“Look up here, I’m in heaven”, Bowie sang in the music video “Lazarus” in 2016 with an eerie bandage with two sewn eyes wrapped around his head. The song was the first single of the new album “Black Star”, which was released on December 8th and was hymnically celebrated as a great deed of an old master, as the “first old work”.
Just two days later, Bowie, who had always kept his cancer a secret, died to the public’s surprise – and his “Lazarus” video became an uncanny message from the herefollowing: It seemed that the great staging artist had even designed his farewell performatively and as the greatest possible mystery staged.
„Rocky Horror Picture Show“ bis Lady Gaga
If one looks only at the commercial success, then the artist born under the name David Robert Jones is not to be found very high on the relevant music lists. Bowie’s artistic importance and his enormous influence on music, fashion and film over the last few decades are hardly to be underestimated: Bowie inspired the music of Metallica, Lady Gaga and minimal music artist Philip Glass and was the godfather for Dr. Frank-N-Furter from the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975).
In the 1970s, the “Ziggy Stardust” cowlick was copied thousands of times, make-up and elevators inspired haute couture, most recently in the form of silver “Ziggy Stardust boots” in the 2014 Saint Laurent collection. The pop star as an absolute fictional figure, He’s only been around since Bowie: With his dream characters Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust, he played with different identities like no other.
His musical work, which ranged from pop to jazz, electro to folk, avant-garde to “plastic soul”, was also formative. “The crushed remnants of ethnic music, as it survived in the age of department store music, written and sung by a white Englishman,” is how Bowie, with a wink in an interview, named the “genre” he named with his hit album “Young Americans “(1975) created.
Soundtrack for the moon landing
Bowie was born on January 8, 1947 to working class parents in Brixton, London. “It wasn’t a particularly happy childhood,” the musician once said. Bowie is described more as a reserved boy. His need to appear and to be recognized as different was, it is said, already shown as a child when he impressed his teachers with sophisticated poses in gymnastics classes, wrote the “New Yorker” in 2016 in an obituary.
Influenced by his half-brother Terry, Bowie came into contact with rock ‘n’ roll when he was nine. In his youth he played in various bands and tried out early as a feminine-queer rock carrier. With his single “Space Oddity”, which was played up and down in Great Britain in the days around the moon landing in 1969, Bowie sniffed the star air for the first time.
He celebrated his breakthrough three years later with “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust”. With the dazzling Ziggy, Bowie not only freed the rock star from the bland outfit, but also blurred the line between the sexes when it still shocked a broad masses. For a generation of men who no longer felt like presenting themselves as “tough guys”, Bowie became an icon. In 1972, the fact that he – just married and with a child – was one of the first world stars to openly acknowledge himself as homosexual was also a topic of conversation.
Dark sides
In the addictive, at the same time extremely creative 1970s in New York, the glam rock hits “Changes” and “Rebel Rebel”, but also “Young Americans” were created. Book publications are now – at least marginally – critically illuminating the dark sides of the star, which were also revealed at the time: Bowie flirted with Nazi symbolism and ideas and made excessive use of underage “groupies”, for example Dylan Jones’ biography “David Bowie – One Life.” “(2018) firmly.
After moving to Berlin, where Bowie sought distance from the pop spectacle, not least in a shared apartment with Iggy Pop, the legendary art pop album “Heroes” (1977) was created. With “Let’s Dance” he became a world star in 1983 and then succeeded as a more conventional stadium rocker. “As soon as you belong to the mainstream, everything suddenly becomes empty and completely obsolete,” he said later at the time.
New release “Toy: Box”
He consistently relied – quite irritatingly for his audience – in the nineties more and more on style experiments. After the solid pop rock albums of “Heathen” (2002) and “Reality” (2003), Bowie suffered a heart attack during a concert in Germany and then moved to New for several years with his wife, model Iman Abdulmajid, and a child York back before he returned with “The Next Day” (2013) – and with the said album “Black Star”, for which he was posthumously awarded four Grammys.
To combine disturbing new aesthetics with catchiness, Bowie succeeded in an impressive way once more and once more until the end. On the occasion of his 75th, Bowie is now being honored with a luxury edition of “Toy”, among other things. The album, recorded in 2000 and released in fall 2020 in a leaner form, looks back on Bowie’s early phase between 1964 and 1971: The album should actually have been released in 2001, but disappeared in the vault following a dispute with Bowie’s record company. Nothing new or sensational, but “appropriate consolation for fans on Bowie’s birthday”, judged the dpa.
Traces of the star, who accompanied the “Space Age” like no other performatively and lyrically, can now also be found in space: Since 2015 a celestial body has been named “342843 Davidbowie”. And in 2016 a constellation was dedicated to Bowie – in the form of the famous lightning bolt that he wore on his face on the cover of “Aladdin Sane” (1973).
