ability to get more from the moments themselves than from the amount of experiences we collect. Quality over quantity and all that jazz. I adore the fact that this class has given me the ability to be a time traveler. The moments that I feel nostalgic for, or memories that I get swept up into no longer feel like wasted time thinking about the past, but the ability to relive those moments briefly. 

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