Goodbye David Bowie & Alan Rickman

At 5:30 in the morning I was gently woken and told that David Bowie had died. I lay alone in the dark for the next hour, listening to Ziggy Stardust singing his heart out, until it was time to get up for work.

When I got there one of my coworkers said I was sounding a little down, and I said I guessed she hadn't heard that Bowie had died. She said she had heard, and that she didn't really know him or his work at all. I was floored. Didn't know David Bowie's work? How could that be? She'd never heard Ziggy Stardust? Or watched Labyrinth? But then I realized I was talking to someone who didn't remember Kurt Cobain or River Phoenix or Brandon Lee either (she had actually once asked me the name of the lead singer in Nirvana). Things change. Time passes.

But then I couldn't help but think of all the modern entertainment that was influenced by Bowie. Things like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hedwig & the Angry Inch sprang immediately to mind. They would certainly be vastly different in a world without him, if they would even exist at all.

In The Venture Brothers not only does the Sovereign take the form of David Bowie, but characters dress as Bowie for Halloween, and an entire episode is based around the song Ground Control. 

  

In the 1999 movie Moulin Rouge, the working girls are known as the Diamond Dogs, which was the name of Bowie's 1974 album. Diamond Dogs are also the elite soldiers in the video game Metal Gear Solid V. And Bowie's "Man Who Sold The World" is part of the game's soundtrack.

It's hard to imagine a world without Bowie. And it's made harder still by the fact that we now have to live in a world without Alan Rickman. But at least my coworker knew who he was -- everybody knows Snape -- although she didn't know he was in Galaxy Quest, or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or Die Hard. How long will it be before he, too is just a distant memory of people's childhoods? No matter the answer, it's not long enough.

So, on behalf of my generation, thank you, Bowie & Rickman, for bringing a little bit of sparkle to the world.