Ghost in the mirror

David Bowie, mourning, and suicide

Abstract

The musical career of David Bowie displays a longstanding fascination with suicide, as both a theme that recurs in his lyrics and as a visually enacted motif in his stage and media performances. This essay focuses on how the artist responded to the death of Bowie’s half-brother Terry Burns by suicide in 1985. Close attention is given to the lyrics of, and music video for, “Jump They Say” (1993), both of which are interpreted as acts of mourning. The essay engages with theories of mourning and trauma to suggest that Bowie’s response to Burns’s suicide is a complex one. Bowie is shown to try to rationalise his reaction, via psychoanalysis, as an ordered working through that leads to the freeing of the ego. With the help of Derrida, it is here argued that the process is, in fact, a protracted and open-ended one. The analysis connects Bowie’s mourning with important earlier songs such as “Rock’n Roll Suicide”, “All the Madmen” and “The Bewlay Brothers”, and also demonstrates how “I Can’t Read” and “Goodbye Mr. Ed” can be interpreted as predecessors for “Jump They Say”. It is argued that Bowie’s mourning process later becomes more occluded, but persists to the very end of his career, including the ending of his musical Lazarus (2016).