David Bowie has died and so many people have died with him: Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke; the sad Berlin wanderer of "Heroes;" the leading crest of the new wave and a true musical experimentalist until the end. He had just turned 69 on Friday, the same day he released a new album, Blackstar. Two days later, and after an 18-month battle with cancer, he died peacefully, surrounded by his family.
Bowie, and his many guises, possessed the strange ability to combine glam and the whirling malleability of celebrity culture with delicious melodies and songs of pure charm. I don't often get generational envy, but the video of Bowie on Tops of the Pops from 1972 brings it on. How fascinating must it have been to see this glorious insect emerging from its chrysalis?
All we can do is watch.
Bowie proudly brought weirdness into the heart of mainstream culture. We should all be deeply grateful.
Rock and roll, as a genre, has always possessed two basic impulses: the playful and the ecstatic. On the side of the playful you have bands like the Beatles, who changed their identities and musical style every year from 1964 to 1970, and later, after Bowie, more explicit acts of character creation, like Alice Cooper or Kiss. On the side of the ecstatic, you have bands who write songs that make you forget yourself, that drive crowds into drug-like raptures: Bands like the Rolling Stones, and then later, splitting into various subgenres, guitar armies like Led Zeppelin, and dance and pop acts, like the Bee Gees. Almost every popular band has participated in both sides of this equation—playing a role on stage and doling out melodies. It was Bowie's glory that he was able to play both sides not only simultaneously, but completely.
We so often exaggerate the impact of cultural forces on ordinary lives, but Bowie gave pop music, and the celebrity obsession that surrounds it, the duty of transforming identity. More than anyone, Bowie performed music as the creation of a state outside the "normal" condition of society, with the simple faith that, through those aesthetic acts, the people who submitted to their power would become more free. More authentic. It was Bowie—an art school student rather than a traditional musician—who carried the play of signifiers into the heart of pop music. The term given to it was "glam," but its glamour was only ever a byproduct. Bowie's music was testament to a very simple but supremely powerful credo: It is okay to be different.
Bowie performed with the joy of a man escaping a dying world. His freakiness was literally liberating—I don't think we should forget that. Because his artistry encompassed the signifiers of gender and sexuality, he opened a huge swath of people to a world in which desire was a game you could play any number of ways, in which the complications of being human should be celebrated rather than suppressed.
Bowie died at a time when the freakiness that he helped introduce to the masses continues to triumph. The Beatles are classics now. The Stones are a touring museum piece. But look around. In the major cities of the western world, we live in a world that David Bowie made. It is a better world for his making.
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