David Bowie (born January 8, 1947, London, England—died January 10, 2016, New York, New York, U.S.) was a British singer, songwriter, and actor who was most prominent in the 1970s and best known for his shifting personae and musical genre hopping.
To call Bowie a transitional figure in rock history is less a judgment than a job description. Every niche he ever found was on a cusp, and he was at home nowhere else—certainly not in the unmoneyed London suburb where his childhood was as dingy as his adult life would be glitzy. While this born dabbler’s favourite pose was that of a Great Artist beguiled by rock’s possibilities as a vehicle, in truth he was more a rocker drawn to artiness because it worked better than any other pose he had tried (not that he was not eclectic—he admired Anthony Newley and Jacques Brel and studied mime with Lindsay Kemp). During the mod era of the 1960s he fronted various bands from whose minuscule shadow he—having renamed himself to avoid confusion with the singer of the Monkees—emerged as a solo singer-songwriter. “Space Oddity,” the science-fiction single that marks the real beginning of his career, reached the top 10 in Britain in 1969 but did not become an American radio staple until some years later, though Bowie had cannily pegged its original release to the Apollo 11 Moon mission. His first album of note, The Man Who Sold the World (1970), a prescient hybrid of folk, art rock, and heavy metal, did not turn him into a household name either. Not until Hunky Dory (1971) did he hit on the attractively postmodern notion of presenting his chameleonism as an identity rather than the lack of one.
At once frivolous and portentous, this approach was tailor-made for the 1970s, Bowie’s signature decade. In the wake of the counterculture’s failure to achieve utopia or even a workable modus vivendi, Bowie concocted a series of inspired, nervily grandiose pastiches that insisted on utopia by depicting its alternative as inferno, beginning with the emblematic rock-star martyr fantasy The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). In the process he stayed so hard on the heels of the zeitgeist that the doomsaying of Diamond Dogs (1974) and the disco romanticism of Young Americans (1975) were released less than a year apart. Bowie also became the first rock star to turn a confession of bisexuality into a shrewd career move (and also the first, some years later, to suspect that times had changed enough for recanting to be an even shrewder one). Yet all this took a private toll.
By 1977 Bowie had decamped, ditching his idiosyncratic version of the mainstream for the avant-garde austerities of Low, a collaboration with Brian Eno, the most eggheaded of the several musical helpmates that Bowie always knew how to put to good use, including guitarists Mick Ronson and Carlos Alomar and ace nouveau-funk producer Nile Rodgers for “Let’s Dance” (1983), when he needed a hit. As music, Low and its sequels, “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979), would prove to be Bowie’s most influential and lasting, serving as a blueprint for a later generation of techno-rock. In the short run, they marked the end of his significant mass audience impact, though not his sales—thanks mostly to Rodgers.
In the 1980s, despite the impressive artistic resolve of Scary Monsters (1980) and the equally impressive commercial calculation of Let’s Dance (1983), which produced three American top 20 hits, Bowie’s work grew steadily more trivial. In tandem with an acting career that, since his arresting debut in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), largely failed to jell, his vague later albums oscillated between would-be commercial moves for which he did not seem to have the heart (Never Let Me Down [1987]) and would-be artistic statements for which he had lost his shrewdness (Outside [1995]). As of the late 1990s, he seemed a spent force, and perhaps Bowie’s greatest innovation in this era was the creation of Bowie Bonds, financial securities backed by the royalties generated by his pre-1990 body of work. The issuing of the bonds in 1997 earned Bowie $55 million, and the rights to his back catalog returned to him when the bonds’ term expired in 2007. His 1970s work including, in addition to his own output, service as a producer on landmark albums from Mott the Hoople, Lou Reed, and Iggy and the Stooges remains a vital and often compelling index to a time it did its part to shape. Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
Bowie continued to record into the 21st century, although a fallow period that followed the release of the backward-looking Reality (2003) led to speculation that he had retired. He unexpectedly resurfaced a decade later with The Next Day (2013), a collection of assured, mostly straightforward, rock songs. The searching, jazz-infused Blackstar (2016) was released two days before his death from cancer. In Bowie’s final years he also cowrote the musical Lazarus (premiered 2015), which was inspired by The Man Who Fell to Earth, and he was the subject of a blockbuster art exhibition, David Bowie Is (opened 2013).