Monday morning, the world awoke to shocking news: David Bowie was gone. The multi-faceted rock artist had died of terminal cancer — mere days after the release of his final studio album.
The cliché is that Bowie was a musical chameleon, shedding skins at a moment’s notice. What’s more important is how he sustained a musical career over more than a half-century without ever descending into embarrassment or predictability.
From the theatrics of his early records to the somber avant-garde of his swansong “Blackstar,” Bowie may have put his foot wrong on occasion but — give or a take a “Dancing in the Streets” here or there — he never humiliated himself.
And the sheer breadth of his achievements is stunning.
Bowie spent the mid-’60s fronting several inevitably doomed blues-rock bands, until recording a theatre-influenced solo LP (“David Bowie,” 1967) millions of miles from it. He broke out with “Space Oddity,” timed to coincide with the Apollo moon landing.
The hippie-folk of Space Oddity quickly morphed into his next album: 1970’s “The Man Who Sold The World,” an excursion into Led Zeppelin-esque heavy metal.
Bowie then quietly released his most melodic collection of songs: 1971’s “Hunky Dory.” Most artists would happily spend their careers living off the merits of immortal songs like “Changes,” “Life On Mars?” and “Quicksand.” But instead Bowie chose not to promote the record, because something greater was coming together in his mind: Ziggy Stardust.
The character of Ziggy, as first unveiled on 1972’s “The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust,” could easily have been an overly precious art-rock conceit: An alien rock messiah comes to earth bringing tidings of joy in a time of despair, but is eventually destroyed by megalomania and the passion of his fans. What saved it from tweeness was flawless songwriting, provocative and intelligent lyrics and the heroic performance of lead guitarist and multi-instrumental arranger Mick Ronson.
Those virtues were amplified on its Americanized follow-up “Aladdin Sane” and the neo-Orwellian “Diamond Dogs,” at which point Bowie simply decided he’d had enough of all that and moved on to more daring pursuits.
The rest of the ’70s gave us even more exciting mutations in Bowie’s music, each radically different yet also, in retrospect, traceably linked to what preceded it: The funk accents on “Diamond Dogs” (1974) became the full-blooded Philadelphia soul of “Young Americans” (1975), which in turn became the forbiddingly aristocratic krautfunk of his best record, “Station To Station” (1976).
That record’s icy remove and human despair led naturally to his famous trilogy of brilliant, therapeutically collaborative records with Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti: “Low” (1977), “Heroes” (1977) and “Lodger” (1979).
Bowie drew a curtain down on all these changes with “Scary Monsters” (1980), an act of canny and daring retrospection where he dared to write a No. 1 hit “sequel song” to “Space Oddity” while announcing elsewhere his refusal to be viewed as “another piece of teenage wildlife.”
The story could’ve ended there. But of course Bowie didn’t even have his greatest commercial success until 1983, with “Let’s Dance,” whose title track (along with “Modern Love”) is already so familiar to anyone reading this that I need merely write out their titles to evoke their instantly memorable hooks.
After some mid-’80s doldrums, he shook off the cobwebs and forced himself into uncomfortable spaces, beginning first with Tin Machine, and then with a series of albums experimenting with everything from industrial (“Outside,” 1995) to house/electronica (“Earthling,” 1997).
But Bowie’s true late-career creative rebirth was heralded with 2002’s “Heathen,” a record which, released after 9/11, still feels as bracingly fresh and relevant as the best of his earlier works. Bowie followed up “Heathen” with “Reality” (2003) and then retired into seclusion for nearly a decade, only to emerge in 2013 with “The Next Day” and his final work, released a mere two days before his death, “Blackstar.”
All of these albums found a mature Bowie unafraid to experiment and sounding as relevant as ever.
It was this avant-garde vibrancy that makes Bowie’s sudden passing such a tragic shock. Bowie, always a private man, took great pains to conceal his terminal illness from the world, suffering in private and working on his last album as a final testament.
It’s a dark but worthy cap on his career, which amounts to a lifetime’s worth of art from one of rock’s last great polymaths, a man unafraid to expand the boundaries of art, artifice and theatricality in popular music. For that, we can only thank David Bowie for all he gave to us, and offer him our word on a wing.
Jeffrey Blehar is an attorney and an analyst at the Ace of Spades HQ Decision Desk who cares more about popular music than any reasonable person ought to.