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David Bowie (1947-2016)

David Bowie (1947-2016)

Ralph Gatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

David Bowie, the infinitely changeable, fiercely
 forward-looking songwriter who taught
 generations of musicians about the power of drama, 
images and personas, died on Sunday, two days after
 his 69th birthday.
Mr. Bowie’s death was confirmed by his publicist, 
Steve Martin, on Monday morning.
He died after having cancer for 18 months,
 according to a statement on Mr. Bowie’s 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 was to be
 honored 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,” that was a surreal sequel to his definitive 
1976 film role, “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”


Mr. 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.”




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.”
Mr. 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 Mr. Bowie’s albums “Low”
 and “ ‘Heroes.’ ”
Mr. 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 Mr. Bowie’s 1970 album, in its brief set 
for the 1993 “MTV Unplugged in New York.”
 “Under Pressure,” a collaboration with the glam-roc
k group Queen, supplied a bass line for the 1990 Vanilla 
Ice hit “Ice Ice Baby.”
Yet throughout Mr. Bowie’s metamorphoses, he was
 always recognizable. 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 Mr. Bowie’s lifelong themes.
 So was a penchant for transgression coupled with a
 determination to push cult tastes toward the mainstream.
 Mr. Bowie produced albums and wrote songs for some of
 his idols — Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Mott the Hoople — 
that gave them pop hits without causing them to 
abandon their individuality. And he collaborated with
 musicians like Brian Eno in the Berlin years and, 
in his final recordings, with the jazz musicians Maria
 Schneider and Donny McCaslin, introducing them to
 many new listeners.
Mr. 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.”

REMEMBRANCES ON TWITTER
The Rolling Stones · @RollingStones
As well as being a wonderful and kind man, he was an extraordinary artist, and a true original. 2/2 #DavidBowie
3 hours ago·ReplyRetweetFavorite

He was Ziggy Stardust, the 
otherworldly pop star at
 the center 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.
The arrival of MTV in the 1980s was the perfect
 complement
 to Mr. Bowie’s sense of theatricality and fashion.
 “Ashes to Ashes,” the “Space Oddity” sequel that revealed,
 “We know Major Tom’s a junkie,” and “Let’s Dance,” 
which offered, “Put on your red shoes and dance the blues,”
 gave him worldwide popularity.
Mr. Bowie was his generation’s standard-bearer for 
rock as theater: 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.
Mr. Bowie was married for more than 20 years to
 the international 
model Iman, with whom he had a daughter,
 Alexandria Jones.
In a post on Twitter, the musician’s son from an earlier
 marriage, Duncan Jones, said: “Very sorry and sad to say
 it’s true. I’ll be offline for a while. Love to all.”