Remembering David Bowie—all of them

David Bowie was a dozen different people; he once described himself as a “collector” who amassed personalities and ideas the way others might clothes, changing them to suit the passing years and styles—and setting them for others to follow. There have been thick volumes written that focus only on brief, specific periods from that life, before he would shed his skin and move on to the next one. With that in mind, summing up David Bowie in a handful of paragraphs seems impossible. (But then, David Bowie being dead seems impossible.)
Adding to the difficulty of eulogizing him, because of David Bowie’s incredibly long career and chameleonic shifts, he probably means something different to everyone. To the repressed British kids who witnessed him singing “Starman” on Top Of The Pops in 1972—an androgynous, oddly sexual extraterrestrial that even the acid-fried, free-love hippies couldn’t wrap their heads around—he was something akin to a savior. The final stanza of “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide,” which closed both the Ziggy Stardust album and its accompanying live shows, finds Bowie’s alien rock star wailing, “You’re not alone” to an audience of fellow outsiders, taking their hands and absorbing their pain like a misfit messiah. And that message has reverberated through each successive generation; everyone who’s ever felt weird or confused (been a teenager, in other words) can find a friend in David Bowie.
At the same time, Bowie was also the epitome of cool, always living at the bleeding edge of glam rock, punk, new wave, and alt-rock, and inspiring a million acolytes across every spectrum of the music and fashion those genres spawned. Bowie was the locus of so many musical movements, you could arguably separate our culture into a pre- and post-Bowie world. His enthusiastic support for and collaboration with his personal heroes like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop placed him atop of an evolutionary ladder of “underground” rock that’s still mutating today. On the other hand, his early, visionary embrace of the possibilities of music video set a template for every MTV wannabe to follow—and made him one of the nascent network’s early kings—while his many stylistic overhauls taught performers like Madonna and Kanye West how to stay relevant. Bowie was at once king of the freaks and the biggest pop star who fell to Earth, and while he may have occasionally struggled with reconciling the two, the world—remarkably—did not.
And let’s be honest: To some people, David Bowie is a brand, a guy whose lightning bolt-adorned face has been so seared into the public consciousness for so long, his influence so deeply subsumed into 50 years of music, that it’s impossible for them to grasp what made him so special. Or maybe he’s just “that guy from Labyrinth” (or “that guy who cameoed in Zoolander”). Maybe he’s the trope the self-destructive Ziggy Stardust feared becoming, and that Bowie fretted over and fought against his whole life: the elder statesman, his once-unusual tastes and social transgressions now as quaint as the banal rock stars he once cut such a bizarre figure against.
That Bowie could contain so many multitudes, ironically, only speaks to his individuality. Bowie may have tried on artistic directions and personas like stage outfits, but beneath them all he remained unmistakably, inimitably Bowie, even before he himself knew exactly who that was. Even though his earliest Decca recordings—a jumble of psychedelic pop, vaudevillian whimsy, and stoned children’s ballads like “The Laughing Gnome”—may seem lightweight compared to his later work (and both he and his fans would more or less ignore it), Bowie’s ambitious attempts to fuse rock and cabaret theatricality were already present, inchoate as they were.
By his second self-titled album—more popularly known as Space Oddity, after its iconic hit single—those avant-garde tendencies were vying uncomfortably with his divergence into acoustic folk to mostly unremarkable result, even though it was still impossible to imagine Bowie sharing a stage with the likes of Joan Baez.