David Bowie, the otherworldly rock singer and cross-cultural icon whose music and art fixed our eyes to the stars across six decades, has died, according to his official Facebook and Twitter accounts. He had just turned 69 on Friday, the day he dropped his 28th and critically revered final album, Blackstar.
According to the posts, Bowie had been battling cancer for a year and a half. His son, Duncan Jones, also confirmed Bowie’s death Sunday night on Twitter:
Very sorry and sad to say it’s true. I’ll be offline for a while. Love to all. pic.twitter.com/Kh2fq3tf9m
— Duncan Jones (@ManMadeMoon) January 11, 2016
Though he recorded 26 studio albums, Bowie was so much more than a rock star, fashioning his entire life and career into a towering piece of boundary-busting performance art. He toyed with sexuality and gender fluidity at a time much less welcoming than our own and got away with it, making his space-obsessed eccentricities and multiple identities seem like an elevated human state.
By all appearances, it was. His introduction to the world was the single “Space Oddity,” the spooky, ambiguous tale of the fictional astronaut Major Tom. Released in 1969, it would rocket to the top of the U.K. singles charts and set the tone for many of Bowie’s extraterrestrial/existential mashups to come:
Bowie continued to push boundaries with his third album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which found him taking on the titular character as an alter ego: the cocksure, androgynous messenger between Earth and extraterrestrial intelligence. For a little while he performed exclusively as Ziggy Stardust, who made a final appearance in 1973:
Bowie’s first musical instrument was the saxophone, though through his career became proficient at multiple instruments, including guitar and keyboards. But his greatest instrument was himself — the combination of his enveloping vocal wail and those unearthly looks (right down to the over-dilated left pupil, damaged in a schoolyard scuffle when he was still called David Jones) made even the real-life Bowie like a rock superhero from another planet, ruled neither by limitations nor cultural norms.
He took on another alter-ego in 1976 with the release of Station to Station, this time as the “Thin White Duke,” an extension of Bowie’s character from The Man Who Fell to Earth. It would be the first of many fascinating bigscreen appearances from Bowie, including turns in Jim Henson’s dark fantasy Labyrinth (as the villainous goblin king Jareth) and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks epilogue Fire Walk With Me.
Even as his life took a turn for the “normal” in later years, Bowie kept a foot firmly planted in the outer realms, never more committed to otherworldly expression than on Blackstar, an unsettlingly morbid and death-obsessed record that he would leave as his final testament.
Word spread quickly through Hollywood on Sunday night, where the Golden Globes afterparties were just getting under way as word came of Bowie’s death (he was nominated for a Best Original Song Golden Globe in 1982 for Theme From Cat People).
Bowie is survived by his wife Iman, whom he married in 1992; their daughter, Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones; and son Duncan Jones, by first wife Mary Angela Barnett.
– mashable