Bowie Born: Rock's Ultimate Shape-Shifter

David Robert Jones was born in Brixton, London, on January 8, 1947, and grew up in Bromley, Kent, where a schoolyard fight at fifteen left him with a permanently dilated left pupil, giving him the appearance of mismatched eye colors that became one of the most recognizable physical features in rock music. He changed his surname to Bowie to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees and spent years recording commercially unsuccessful singles before Space Oddity, released five days before the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, gave him his first hit. What followed was one of the most restlessly inventive careers in popular music: Bowie cycled through at least six distinct artistic personas between 1969 and 1983, each accompanied by a complete reinvention of visual presentation, musical style, and cultural reference points. Ziggy Stardust turned glam rock into theater. Aladdin Sane deconstructed it. The Thin White Duke drew on Krautrock and European cabaret. The Berlin Trilogy, recorded with Brian Eno in a divided city, produced Heroes and Low, albums that rewrote the possibilities of art-pop and electronic music. Let's Dance in 1983 made him a mainstream pop star, and the decades that followed included film roles, fashion influence, a pioneering internet bond offering, and sustained musical experimentation that kept critics engaged even when commercial returns diminished. Blackstar, his final album, was released on his sixty-ninth birthday, January 8, 2016. He died of liver cancer two days later. He had been working on the album for over a year, keeping his diagnosis private from virtually everyone outside his immediate circle.