A few days ago I learned about how to look at David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” video anew, and I’m still pretty blown away. When the video came out I was like WTF WHATEVZ MORE RANDO VIDEO STUFFZ, but (of course) it turns out it was an aggressive and generous intervention — pretty much out of the fkn blue — into the racialized politics of Australia’s monstrous cultural politics WRT first nations peoples. And in the convo where I learned this, we realized how deeply that connected to his advocacy for African American artists — from his break from space-age krazy sh*t to the broken America(n)s of Aladdin Sane, to his renaissance with Young Americans, his love for Ava Cherry and support for Luther Vandross, and his death-knell for white America on Diamond Dogs. If that weren’t enough, it was a revelation to realize that these inward threads, where race was tacit, surely connected with his work with Nicholas Roeg on The Man Who Fell to Earth, with its ambiguous roots in Roeg’s earlier film Walkabout. tl;dr if you’ve gotten this far: Bowie did some hard-core postcolonial thinking waaaaay before pretty much anyone else. Maybe some of his commentators — [Simon] Critchley, [Mark] Dery, etc — have talked about this. If I’m late to the game, OWELZ. But, honestly, I doubt it.