Elaine Chung
You’ve probably seen it as a meme, or on a t-shirt: “Ever since David Bowie died, shit’s been weird.”
It’s hard to dispute that Bowie’s death seemed to start a global decline. His passing on January 10, 2016 kicked off the year of Donald Trump’s election and the Brexit vote. In April Prince died suddenly and tragically. It felt like we were living in a world that no longer had room for this kind of visionary, ground-breaking artist. Not much since has offered evidence to the contrary.
Unforgettably, the announcement of Bowie’s death (after a lengthy private battle with liver cancer, unknown even to most of those working with him) came just two days after he put out his magnificent album Blackstar, a bracing meditation on mortality released on his 69th birthday. Whatever the fateful combination of intention and coincidence, it made for a flawless exit, and helped secure his reputation even further. Despite—and partially because of—his missteps and inconsistencies over an almost 50-year career, he would remain eternally cool, perpetually modern, unlikely to grow stale or old-fashioned like most of his peers.
So now here we are—and how can we not think of his song “Five Years,” the scene-setting opener on 1972’s earth-shattering album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which conjures visions of an apocalypse that seem more real than ever right now? The shadow of David Bowie remains so present, so powerful in our culture, as his legacy both continues to expand and to demand constant re-evaluation.
Since his death, there has been a shelf full of books devoted to him (from sumptuous photo collections to exhaustive biographies to an analysis of his own cherished library), multiple documentaries focused on his early career and his final years, and a godawful unauthorized biopic. There’s been a seemingly endless river of new and repackaged recordings—18 posthumous albums, including seven box sets. Perhaps most memorable was the “David Bowie Is” exhibit, a stunning collection of costumes and artifacts that drew sold-out crowds when it toured museums around the world. Songs like “Heroes” and “Life on Mars?” have become something like standards, frequently covered and constantly turning up in movie and TV soundtracks.
In 2021, there was a stream of the London production of Lazarus, the musical Bowie worked on during the months before his death, and a livestream featuring alumni of Bowie’s band (who have continued to tour regularly, performing his music) playing alongside such disciples as Trent Reznor, Perry Farrell, Billy Corgan, and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott. There was even a new Bowie single, previously unreleased live versions of John Lennon’s “Mother” and Bob Dylan’s “Trying to Get to Heaven.” On his 74th birthday, he'll finally become a TikTok star.
Bowie’s influence—his creative shape-shifting, meticulous blending of art and pop, embrace of fashion without surrendering songwriting discipline—was so pervasive during his lifetime that it can be tough to isolate his impact during these last five years. As rock has increasingly become an exercise in nostalgia, the bands he championed in his later years (LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire) have broken up or waned in impact. Visually- and conceptually-savvy artists like St. Vincent, Bjork, and Jack White certainly carry the torch, but even they have started to feel like holdovers from another era.
The Bowie DNA is obviously present in The Weeknd when he wears those unexplained face bandages or in Lady Gaga’s reinventions and costuming (though, as my teenage son cannily points out, Gaga’s grand pop gestures are really more Freddie Mercury than Bowie). But if his greatest contribution of all was to give a voice to the outcasts and misfits, to speak for those on society’s fringes and provide them a valued space in rock & roll, then the question is where do those freaky kids now turn?
Billie Eilish filled that spot for a while, but has—like Nirvana before her—presumably become too big to represent those impassioned, alienated youth. And in truth, it’s primarily the anarchic hip-hop of Tyler, the Creator or Frank Ocean’s hazy, interior R&B or Janelle Monae’s angular funk-rock (and parallel acting career)—uncategorizable, sexually unfixed, imperfect but ambitious—that offer the defiance and bravery that Bowie pioneered. For that matter, would the queer, genre-blending, fashion-forward Lil Nas X have had the longest-running Number One single of all time without the trail that Bowie blazed decades earlier?
Bowie surely would have loved and embraced this evolution, not just because of his lifelong championing of Black music (the sound of Blackstar was inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s jazz-inflected hip-hop), but because his entire career was dedicated to moving forward. This aspect of Bowie is documented in his most progressive statements and actions—from his prediction of streaming as the future of music to calling out MTV on its racist programming policies to his sale of “Bowie Bonds” anticipating the current acquisition frenzy on the publishing side of the music business—which social media is quick to cherry-pick and keep these clips in regular rotation.
Gijsbert Hanekroot
But let’s not forget that he said and did a lot of things, and they weren’t always simple or admirable. In the heat of the emergence of the #MeToo movement, an interview with former Sunset Strip groupie Lori Mattix was widely circulated, in which she described losing her virginity to Bowie at age 15. Today’s world of increased accountability for offensive or racist statements requires that we wrestle with his assertions in the mid-‘70s that “I believe very strongly in fascism” and that “Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.” In later years—settled into his final persona, happily married to Iman, moving about New York City with relatively low-key ease in what she recently called a “beautiful, ordinary life”—Bowie attributed these remarks to his (well-documented) heavy drug use at the time and his attraction to provocation.
Creatively, intellectually, and personally, he was a complicated figure, and time will tell how the balance between the human and the myth will play out. He was a sponge, a scholar, an editor, a chameleon, a confirmation of and a challenge to so many of rock’s basic principles.
Looking to find some measure for his ongoing popularity, I tried to compare his streaming numbers on Spotify to those of his peers. And then I was frozen. Who is a fair comparison to David Bowie? Is it the theatrical pop stars like Queen and Elton John on the one side? The fearless street poets Lou Reed and Iggy Pop on the other? Inheritors of his inspiration, Talking Heads or Madonna, Kanye West or the Cure or My Chemical Romance?
It’s clearer every day that Bowie stands alone. So even as his greatest gift to us was serving as a beacon to focus on the future, let’s take this moment and appreciate what he meant to music of this generation, and the next. Look back in awe. Just for one day.