David Bowie was evolution in perpetuum: From his genres to professions, he left behind little to get typified

In #TheMusicThatMadeUs, senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri chronicles the impact that musicians and their art have on our lives, how they mould the industry by rewriting its rules and how they shape us into the people we become: their greatest legacies.

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Critics frequently cite David Bowie’s ‘Changes’ (from the album Hunky Dory, 1971) as an anthem that encapsulates the spirit of the musician, released that it was at the earlier stages of his five-decade-long career. It was the album — they say — that saw Bowie became THE David Bowie, a prescient artist with a proclivity for constant upgradation.  

There is a profoundly expressive line in the song that goes:

“…And these children that you spit on

As they try to change their worlds,

Are immune to your consultations.”

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While the lines refer to parents who find faults in their children’s endeavours, it really holds true for so many sections of society that are marginalised for attempting to be immune to a cookie-cutter mindset. If there has ever been a musical messiah for the misfits or the outcasts in conventional society, it has been David Bowie.  

He was among the first to openly call out MTV for racism against Black artists, and controversially announced his bisexuality in the ’70s at a time when being gay was just about accepted in prudist America. He often veered towards themes of social alienation and outlier-ness through songs like ‘Life on Mars?,’ ‘Rebel Rebel,’ and even ‘Changes,’ to provoke and include, rather than conform and exclude.  

Spanning half a century, Bowie’s has been a career that has exemplified reinvention as this consummate cultural disruptor has constantly challenged and transformed the status quos of rock and pop music. He would have turned 75 on 8 January, an occasion that is as good as any to recount the indelible mark he has left on our understanding of creative roleplaying.  

His birthday is being celebrated through a live-streaming mega concert organised by his long-time pianist Mike Garson, featuring many of Bowie’s band members over the years, and with guest appearances by Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott, Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon and John Taylor, Living Colour, Rob Thomas, Walk the Moon, Jake Wesley Rogers, Gail Ann Dorsey, Bernard Fowler, Judith Hill, Gaby Moreno, Gretchen Parlato, Joe Sumner Gary Oldman, and Ricky Gervais. Garson, who organised a similar event last year, has been instrumental in rallying artists to pay tribute to a man considered a maverick and a duke in equal measure.  

Everything about Bowie is a dichotomy. He has been stylish and garish, elegant and shocking, understated and outrageous, depending on who you ask.

Like with world history, Bowie’s career can be categorised by the various phases he has been through — from his early jazz influences and glam rock era, plastic soul and industrial, to electronica and pure pop. It is so hard to slot him under one genre because Bowie himself has taken much pain through his career to ensure he is hard to typify.

Seriously, how dare we try to govern his work by the laws of rock and roll when there are intergalactic influences and creations at play here? Bowie has created alter egos like Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke, and dabbled with acting, painting, and fashion, making it really hard to define him as anything more than the most evolving avant garde, shape-shifting artist of our times. Time itself has been manipulated and challenged as he has constantly shown us that age or a generation is nothing but a state of mind. His signature vibrato is immediately recognisable as is his extraordinary ability to achieve such rich timbre even in the lowest end of his vocal register.  

If his dramatic octave shifts helped him find more power in his singing, then his roleplaying through songwriting, stagecraft, and fashion choices aided in building his legend of iconoclasm. Add to this his penchant for androgyny in the peak of his career, and we come to understand just how wary he was of becoming “routine.” Even though he was hardly a champion of queer groups, Bowie used sexual intrigue in his songwriting and his sense of style to generate shock value at first, and deeper social conversations eventually.

During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at over 100 million records worldwide, making Bowie one of the bestselling music artists of all time. The British artist was awarded 10 platinum, 11 gold, and eight silver album certifications in the UK, having released 11 #1 albums.  

The fact that Bowie was evolution in perpetuum has also meant that he has been a very polarising oddity. It is hard to find a fan that has embraced all his avatars and genre changes equally. We see ourselves in the music that resonates with us, so identifying with Bowie has usually meant identifying with one or two of his versions. Not like it ever mattered to him.  

He has always wanted to be in control of the narrative of his life; something that he held dear even at the time of his death. Those working on ‘Lazarus’  — the musical upgrade to his The Man Who Fell to Earth  — had no idea that the legend was battling cancer for over a year. In a short statement two days after the release of the gut-wrenchingly noir Blackstar, it was confirmed that Bowie has indeed passed away after an 18-month private battle with liver cancer.  

In death as in life, Bowie ensured that his terms were honoured. He lived with a creative urgency that was as timeless as it was controversial, yet it often appeared like he could not care less. Like he poetically wrote in ‘Changes,’ “Time may change me / But I can’t trace time.”

Senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri has spent a good part of two decades chronicling the arts, culture and lifestyles.