Tuesday, January 12, 2016


David Bowie is not simply the prettiest star—he’s a constellation. No matter which Bowie you first encountered—the orange-haired alien androgyne of Ziggy Stardust, the creepy clown in the “Ashes to Ashes” video, the louche lothario of the Let’s Dance era, or even the guy refereeing Derek Zoolander’s walk-offs—you were instantly disarmed by his style, sophistication, and presence. But Bowie was the rare rock legend whose mythology is defined more by his intellectual curiosities than his cocaine-fuelled debauchery.

The famous parade of personae that defined his astounding 1970s discography represented not just new sounds and aesthetics; Bowie was essentially a human Internet, with each album serving as a hyperlink into a vast network of underground music, avant-garde art, art-house film, and left-field literature. Bowie was the nexus through which many rock fans were first introduced to not just the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and Kraftwerk and Neu!, but also William S. Burroughs and Klaus Nomi and Nicolas Roeg and Ryuichi Sakamoto and Nina Simone. By design, most pop music is a closed loop—a rollercoaster that’s expertly designed for maximal thrills, to make you go “wheee!” over and over again. Bowie envisioned pop as Grand Central Station, the train tracks branching off into infinite new directions.

It’s hard to think of another celebrity artist who was so committed to using his elevated stature to bring transgressive ideas into the mainstream, reshaping it many times over. “Starman,” the glam anthem that made Bowie a bona fide UK sensation in the summer of ’72, wasn’t just some cosmic jive about a visiting space alien; it was the road map for a career spent luring the masses to the fringes and showing them all the weird and wonderful things happening on the other side. Even when engaging in media manipulation—like tellingMelody Maker that he was gay that same year, even as his domestic life suggested otherwise—the effects were real and profound, by making the world feel a little safer for queer kids, while igniting a public conversation about gender fluidity that continues to this day. For Bowie, a vampish visage was a mere front for a deep reservoir of ideas. Even after he ditched the sci-fi costumery to focus more on musical rather than aesthetic experimentation—all while first-wave punks remodeled rock out of his discarded leather scraps and hair-dye—it still felt like he was taking us to unrecognizable places, with his late-’70s Berlin Trilogy serving as the connective tissue between the rock of the past and the electronic music of the future.

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