If you stay hung up on an intellectual interpretation of what Bowie's doing, firstly you're right where he wants you, he'll play with you like a toy and in so doing, he'll have a grand time, he loved that even at times when his life was faltering.

Secondly, you overlook the glee with which he collaborated with people to jointly express their humanity, and who inspired him to do this. You can read the lyrics and parse them all you like, but what does it FEEL like when you've soaked up the whole song and are at that moment of…

"Ain't there one damn song that can make me…"

That's not even getting into my personal faves like Station to Station, Scary Monsters, where he's venting some really personal stuff and turning it into sound-as-art and also hellacious good funk, with the most gifted companions you could wish for.

Bowie liked to record vocals in one take, just fling himself into expressing and run with whatever he had in the tank that day, and it communicates like mad. He's maybe the canonical example of the opposite to AI music. In bringing that to fruition, I'm certain he understood countless joys. You gotta express many other things than just joy to have hit records, but then Beethoven excelled at that as well.

I've doubtless taken more trouble than I needed to, rebutting what could have been a GPT-extruded troll of an argument, but it was fun :)

> I've doubtless taken more trouble than I needed to, rebutting what could have been a GPT-extruded troll of an argument, but it was fun :)

Yet failed to address even one of my contentions, which if I had to summarise them for you again are:

- Music of the 20th century falls short of music of the 19th century, and it's not particularly close.

- Having no boundaries and standards does not make for better art.

- Bowie's music cannot convey meaning or wonder because he did not believe there is any meaningful or wonderful in the universe other than him, even if he held this view "humbly".

- Bowie could not write joyful music because his world view made it impossible for him to have joy.

(quoted) The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.