“Quicksand” [demo], (Hunky Dory, 1971)
Daniel Brockman
Although Bowie dabbled in all forms, he wasn’t a rocker at heart — he was a searcher, and a loner, sad and distant and aching and feeling. By the time he finally hit paydirt commercially, with the success of the Ziggy Stardust persona, he had already been a thousand people in a decade-long career that saw him flail at r&b, mime, cabaret and earnest folk in search of anyone, anyone, to cure him of the boredom and loneliness. He had tried every crazy religious thought too, which explains the Tibetan-Book-Of-The-Dead-via-Nietzsche-and-Aleister-Crowley creep of his immediately-pre-Ziggy period. “I’m not a prophet or a stone-age man/Just a mortal with potential of a superman/I’m living on” is not the type of couplet penned by the soon-to-be-leader of Glam Nation ’72 — instead, tracks like “Quicksand” show that Bowie was always wrangling with ways to universalize the internal struggles with infinity and death that fixated him throughout his life. There hasn’t been a moment in my life when death has come up as a topic and the chorus to this song hasn’t popped in my head: “Don’t believe in yourself/Don’t deceive with belief/Knowledge comes with death’s release.” Amen, David Bowie, amen — here’s to hoping that you have finally found that knowledge of the untenable on which you spent your whole life theorizing.