makz | Ziggy Stardust and the Fall and Rise of the Sine Wave

For no particularly good reason, I'm doing a deep dive into David Bowie and his various stage personas, concept albums, and lyrical elements. I'm a product of American radio, just as much as the next person, so it isn't as if I have had no exposure to the man. In fact, I remember precisely where I was when I first heard his very last single.

At the time, I thought only, "just like the rest of his work, my religious schoolteachers would all have a field day whispering in corners about the decline of society," and secretly enshrined in my heart a small shard of solidarity. I think that's the core of rock music. It isn't anti-establishment sentiment, so much as it is the small knowledge that you've made them sweat a bit.

I've got to say, though, the entire experience of watching Bowie's final performance as Ziggy Stardust has been an interesting time for me, in my present circumstances. I'm sitting here — watching him, then later typing this — at a computer with more power than any I've set my hands to before, researching how to packetize audio and video and send it over network switches that would have made my child self blush at their sheer speed — and there he is, across time and space, performing at a level I can't even imagine reaching, every analogue sine wave traveling down a dedicated cable, getting a dedicated fader, being manipulated by human hands alone, traveling to a recording medium unmitigated by ones and zeroes at all… It's the world that built the world that I live in. My hair is bright red because of glam rock. My job was built on the back of those camera operators and lighting engineers, sweaty in a control room, with monitor mixers sitting near wedge speakers, losing their hearing bit by bit, while spotlight operators track movements onstage.

My first ever gig that I got any credit for, in any meaningful way, was doing spotlights at a rodeo. I got so motion sick I had to leave straight after. There's a physicality to that job. And now I'm bruising my knees on the concrete warehouse floor zip-tieing in fiber cables between switches so that, at point of show, a single Ethernet cable could carry more digitized sine waves than surrounded Ziggy during his Rock 'n' Roll Suicide by some exponential number; fader groups abstracted away, preprogrammed in their paths by osc signals, recorded here and sent there as a series of packets arranged by committees of electrical engineers… Ziggy Stardust is dead! They took pieces of him and became real, traveling down the wire!!

And I will sit, knees bruised, sweaty in a control room, and if I get motion sickness it will be from staring into a monitoring application too hard, surely.

I ended up becoming more of a computer monkey than a rock star, despite the color of my hair. Still, I hold onto that shard of solidarity. Maybe I'm a blackstar.