Bowie, Bowie Everywhere

Last year a friend asked me to write a piece about how and where David Bowie's stamp on the culture still shows up, 10 years after his death. The piece didn't run for whatever reason, so I got permission to share it here. Put on your red shoes and enjoy!

With due respect to Taylor Swift, David Bowie was the original “eras” artist. Even before he had chart success with 1969’s “Space Oddity,” he had already shed a few skins—novelty singer, blues rocker, mime—and his ensuing career was defined by shifting personas and genres: the glam rock of Ziggy Stardust, the plastic soul of the Thin White Duke, the electronic minimalism of the Berlin records, the bright New Romantic pop of the 1980s, the eclectic experimentalism that continued through to his 2016 swan song, Blackstar.

Given that polymorphous influence, it’s no wonder we can still hear Bowie’s legacy everywhere in pop music: in the glam pop of Chappell Roan, in the indie rock of The 1975, in the alien R&B of Janelle Monáe. The influence isn’t strictly musical, of course: Each of Bowie’s eras had a corresponding aesthetic, so we can also see Bowie everywhere: in Lady Gaga’s elaborate stage presentation, in Harry Styles’ Gucci dress, in Dorian Electra’s genderfluid presentation.

Indeed, though he ended up a married dad most often seen in tailored jackets (when he wasn’t in jeans), Bowie’s gender performance, as the academics would call it, may be his most enduring legacy. In a time when rock stars were guitar-slinging bros and pop stars were effete if not female, Bowie confidently bridged the divide, making muscular rock while dressed in Kansai Yamamoto bodysuits or making pop-soul dressed in snazzy double-breasted suits. Every emo frontman with teased hair and nail polish, and every pop diva with a slicked-back do and retro lapels, owes a debt to Bowie’s path-breaking androgyny.

Arguably, many current manifestations of Bowie’s influence are filtered through generations of New Wave and Britpop bands, and it’s been a while since Jay-Z sampled “Fame.” But, as is often the case with pop star deaths, Bowie’s passing in 2016 inspired artists in fresh and unexpected ways. Lorde, for one, recorded her breakthrough 2017 album Melodrama in the wake of Bowie’s death, and has said she had him in mind as she made it. Though you may struggle to find an explicit Bowie stamp on the theatrical pop of “Green Light” or “Perfect Places,” this is one mark of true influence: It lives less in imitation than in inspiration. Maybe that’s why, while Lady Gaga gave apt tribute to Bowie at the 2016 Grammys, complete with orange hair and feathered costumes, it was Lorde’s unadorned, impassioned rendition of “Life on Mars” at the BRIT Awards that same year that sticks.

Another songwriter took an unlikely spark from Bowie’s passing. Lin-Manuel Miranda was writing the score for the animated Disney musical Moana in his Hamilton dressing room in early 2016 when news of Bowie’s death reached him. He’d been searching for a musical idiom for the film’s villain, a greedy giant crab called Tamatoa; Jemaine Clement, of Flight of the Conchords, had already been cast in the role. The idea of a Bowie pastiche snapped into place, not least because Clement and his Conchords partner, Bret McKenzie, had done a brilliant parody on that show, “Bowie in Space.” Hence the catchy “Shiny,” the first time since Labyrinth that Bowie found his way into children’s entertainment.

Though she draws influences from a wide palette, Janelle Monáe may be Bowie’s clearest contemporary heir. As he was, she’s an occasional actor as well as a pop star. More significantly, she burst onto the scene in 2010 with a concept album called The ArchAndroid, which was underpinned by a loopy science fiction narrative about a messianic robot, Cindi Mayweather, sent back in time to save a city from civil war. The parallels to such Bowie classics as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Diamond Dogs were clear enough. But it was in the dizzying variety of musical styles, from rockabilly to synth-pop to soul, that Monáe used to unfold her narrative that she showed the strongest Bowie imprint, as if she were trying to compress several eras into the grooves of a single record. (He had done the same on everything from Hunky Dory to Hours.)

In a tribute Monáe posted after Bowie died, she hailed above all the permission his work gave to so many who followed—a legacy that has not only flowered in a range of expressions and styles but also ultimately transcends them. Bowie lives on, in other words, not only among those who look and sound like him, but in all who follow his restless, exploratory example.

“You continue to teach me what freedom looks like through the gifts you left behind,” Monáe wrote. “You continue to help me and so many feel comfortable during some of our most vulnerable and fearful moments…Thank you for living your life as a free ass muhfugga.”