IN JULY 1969 men walked on the moon, a technological leap all but unthinkable 50 years before. Three years later they abandoned it, and have renounced all return ever since. What boosters saw as the great opening act of the space age turned out to be, in effect, its culmination. Within a few years presidential corruption, economic stagnation, military ignominy and imagined catastrophe had warped post-war America’s previously impervious belief in progress, a belief that had resonance across the then free world. After Apollo, the future would never again be what it used to be.
1969
年的七月人类登上了月球，完成了一次
50
年前的人们无法想象的科技飞跃。三年过后，他们抛弃了登月计划，宣称再也不会回归月球。支持者们所谓的“太空时代的宏伟序幕”最终成为了太空时代的最高潮。在短短的数年里，总统腐败丑闻、经济停滞、越战的耻辱和核灾难的臆想将二战后美国对于进步一往无前的信念——曾在当时的自由世界激起无限共鸣的信念——扭曲得面目全非。阿波罗计划之后，未来已不再是过去的样子。
David Bowie’s greatest years began nine days before Apollo 11 touched down in the Sea of Tranquillity, with the release of his single “Space Oddity”; they ended 11 years later, with the single “Ashes to Ashes”. Over that decade he used imagined futures to turn himself into something contradictory and wonderful—an epitome of alienation with whom the alienated flocked to identify. In doing so, he laid bare one of the key cultural shifts of the 1970s: the giving up of past dreams.
大卫•鲍伊最辉煌的时期始于阿波罗
11
号降落在静海的九天前，那天他发行了单曲“
Space Oddity
”，并在
11
年后随着单曲“
Ashes to Ashes
”的发行为该时期划上了句号。在这十余年间，他借助幻想中的未来，将自己转化为某种矛盾和美好的结合体——作为排斥于主流之外的象征，他受到了无数从他身上寻找自我认同的被排斥者的追随。借此，他赤裸裸地揭示了
70
年代最重要的一项文化变迁的本质：放弃过去的梦想。
Mr Bowie’s future-fixation was most obvious in his appropriation of the themes of pulp science fiction, of space travel and aliens from other planets, of “Ziggy Stardust” and “Life on Mars”. Other impresarios—most notably L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology—had ransacked the genre for mythologies of personal growth. But none did so with Mr Bowie’s sense of dress and theatre, his sexual thrill, his salesmanship and his understanding of what his fans wanted to hear. His alien allegories made the possibility of change—the heart of the future’s appeal, especially for adolescents—a matter not of remaking society or piling up technological progress but of revealing, or remaking, yourself. The difference between the future and the past lay not in it, but in you.
鲍伊对于未来的执念最明显的体现是他大量借鉴了“纸浆科幻”小说中的主题，譬如太空旅行和外星人，譬如“基吉•星尘（
Ziggy Stardust
）”和“火星生活
(Life on Mars)
”。尽管其他经理人为了编造“个人提升”的神话早已将该文学流派的价值榨取殆尽（当中最著名的当属山达基教会的创始人
L
•罗恩•贺伯特
[L. RonHubbard])
，但鲍伊的衣着品味、舞台表现力、性吸引力、自我营销能力和对于自己歌迷想要听什么的深刻理解可谓前无来者。他的外星寓言让改变成为可能，而改变正是“未来”的吸引力核心所在——对青少年而言更是如此。“未来”不意味着重新改造社会，也不意味着积累技术进步，而是启示或重造你自己。未来和过去的区别不在于未来本身，而是在于你的内心。
The proof was in the playing. Mr Bowie grew up as David Jones, a sharp-toothed kid from dull suburban Bromley whose parent sheld no aspirations for him. Through a talent born of yearning he had transformed himself into Ziggy Stardust: extravagant, flawed and sexually polymorphous, tottering on platform shoes and hiding behind a mask of paint. “Nijinsky meets Woolworths” Mr Bowie called him: a character who ran through 73 different outfits in 21 months. If he could so transform himself, what could make-up and attitude do for you—especially if you had outcast Ziggy, your lepermessiah, to sexily show you the way?
鲍伊的表演就是此中证据。原名大卫•琼斯的他年少时只是一位来自布罗姆利沉闷郊区的龅牙男孩，父母对他的成长从未寄予厚望。他的才华源自渴望，借此他将自己化身为
Ziggy Stardust
：一个外形浮夸、缺点鲜明、雌雄难辨、踩着高跟鞋蹒跚行走、隐藏在颜料的面具之后的人物。“当尼金斯基遇到沃尔沃斯商场”，鲍伊如此描述这个
21
个月里换了
73
套不同戏服的人物。既然他能够以这种方式改头换面，那么，当放逐者
Ziggy
——被排斥的弥赛亚——用一种性感的方式为你指明了方向，你可以用化妆品和态度做到什么程度呢？
Mr Bowie had taken a while to attract attention. Stuck in 1960s London, he picked up a saxophone and considered jazz, then flitted between bands; he moved from mod to Buddhist, from rocker to folk artist, hanging around London’s Soho with its sex shops and music clubs, exploring sexual ambiguity. Despite the success of “Space Oddity” his earlyalbums drew little attention. It was only with the fifth, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, (1972) that millions of teenagers insemi-detached houses just like the one back in Bromley took him to their hearts and turntables.
鲍伊在成名之前花费了不少周折。身陷
60
年代的伦敦，他先是考虑玩爵士，挑了萨克斯作为乐器，换了一个又一个乐队；他从摩登派转为佛教徒，又从摇滚转到民谣，在伦敦经营自家的情趣用品店和音乐俱乐部，探索雌雄同体之道。尽管他的单曲“
Space Oddity
”获得了巨大的成功，他的早期专辑仅受到了极少的关注。直到
1972
年他推出了第五张专辑《基吉•星尘的崛起与陨落以及火星蜘蛛
(The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars)
》，他才得以进入数以百万计住在半独立房（就和他当年一样）的青少年的唱机转盘上和心里。
Through these years and after Mr Bowie’s focus on the future was clear in his relentless reinvention of himself and his music: always wanting to see what was next, ceaselessly leaving the places hehad lived and the music he had played for what was to come. “I can think of no other rock artist” wrote Charles Shaar Murray, a rock journalist, “whose next album is always the one I’m most looking forward to hearing.”
在这段时期以及之后的年月里，鲍伊不断地重塑自己和重塑音乐，他对于未来的执着由此可见一斑：永远寻求着下一步做什么，为了未来永不停息地离开曾经住过的地方和曾经做过的音乐。摇滚记者查尔斯•夏尔•穆雷写道：“我想不到还有其他哪位摇滚艺人可以做到下一张专辑永远是我最期待听到的音乐。”
Some called him a chameleon, but he was the reverse. Chameleons change hue to blend in with their background; he changed to stand out, and dared others to mimic him. He was never afraid to murder his darlings. Ziggy was killed off in 1973 as he finished an exhausting worldwide tour at London’s Hammersmith Odeon; he was being too much imitated, and Mr Bowie always had to be one step ahead. One successor was Aladdin Sane, a zigzag of painted lightning across his face; another, the most troubled, was the Thin White Duke, an aristocratic cabaret singer in black trousers, waistcoat and white shirt, needing only a skull to play Hamlet.
有人把他叫做“变色龙”，但他恰恰相反。变色龙改变自己的颜色是为了融入背景，他改变自己的颜色却是为了脱颖而出，并向他的模仿者发出挑战。他从不畏惧杀死自己的宝贝，在身心俱疲的
1973
年世界巡演的结尾，他在伦敦的汉默史密斯剧场（
Hammersmith Odeon
）宣布，
Ziggy
已死；他已经被模仿得太多，而鲍伊必须永远领先他人一步。下一位继任者是
Aladdin Sane
，一道闪电形状的彩妆划过整张脸；另一位继任者，也是最苦恼不安的一位，则是
“瘦白公爵”
(Thin White Duke)
，一位贵族做派的卡巴莱歌手，穿着黑长裤黑背心和白衬衫，离扮演哈姆雷特就只差一个骷髅头了。
The tragic garb was well judged. As he dashed from persona to persona, station to station, so the worlds he pushed into became darker. Shaped by the threat of nuclear war, the cultural imagination took a catastrophic turn in the 1970s—one ever-present future wasno future at all. Mr Bowie was there at the turning point; his song “Five Years” says more about impending annihilation than a shelf full of reports from the RAND Corporation. Spectacular levels of cocaine abuse also shaped this nihilistic trajectory. Settled in Los Angeles from 1975, he stayed up for dayson end, sitting cross-legged behind black curtains, surrounding himself with black candles and painted pentagrams.
悲剧的戏服在他身上非常得当。随着他由一个人格转为另一个人格，从一站冲到下一站，被他推入其中的世界也变得愈发黑暗。在核战争的威胁之下，
70
年代的文化幻想发生了灾难性的扭转——近在咫尺的未来可能就是不再有未来。鲍伊身处转折点之上，对于仅在咫尺的人道毁灭，他的“
Five Years
”歌词描写的分量要胜过一整柜兰德公司的报告。而令人叹为观止的可卡因滥用也促成了他向虚无主义的转变。从
1975
年起生活在洛杉矶的他，经常一连好几天不眠不休，盘腿坐在黑色的幕布之后，用黑色的蜡烛和五角星图案将自己环绕。
His diet was “red peppers, cocaine and milk”; always slender, he became skeletal. He would work madly on a song for a week, only to realise that he had got no further than four bars. Nicolas Roeghad originally been set on Peter O’Toole to play the titular alien in his film “The Man Who Fell To Earth”. But on seeing television footage of Mr Bowie sitting utterly isolated in the back of a limousine he knew he had his not-quite-man. Mr Bowie, true to form, remembered almost nothing of the filming. There is no alienation like drugged alienation, and perhaps no worse place to experience that than “the most repulsive wart on the backside of humanity”, as he described the City of Angels.
他的饮食是“红辣椒，可卡因和牛奶”，本来就修长苗条的他变得骨瘦如柴。他经常连续一周疯狂地写歌，最后发现自己翻来覆去只写了四个小节。尼古拉斯•罗伊格本来想在他的电影《天外来客（
The Man Who Fell To Earth
）》中让彼得•奥图扮演那位名义上的外星人，但当他在电视上看到鲍伊与世隔绝般独自坐在豪华轿车后座的镜头时，他知道他找到了自己的天外来客。鲍伊倒是一如既往地对拍电影的事几乎一点都不记得了。毒品作用下的与世隔绝和所有与世隔绝感都不一样，要体会这一点，或许除了洛杉矶——用他的话来说就是——“人性背面最令人作呕的湿疣”之外，没有其他更好的地方了。
In “Space Oddity” Major Tom, floating in a most peculiar way, had been an isolated spaceman; by “Ashes to Ashes” his isolation was a junkie’s. Mr Bowie later said that this funereal nursery rhyme (only his second British number-one single) served to wrap up the 1970s. In the1980s he reconnected, refashioning himself into a much more straightforward, and less interesting, pop star and something of a Thatcherite poster-boy; embracing consumerism was another side of his celebration of the individual overall else. He found huge audiences in America with “Let’s Dance” (1983); he sanga camp cover of Martha Reeves & the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” with Mick Jagger for Bob Geldof’s Band Aid. His skills were still there, yet his sense of daring had faded. For the first time since Ziggy, he no longer drove the cultural agenda; like many an ageing rocker, he found himself seen as part of the establishment he had spent his life wrong-footing.
在“
Space Oddity
”中那位“用最诡异的姿势漂浮”的汤姆少校是一位隔绝于世的宇航员；到了“
Ashes toAshes
”，他的与世隔绝变成了瘾君子那种隔绝感
。后来鲍伊声称，这首适合葬礼播放的儿歌（只不过是他第二首获得英国榜单冠军的单曲）可以用来概括整个
70
年代。到了
80
年代，他重新回归世俗，把自己改造成一个更明快直白、然而也不那么有趣的流行明星形象，风格类似撒切尔阵营的海报男模；对消费主义的拥护只是他一贯鼓吹“自我高于一切”的一个方面。他借助
1983
年的“
Let
’
s Dance
”在美国赢得了大量歌迷；他为鲍勃•吉尔道夫
(Bob Geldof)
的
Band Aid
与米克•贾格尔 （
MickJagger
）合作翻唱了玛莎与文德拉合唱团（
MarthaReeves & the Vandellas
）的“
Dancing in the Street
”。他的技术依旧，但就如同许多其他老牌摇滚明星一样，尽管他一辈子都在与主流划清界限，他发现人们已经将他视为乐坛元老中的一分子。
His better work in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, like the late work of many artists, seemed more a response to his own earlier achievement than a reflection of the world outside—but the stature of that earlier work, and the fact that it had done much to shape that world outside, still made the last albums far more interesting than those of most of his peers. Most poignant was his 27th and last, “Blackstar”, released on January 8th. The video for the track “Lazarus” shows him singing “I’ll be free—ain’t that just like me?” before walking backwards, trembling, into a wardrobe, and pulling the door closed. He had choreographed his own death—a step ahead, as usual, and a profound shock for a world that had been unaware of his cancer. Within days “Lazarus” had been watched 17m times, and “Blackstar” topped the charts. His producer, Tony Visconti, confirmed that it was Mr Bowie’s “parting gift”.
他从
90
年代，
00
年代，再到
10
年代的较好作品，和许多艺人的后期作品一样，与其说是映射外面的世界，不如说是对自己早年成就的一种呼应——但他早年作品达到的高度，以及他的作品极大地影响了外面的世界这一事实，还是足以让他的作品比大部分同期艺人来得要有趣得多。当中最为悲伤深刻的是他的第
27
张，也是最后一张专辑《
Blackstar
》，发行于
