Happy New Year! We've officially said goodbye to a year filled with seemingly nonstop worldwide violence, divisive political upheaval and a surprising number of celebrity deaths. The latter especially led many on social media to demonize 2016 as a particularly horrible year. As a fan of many of the Baby Boomer era icons to leave us this year, I'd be inclined to agree. One of the heaviest losses from my perspective was someone I consider to be my all time favorite musician; David Robert Jones, known more widely as David Bowie.
I can remember hearing his name and seeing Jimmy Fallon doing an appropriately off-kilter impression of this strange, almost devilish yet charismatic character on Saturday Night Live as a child. Even as a proponent of the bizarre, I was more frightened than interested in this vampire of a musician. Many years later as a teenager, I was finally swayed to buy his albums after reading about his unequaled role in the development of glam rock, punk rock and countless other musical sub-genres. Almost all of his albums from the '70s earned perfect or near-perfect ratings on allmusic.com. Musicians from all across the board from Madonna to the Pixies cited him as a major influence. I was properly intrigued.
The fact that everyone has a different favorite album or phase in Bowie's career is a true testament to his boundless creativity and versatility. Bowie's massive oeuvre was marked by wildly different musical excursions ranging from his beginnings as a hippie-ish folk songwriter in the '60s to his dabbles in Industrial music three decades later. He managed to touch upon just about every disparate musical movement in between including glam rock (which he pioneered), English music hall, early heavy metal, progressive rock, soul, German-influenced electronic music and synth-pop. Only fellow 2016 departed Prince can claim a musical resume so diverse.
Not only did Bowie influence countless musical movements, but he was also a lightning rod for the latest trends, often taking great influence from another artist while influencing them. He had such a dynamic of respect with younger artists who looked up to him and ended up touching him with their own music. The most notable examples include the Pixies, Trent Reznor and Sonic Youth. In the '70s, Bowie also found time to revive the then-dormant careers of his own heroes, producing and writing albums for Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Mott the Hoople in addition to his own fledgling career as a superstar. Even shortly before his death, Bowie was still gleaning inspiration from this generation of music in Kendrick Lamar for his swan song Blackstar.
Bowie is perhaps remembered most widely as not one but several visual icons. Lady Gaga and Lana del Rey toy with these concepts in today's pop culture landscape, but Bowie was the first rock star to successfully create and live out his own creations with their own complex backstories. The most notable is Ziggy Stardust, the alien rock star who brings rock music to save Earth from death. Then there was the Thin White Duke, a cocaine-driven white soul singer who managed to blend a steely personality with the most lively and vivacious music known to man. Sometimes he was just "David Bowie", but was this the David Bowie who donned a dress and played what would soon be known as heavy metal or the David Bowie who lived in Berlin and made among the first widely known electronic music?
His music itself was rich and too diverse to describe in one thought. Interestingly enough, there is a widely supported critical consensus that his work had a certain depth to it, even if he was dabbling in a genre as consciously trashy as glam rock or in the excesses of '70s music in general. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bowie could augment one of his songs with a five minute guitar solo from the great Mick Ronson or sing of monsters and aliens doing the boogie without having it sound kitschy or pretentious. It was all art from his pen.
While he continued to make critically well-received music even years after retiring from live performances in the last decade, his commercial peak was 1983's Let's Dance, which is how most casual fans became familiar with him. Artistically however, he created his most memorable and lasting works in the 1970's, including his glam rock masterpieces Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. He closed out the era with a trio of forward-thinking electronic albums known as his Berlin Trilogy after dabbling in his own strain of R&B music he would dub "plastic soul". Most amazingly however, seemingly wandered from one genre from the next, bridging the most disparate styles in the previously unimaginable ways.
He was always a personal hero of mine as a musician and an artist in general, as he refused to be defined or characterized by one single thought. He's a musician who requires a complicated description, and in the process he consciously forged out a large output of art which will be dissected and honored decades after his death. Upon his passing, musicians as diverse and young as Lorde, Kanye West and Justin Timberlake all flocked to sing their praises. One word that fans and foes (if they exist) alike seem to agree upon as an appropriate one-word description would be "weird". David Bowie was anything but normal and the world will be notably less interesting without him.
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