Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 18 January 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
I believe you are a big fan of David Bowie. Very sorry to hear about his passing.
Seeking Stardust

I am a big fan and when it was announced that David Bowie had died, a lot of people sent me their condolences, which is very sweet, but I didn’t know him. I don’t think any of his fans knew him at all and that is perhaps the beauty of it. David Bowie was unknowable. He always shielded his fans from knowing his human dimensions. I was and remain more broken by the loss and continued absence of John Lennon and perhaps have guarded myself from getting too emotionally involved with a pop figure ever since, somebody I don’t know personally. But whereas Lennon was human with all the lies, failings and glories, Bowie dedicated himself to being art and artifice. We will always have Bowie’s body of work that he conjured into being not by chance but through deep consideration and clever collaborations. I admire and try to deconstruct his processes, trying to understand how he took me to strange places. I don’t know who he was or even how he did what he did but I have tried to ingest Bowie’s artistic courage. I hope that future generations will be awed by his works and wonder who was this creature (fair). I grew up in a small town feeling a bit odd and different and then I heard Bowie screech so triumphantly that you are not alone. And then he told me that we can be heroes. He evoked something utterly intangible about Subterraneans and an Art Decade that means something different to each person who hears it. And all the time, you are not alone. I cannot imagine who I would be without David Bowie.

I have been a fan since I was 15 and although he has been a key inspiration in the work I have done, I have always found it hard to say how or why. After all, he wrote songs and I do not. Perhaps, it is Bowie’s example that it is okay to be different. Growing up in the 1980s on the streets of a small town in England (the same town where Bowie’s parents met), I was beaten up a few times because I dressed in very peculiar styles that were inspired by Bowie, but never tried to look like Bowie. The young men who beat me up were fascist-inspired scary skinheads or clothed in a style that was popular back then called “Soul boys” and I saw that they all had one thing in common — they dressed in what was essentially a tribal uniform because they all wanted to look just like everybody else. They wanted to beat me up because I looked different, which they found to be insulting. Ever since then, I have been wary of people who want to be just like everybody else.

But even non-conformity can end up being a kind of conformity with its own uniforms and rules. In London’s gay community in the 1980s, there was a surprising style moment. Many in the gay community (the ultimate outsider community) presumably became so tired of being beaten up by skinheads that they started to dress exactly like them. Soon, the hunters and the hunted looked exactly the same, even though they were so very different. I guess we are all searching for safety and a sense of community.

Ultimately, David Bowie will be remembered because he wrote so many wonderful catchy songs, a quantity that can only be equalled by Lennon-McCartney and a handful of others. No matter how outlandishly he dressed, he would have passed into oblivion long ago if it were not for his craft as a songwriter. But his songs don’t really mean anything. Bob Dylan proclaimed that “The times they are a-changin” but Bowie said, “I’m an alligator, I’m a mama-papa coming for you.” Bowie rarely told coherent stories in his songs and they do not have specific didactic meaning. But they do evoke intangible emotional landscapes and it is in those dazzling creative landscapes that I have found my communities and have attempted to forge a path as my own person. Thanks, David.

Reprinted with the kind permission of