Turning Pain, Loss and Trauma into Art: David Bowie’s Blackstar and Lazarus and Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree and One More Time with Feeling

Abstract

The year 2016 was a proficuous one in terms of music, poetry and film production when we consider David Bowie and Nick Cave. This paper will analyse the works of David Bowie in BlackStar and the musical and the book Lazarus (written by Bowie and Enda Walsh) and Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree and One More Time with Feeling. In Bowie’s case the pain of enduring a slow death, watching the decaying of his body, at the same time he tried to hide that suffering from the rest of the world, was used as an engine to propel him to write his testament work, accompanied by the writing of the musical, Lazarus, and the filming of the videos and photoshoot for the promotion of his last album. Bowie managed to convert the decrepitude of his body in art. In Nick Cave’s instance the untimely loss of his 15 years old son, Arthur, who fell to his death from a 60ft cliff in Brighton, on July 2015, was converted into the production of an album, Skeleton Tree, and a film One More Time with Feeling. This paper aims at addressing the metamorphosis of tragedy in beauty and art, through music, theatre, film and poetry in a technological world.