‘A real, living Renaissance figure’
David Bowie transcended art, music, fashion
David Bowie, the self- described “tasteful thief ” who appropriated from and influenced glam rock, soul, disco, new wave, punk rock and haute couture, and whose edgy, androgynous alter egos invited fans to explore their own dark places, died Sunday. Bowie had turned 69 on Friday, the same day he released his latest album, Blackstar.
He had been battling cancer for the past 18 months.
With his sylphlike body, chalk-white skin, jagged teeth and eyes that appeared to be different colours, Bowie combined sexual energy with fluid dance moves and a theatrical charisma that mesmerized male and female admirers alike.
Citing influences from Elvis Presley to Andy Warhol — not to mention Edith Piaf and writers William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet — Bowie was t rained in mime and fine arts, and played saxophone, guitar, harmonica and piano. A scavenger of musical and visual styles, he repackaged them in striking new formats that were all his own, in turn lending his dramatic, gender- bending esthetic to later performers such as Prince and Lady Gaga.
As much curator as inventor, Bowie lifted motifs from blues, funk and standards and presented them in such a way many fans had no idea the catchy Starman was a version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow or that Life on Mars was My Way in disguise.
David Robert Jones was born on Jan. 8, 1947, in Brixton, a working- class south London neighbourhood.
His father, a publicist for a children’s charity, was a failed music- hall impresario; his mother was a former model. An older halfbrother, Terry, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized. For many years the rock star worried about his own mental health, and the theme of insanity runs through his early songs. “I was scared stiff that I was mad, that the reason I was getting away with it was that I was an artist, so people never knew I was totally bonkers,” he told Esquire in 1993.
Although his first two albums received little notice, in 1969 Bowie had his first hit single with Space Oddity.
That year he also met Angela Barnett, with whom he would enter into a 10- year marriage and have a son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, born in 1971.
In 1974 he moved to Los Angeles, whose hyped- up, drugged- out music scene took a toll. Seeking anonymity, Bowie spent much of the late 1970s in West Berlin.
Returning to live in New York City, he began expanding his range as an actor. Having starred in the 1976 Nicholas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth, in 1980 he played the lead in a stage production of The Elephant Man. Bowie’s commercial musical pinnacle also came in 1983, with the blockbuster album Let’s Dance.
By the eve of the century he had once aspired to create, Bowie seemed to be finally settling down. He fell in love with the model Iman Abdulmajid, whom he married in 1992 and with whom he had a daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, in 2000. After suffering a heart attack backstage in 2004, he stopped producing albums or touring for nearly a decade.
That Bowie was still reinventing himself in his seventh decade could not have surprised those who knew him. “David’s a real living Renaissance figure,” Roeg told Time in 1983. “That’s what makes him spectacular. He goes away and reemerges bigger than before. He doesn’t have a fashion, he’s just constantly expanding. It’s the world that has to stop occasionally and say, ‘My God, he’s still going on.’”