David Bowie, the alien rock ‘n’ roller, teddy boy crooner and icon, died Sunday night after an 18-month battle with cancer. He was 69 years old.
His publicist Steve Martin confirmed his death through Bowie’s official Facebook page and stated that he died peacefully, surrounded by family.
January 10 2016 – David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18 month battle with…
Posted by David Bowie on Sunday, January 10, 2016
While many remember Bowie as a rock ‘n’ roll icon, his artistry superseded the limiting genre. He once said he desired to become an actor before a musician – his very being always encapsulated a sense of the dramatic.
It was through his combination of the theatrical with his music that made Bowie a household icon. Starting off as a singer-songwriter with his 1967 album “David Bowie,” Bowie wore eyeliner and lightning bolt makeup, and stepped into the ultimate role with the release of his 1972 album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.” The album saw Bowie transforming into the titular character, a sexually promiscuous alien who delivered messages to humanity through rock ‘n’ roll.
His love for playing multifaceted characters further manifested itself in his somber yet sentimental film roles like his portrayal of Major Jack Celliers in Nagisa Oshima’s “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” (1983), Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988) and Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige” (2006).
Experimentation through constant reinvention, initiated by Ziggy Stardust, became essential to Bowie’s artistic identity. After Stardust’s glam-rock phase, Bowie partnered with avant-garde producer Brian Eno in 1977 to record the forward-thinking album “Low,” whose atmospheric timbre pushed musical boundaries and paved the way for the upcoming wave of ambient music in the 1980s.
Then, abandoning avant-garde for pop music, in 1983 Bowie hired Stevie Ray Vaughan, a young blues guitarist who was booed off the Montreux Jazz Festival just a year earlier, and recorded the flamboyant and critically acclaimed single “Let’s Dance.” The single’s use of synthesizers and vocal reverb set the sound for ’80s pop, and Bowie’s exposure allowed Vaughan to head the blues revival of the late 1980s and become a household name in the blues.
In 1993, Bowie returned to experimenting with new sounds – this time immersing himself in the emerging electronic music scene with the album “Black Tie White Noise.”
After dabbling in new musical territories, Bowie returned to his rock ‘n’ roll roots for the past two years. However, his latest album “Blackstar,” released just two days before his death, reminds listeners that he was still experimenting and expanding, in a modern jazz outfit.
Even through each of his reinventions, what made Bowie relatable was that he did not shy from his identity as an outsider. Bowie knew himself.
His recognizable baritone and English-accented voice never changed even if the music he sang over did. The juxtaposition of constancy and reinvention became the model for other outsiders like Annie Lennox or Lou Reed, who broke into the charts by exploring new sounds without compromising who they were as artists.
I remember staring at the night sky and singing “Space Oddity” with a friend, not having a single worry about who might be listening to our tone-deaf singing. But as we alternated between “Major Tom” and “Ground Control,” it seemed like we were telling a story not singing a song, something which was inherently “Bowie.”
While Bowie spawned many imitators, no one ever paralleled his status as a performer. It seemed he was born with a predetermined path to stardom.
“I’m an instant star. Just add water and stir,” Bowie once said in Leslie Halliwell’s book “Who’s Who in the Movies.”
It seems that with his death, Bowie once again transformed into the starman waiting in the sky, waiting to perform this time in the heavens.
– Sean Lee