DAVID BOWIE: ROLE MODEL ESSAY

Trailblazer Lucy Hale blogs about why David Bowie, who died on 10th January, was such a role model for her.

I’ve never been into makeup, partially due to just not having inherited the fashion victim gene and partially due to an inability to see that looking obviously disabled and being attractive can go hand in hand, so my attitude was always “why bother trying?”.

Therefore, when my sister requested that I wear makeup to her 18th birthday party, I wasn’t enamoured by the prospect of girlying up. My response? An ‘Aladdin Sane‘ lightning bolt down my face, just like David Bowie. If I was going to wear makeup, I wanted to do it in a way that matched how I saw myself at the time; an outsider with a passion for music, not unlike David Bowie himself.

Rewind a few years to when I fell in love with alternative music, just before leaving junior school. Old school Bowie, thanks to my mum, was one of the first acts to draw my attention.

Following my first year or so at secondary school, I had an irreparable fallout with my friends. I was left feeling very alone in a place where I felt I didn’t fit. ‘Life on Mars?’ came to feel like an anthem to me. The isolation it described really resonated with me but also the yearning to be somewhere else and to do something more.

Bowie’s entire career epitomised this desire to explore, be adventurous and push boundaries. His music and image evolved constantly, he challenged our perceptions of gender, sexuality and what was acceptable. He also made great protest art, such as the song ‘Changes’, the video for ‘Let’s Dance’ and his performance atop the Berlin Wall where he could be heard by both East and West Germans. He’s an inspiration to activists as well as artists.

He’s an inspiration to activists as well as artists.

In my early teens, I began having frequent hospital admissions and music became an even more important part of my life. Listening to music was something I could do even in an intensive care bed with countless tubes and wires attached to me and it provided a solace.

So many artists and bands were important to me during those times but none took me out of myself in quite the way Bowie did. The sense of adventure in songs such as ‘Space Oddity’, ‘Starman’ and ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ meant listening to them was like visiting another planet.

However, Bowie didn’t just provide an escape from reality. Like all the best artists, he has taught me valuable lessons about reality. Bowie was the outsider who made being an outsider cool and it’s easy to feel like an outsider as a disabled person. I’m currently studying at music college and, though my musical taste has expanded hugely, Bowie, along with certain others, will always feel special to me.

Bowie was the outsider who made being an outsider cool and it’s easy to feel like an outsider as a disabled person

Physically disabled classical musicians are few and far between and sometimes I feel slightly out of place. I’ve had to be exempt from a couple of assessments on my degree due to my disability and things like that serve to remind me of my difference from my peers.

There’s also always that one person at every concert where one of my pieces is performed (I’m a composer) who can’t believe that a disabled person can write music. That person’s irritating.

But I’m happier with my outsider identity than I was in school, or even when I had my ‘Aladdin Sane’ makeup at my sister’s birthday. I just think to myself ‘If David Bowie can be an androgynous, cross dressing rockstar, I can be a disabled composer.’

Thank you Bowie, for enabling me to think like that. Rest in peace, the world is a much better place for having had you in it.

Written by Lucy Hale.