Will Brooker is a London professor who teaches at Kingston University. He's also a David Bowie super fan who's been essentially cosplaying Bowie's career and plans to continue for the duration of the next year. Brooker is emulating Bowie's aesthetic transformations and his eating/consumption habits, reading the literature he read, and traveling to the cities he visited. But before you alert ground control to this Major Tom's dead circuits, keep reading. It seems like this guy is not, in fact, off the rails, but thoughtfully conducting a social experiment in honor of his favorite icon.
Brooker is a Bowie scholar who is writing a monograph -- a detailed, written study on a single subject -- called Forever Stardust, and he explained to The Guardian that he's trying to see things through Bowie's perspective:
The idea is to inhabit Bowie's head space at points in his life and career to understand his work from an original angle, while retaining a critical and objective perspective at the same time -- a kind of split persona perhaps.
https://twitter.com/willbrooker/status/621889729735335936
Brooker first came to Bowie's music as a teenager, and said he's long admired Bowie's ability to combine his own strange authenticity with commercial success. What does Brooker think Bowie would have to say about his project?
I hope he would be interested in and amused by my research. I do feel, though, that everything he says and does in public is performance, so if he did hear about it, we would be unlikely to know what he genuinely thought.
Well-played, Brooker.
