Today is probably the most rock n roll day in history. Why? I hear you ask, well I will tell you. Today is the day that two rock stars were brought into this earth, sent by the Gods to remind us that we are mere mortals compared to these glorious entities. For today, Bjournal readers, was the day both Elvis Presley and David Bowie were born. That’s right, both of them. If you are born today, then you better start learning to play the guitar because you are obviously destined for rock greatness.
Much has been speculated about David Bowie. Is he human? Is he immortal? Is the Labyrinth actually a documentary? Why didn’t he win an Oscar for his stella performance in Zoolander? Who knows? These are all questions we will never find an answer to. What we do know the answer to, however, is the question you ask yourself every time you find yourself wondering what on earth you are doing with your life; ‘I wonder what David Bowie was doing at my age?’. Somebody, some terrible person, has created a programme that tells you exactly what David Bowie was doing when he was your age.
Why is this terrible? Because it doesn’t matter how old or young you are, David Bowie was 100% doing something more productive than you. When David Bowie was fourteen, six girls asked him out on Valentine’s Day, and I bet it wasn’t even as a joke. At the age of seventeen he released his first ever single under the name “Davie Jones with The King Bees”. More importantly, at the age of seventeen he defended his hairstyle in an interview with the BBC as the founder of “The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men”.
What about those twenty-somethings who finally feel like their lives are together? Well friends, I have news for you. When David Bowie was twenty-two, he had his first UK single with Space Oddity. Don’t think that this will stop, that one day you will reach the end of the David Bowie comparisons because you will not. Do you know what happened to David Bowie when he was sixty-two? He had a species of spider named after him called Heteropoda Davidbowie. You can even buy one to keep as a pet, however, it is not known as to whether they were sent from Mars. You can find out what David Bowie was doing at your age here. Be warned, it can cause existential crises. You can find out about Heteropoda Davidbowie here.
The King would have been eighty one years old today, and it would be incredible to think about what more he could have possibly achieved, had his life not been tragically cut short. However, let’s not end this article of celebration on a downer and since his death he has been inducted into five music halls of fame, reissued seventeen singles in the UK all of which made the British top five and for the fifth year straight was named top-earning deceased celebrity by Forbes magazine, earning a gross income of $45 million.
Just before Elvis died, he commissioned his stage electrician to design a version of his white jumpsuit that would shoot laser beams into the audience, which would have been one hell of a show. Presley also was given a ‘Special Agent’ badge by President Nixon after he denounced The Beatles as being ‘un-American’ for their open drug-taking and anti-Vietnam politics. His 1973 live concert broadcast, Aloha From Hawaii, is the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history, having been watched by an estimated 1.5 billion people.
Happy Birthday to Elvis and Bowie!!
