David Bowie’s Music as a Navigational Portal to Our Inner Worlds
Through a playlist of the late artist’s songs, philosopher and longtime Bowie fan Simon Critchley shows how Bowie’s music can help us pinpoint how we feel.
By Tiffany Jow
September 28, 2021
4 minute read
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“David Bowie was the greatest artist in any medium from the 1970s onwards,” says philosopher Simon Critchley. His opinion is hardly unfounded: A Bowie fan since first glimpsing the artist on the British TV show Top of the Pops at age 12, Critchley, now in his 60s, often turns to him as a muse and a mirror. (Critchley makes music himself with his longtime collaborator, John Simmons.) In the midst of the pandemic this past January, five years after Bowie’s death, Critchely wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “What Would Bowie Do?,” searching for answers in the dystopian worlds of his songs.