What Is David Bowie’s Real Legacy?
This week marks 10 years since the death of the musician, actor, unlikely internet pioneer, and occasional artist David Bowie. That the decade’s anniversary is considered worth marking indicates that Bowie’s standing remains undiminished, with an end that came only two days after the release of his final album, the masterly Blackstar. There have been countless reissues, new biographies (including my own), and documentaries about him. Bowie may be dead, but his spirit lives on, triumphantly.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Even the most committed of Bowie admirers—and I would unhesitatingly put myself in such a category—might wonder whether there is an element of overkill in the continued adulation. He released 26 studio albums, not all of them distinguished, and appeared in films that ranged from classics (The Prestige, The Last Temptation of Christ) to the dreadful. If you’ve been fortunate enough never to see the dire 1970s flick Just a Gigolo, which Bowie once ruefully called “my 32 Elvis Presley movies contained in one,” then your life will be happier for it.
Yet compared to his peers, Bowie was in a class of his own. I would struggle to name a song that Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, or Sting had released in the past 30 years. The greatness and genius of Bowie was that, despite his well-publicized and mocked missteps, he never lost an ability honed in the very earliest days of his career, and that was to write indelible music. If you listen again to what passed for his greatest hit, they remain as crepuscular and enigmatic now as they did when they were first released.
Compare Bowie’s first big single, “Space Oddity,” with Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” which is similarly both lyrically and musically. “Rocket Man” is hugely accomplished, endlessly memorable, and reveals its treasures on first listen. The Bowie song, meanwhile, is laden with sadness, poignancy and mystery, as the young Bowie sang of the adventures of Major Tom, “drifting in a tin can” through outer space, and wanting to say to his wife ‘I love her very much … she knows.’” From the outset, Bowie presented himself less as that degraded breed—a rock star—and more as a cultural all-rounder. He may not have been a poet like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, a guitar virtuoso like Jimmy Page, or an extraordinary vocalist like Mick Jagger. What he was instead was inimitable. Plenty have tried to imitate him, and none have succeeded.
Bowie’s world-conquering phase came in the 1970s, when he released brilliant album after brilliant with the assurance of a man who knew that he had been touched with genius. From The Man Who Sold the World in 1970 to Scary Monsters in 1980, you would struggle to find a poor release—even his 1973 “stop gap” covers album Pin Ups has its charms—and on several of his records, most notably 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, 1976’s Station to Station and 1977’s Low, Bowie reached unparalleled heights of greatness in popular music.
Where it went wrong, surprisingly in retrospect, was with the vast success of Let’s Dance in 1983. It transformed Bowie from a chameleonic, gender-bending rock star into a mainstream pop entertainer, and this was a persona too far. His assurance slipped, he produced poor albums for the first time in his career—nobody needs listen to 1987’s Never Let Me Down, the nadir—and his desperate attempt to form a hard-rock band, Tin Machine, was rightly castigated as a wealthy middle-aged man’s vanity project.
Yet he continued, and even his detractors could only applaud his determination to regain his earlier brilliance. There were superb, underrated albums, including 1995’s Brian Eno reunion Outside, amid those that did not entirely work (not least 1997’s drum ‘n’ bass experiment Earthling), and by the time that he headlined Glastonbury in 2000, Bowie was once again a much-loved cultural icon, helped by the friendly yet detached persona that he adopted during press interviews throughout his career.
The next 16 years encompassed both triumph and disaster. He retired from music for the best part of a decade after an on-stage heart attack in 2004, only to return in glory with 2013’s The Next Day: an album recorded in complete secrecy and only revealed to the world on his birthday, Jan. 8. He co-wrote a musical, Lazarus, recorded his crowning glory Blackstar, and faced terminal liver cancer with the calm assurance with which he conducted his entire career. When he died, the world ceased its business to mourn. Some of us have never stopped mourning.
It is easy to be sentimental about the dead, and to imagine what they would have done if they had lived. In the case of Bowie, he leaves one of the greatest oeuvres that any artist ever produced, and that should be enough. Even as his Reddit-haunting admirers still parse his lyrics for hidden meanings, his spirit surely looks down on them with wry amusement at his fans’ unending search for profundity. I prefer to remember him through the words of his friend and collaborator Iggy Pop, who said in 2016 “David’s friendship was the light of my life. I never met such a brilliant person. He was the best there is.” Ten years on, we can only agree.