Heroes

January 12, 2016 by Ray Morgan

Heroes

You know when all your friends are posting pictures online of someone famous that it isn't good news. I woke up on Monday morning and checked my Instagram, and it was blooming with pictures of David Bowie in all his many, electrifying and beautiful guises. Two weeks before, it was pictures of Lemmy, his face cragged with a lifetime of being on the road.

There's something of togetherness when someone incredibly famous passes away. I guess that's a good thing about social media - you can all feel it together. To have your timelines heavy with outpourings of public grief can actually be quite beautiful, and certainly comforting.

Posting a video of Heroes, for example, isn't just about your love for the song, or even the musician himself. As I've blogged about before, music is powerful. Heroes might have been the song of your first dance at your wedding, or a song you shared with a loved one. You can attach songs to certain times in your life, a wall-chart of time with songs pinned to it at significant points.

I associate David Bowie with a lot of moments in my life: dancing at the Pink Toothbrush, swapping mix CDs with friends, my Mum buying The Buddha of Suburbia on cassette tape and playing it over and over again, my partner's super cool Bowie tshirt, watching The Snowman as a little kid, a dear departed friend making a mash-up of Let's Dance with Encore by Jay-Z (believe me, it worked) and rediscovering the Berlin period after the release of Dylan Howe's jazz take on those albums, not to mention how much wear I got out of Bowie's albums in general day to day listening - at work, on the bus, walking home.

It's strange that people can feel so connected when somebody they don't know has died, but again, it's not just about that. You don't need to have known them personally to feel it. Remembering someone who made great music that shaped your life is public grief on a basic level; it can also comfort you in your own life and losses. You can reflect on whatever is going on in your life at that moment, and use the music to fit into your headspace.

As soon as I left the house after hearing the news I put the song Heroes on my headphones, blasted so loud that my phone actually *told* me to turn it down, and I immersed myself into listening to the lyrics of one of my favourite songs of all time. I felt a swell of sadness in my heart and cried, not just for Bowie, for everything else in my life that it applied to in that moment, and I read through all my friends' gorgeous tributes online to moments in their lives, and despite the sadness, it felt really, really great.