Tribute
Goodbye
Bowie
The star who transcended music, art and fashion dies at the age of
69:
David Bowie, the infinitely changeable, fiercely forward-looking
songwriter who taught generations of musicians about the power of drama,
images and personas, died last Sunday (January 10), two days after his
69th birthday.
His death was confirmed by his publicist, Steve Martin, on Monday
morning. No other details were provided.
Bowie had been treated for cancer for the last 18 months, according
to a statement on his social-media accounts. “David Bowie died
peacefully today surrounded by his family,” a post on his Facebook page
read.
His last album, ‘Blackstar’, a collaboration with a jazz quartet that
was typically enigmatic and exploratory, was released on Friday — his
birthday. He is to be honoured with a concert at Carnegie Hall on March
31 featuring the Roots, Cyndi Lauper and the Mountain Goats.
He had also collaborated on an Off Broadway musical, ‘Lazarus’, which
was a surreal sequel to the 1976 film that featured his definitive
screen role, ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’.
Bowie wrote songs, above all, about being an outsider: an alien, a
misfit, a sexual adventurer, a faraway astronaut. His music was always a
mutable blend — rock, cabaret, jazz and what he called “plastic soul” —
but it was suffused with genuine soul. He also captured the drama and
longing of everyday life, enough to give him No. 1 pop hits like ‘Let’s
Dance’.
In concerts and videos, Bowie’s costumes and imagery traversed
styles, eras and continents, from German Expressionism to commedia
dell’arte to Japanese kimonos to spacesuits. He set an example, and a
challenge, for every arena spectacle in his wake.
If he had an anthem, it was ‘Changes’, from his 1971 album ‘Hunky
Dory’, which proclaimed:
Turn and face the strange,
Ch-ch-changes,
Oh look out now you rock and rollers,
Pretty soon now you’re gonna get older.
Bowie earned admiration and emulation across the musical spectrum —
from rockers, balladeers, punks, hip-hop acts, creators of pop
spectacles and even classical composers like Philip Glass, who based two
symphonies on Bowie’s albums ‘Low’ and ‘Heroes’.
Bowie’s constantly morphing persona was a touchstone for performers
like Madonna and Lady Gaga; his determination to stay contemporary
introduced his fans to Philadelphia funk, Japanese fashion, German
electronica and drum-and-bass dance music.
Nirvana chose to sing ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, the title song of
Bowie’s 1970 album, in its brief set for ‘MTV Unplugged in New York’ in
1993. ‘Under Pressure’, a collaboration with the glam-rock group Queen,
supplied a bass line for the 1990 Vanilla Ice hit ‘Ice Ice Baby’.
Yet throughout Bowie’s metamorphoses, he was always recognisable. His
voice was widely imitated but always his own; his message was that there
was always empathy beyond difference.
Angst and apocalypse, media and paranoia, distance and yearning were
among Bowie’s lifelong themes. So was a penchant for transgression
coupled with a determination to push cult tastes toward the mainstream.
Bowie was a person of relentless reinvention. He emerged in the late
1960s with the voice of a rock belter but with the sensibility of a
cabaret singer, steeped in the dynamics of stage musicals.
He
was Major Tom, the lost astronaut in his career-making 1969 hit ‘Space
Oddity’. He was Ziggy Stardust, the otherworldly pop star at the centre
of his 1972 album, ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders
From Mars’.
He was the self-destructive ‘Thin White Duke’ and the minimalist but
heartfelt voice of the three albums he recorded in Berlin in the ’70s.
Bowie was his generation’s standard-bearer for rock as theatre:
something constructed and inflated yet sincere in its artifice, saying
more than naturalism could. With a voice that dipped down to baritone
and leapt into falsetto, he was complexly androgynous, an explorer of
human impulses that could not be quantified.
He also pushed the limits of ‘Fashion’ and ‘Fame’, writing songs with
those titles and also thinking deeply about the possibilities and
strictures of pop renown.
Bowie was married for more than 20 years to the international model
Iman, with whom he had a daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones. They survive
him, as does his son from his marriage to the former Mary Angela
Barnett, Duncan Jones, a director best known for the 2009 film ‘Moon’.
David Robert Jones was born in London on January 8, 1947, where as a
youth he soaked up rock ’n’ roll. He took up the saxophone in the 1960s
and started leading bands as a teenager, singing the blues in a
succession of unsuccessful groups and singles. He suffered a blow in a
teenage brawl that caused his left pupil to be permanently dilated.
-NYT
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