David Bowie, one of the founding fathers of modern pop music, passed away two days after his 69th birthday on Jan. 10, 2016 of natural causes in the presence of his family.
Unbeknownst to the general public, Bowie had been battling cancer for 18 months, according to his Facebook page. He continued making music as long as he could, releasing music videos for his newest songs “Blackstar,” last November, and “Lazarus,” just three days before his passing.
Both music videos directly tackle matters of death and the afterlife. According to Ivo van Hove, a musical director who worked closely with him, Bowie wrote metaphoric dramas “about why we are here, what does it mean, and is there something after we are gone.”
In a vast community of musical artists, Bowie’s distinctiveness shined through, particularly throughout the 1970s and 1980s at the peak of his popularity. “Angst and apocalypse, media and paranoia, distance and yearning were among Mr. Bowie’s lifelong themes,” wrote Jon Pareles for The New York Times.
He was quite outspoken and explicit about his concern for social issues, both in his lyrics and his videos. In Bowie’s music video for his smash hit “Let’s Dance,” he addresses problems of imperialism, cultural homogenization, and the marginalization of indigenous people, particularly of Australian Aborigines.
In his music video for the song “China Girl,” Bowie highlights societal taboos against interracial relationships. In a 1983 T.V. interview conducted by V.J. Mark Goodman, a media personality for MTV, Bowie bluntly criticized the network for broadcasting music produced almost entirely by white artists, according to The Washington Post.
His cosmopolitan worldviews and xenophilia characterized him as a musician. According to American journalist Wesley Morris, Bowie was, essentially, “a self-concocted alien… drawn to other people’s otherness. Yet no matter how otherworldly… he made himself, Mr. Bowie was aware that he was a white man. For MTV, he leveraged it. As a performer, he dramatized it.”
Few white males can “check their privilege” as eloquently as did David Bowie, concluded Morris.
John Osel Diaz, a recent BYUH graduate from the Philippines who studied graphic design, said of Bowie, “He’s kind of like the Lady Gaga before Lady Gaga was born, or even Madonna, but he’s a guy; he wore make-up and costumes and big hair, and… I like his eyes cause one of his eyes is kind of light colored. It’s not as dark as the other one because he had a fight when he was younger. So, I know David Bowie for his image.”
Although Bowie struggled intermittently with drug addiction and immorality, he was happily married to Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid, a Somali supermodel, for 20 years, according to US Weekly. Together in New York City, Bowie and Iman raised their daughter, Alexandria, who is now 15.
Throughout his life, Bowie was allegedly “searching for God,” according to The Christian Post. In a CBS newscast of “60 Minutes” in 2003, Bowie reminisced on the connection between his artistry and his spirituality.
He explained, “There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.”
Generation X is not the only group of people enamored with Bowie. He has touched the hearts and enlivened the imaginations of younger Millennials, as well.
Sarah Nichole Maddock, a senior from Utah majoring in social work, said, “When I discovered how to burn CDs, I made a CD that only had Bowie’s ’Fame’ on it just so I could play that song on repeat without any interruptions. He made my naïve elementary worries a little less troublesome.”
Despite Bowie’s morally questionable lifestyle, the good things about him and his music can be respected and remembered. Lorde, a pop star from New Zealand, said of Bowie, “He was a piece of bright pleated silk we could stretch out or fold up small inside ourselves when we needed to.”
Such existential yearnings for the divine are evident in Bowie’s work, which repeatedly crossed the rift between the mainstream and the avant-garde to convey his feelings, opinions, thoughts, questions, and doubts.