As we mourn the loss of David Bowie, who died Sunday of cancer at age 69, what keeps coming to mind is the huge impact he had on our times, anticipating and, often, helping to shape its twists and turns through the past few decades. “He always got to the unknown first,” the theater critic Hilton Als wrote in the New Yorker on Monday.
Here are eight ways Bowie influenced popular culture:
1. As a gender bender: At a time when homosexuality was still, mostly, illegal, Bowie publicly embraced the idea of a fluid sexuality. As he came to public prominence in the 1970s, he’d wear dresses on stage, proclaim himself gay, flirt openly with guitarist Mick Ronson in a legendary British TV performance of the song “Starman.” All of it helped pave the way for a culture that became ever more accepting of nontraditional sex roles.
2. As a genre bender: Not only did Bowie make music in an astonishing range of styles, but he made compelling music in all of them. His catalog includes everything from singer-songwriter gems (“Changes,” “Life on Mars”) to grinding, guitar-led rock (“Suffragette City,” “Rebel Rebel”) to soul (“Young Americans”) to funk (“Fame”) to post-Cold War anthems (“Heroes,” “Station to Station”). And when he needed to make hits, he turned out “Let’s Dance” and helped shape the sound of the 1980s. “To me it seems so intentional and so well done that I don’t think the word ‘poser’ fits,” said Michael Darling, chief curator of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the only U.S. home for the “David Bowie Is” museum show. “It’s so strategic and smart in a way that is very Warholian.”
3. As a crossover artist: Before settling into rock ‘n’ roll, Bowie tried his hand at, among other things, mime. And he would keep experimenting, playing a convincing space alien in Nicolas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and the title character in the Broadway play “The Elephant Man.” He wasn’t the first to move from popular music into film and theater, of course, but he was one of the most effective, even as he said he lacked the discipline to do more than dabble in acting. “It really kind of connects up to bigger ideas about a signature style and how that’s maybe an old-fashioned notion,” Darling said. “This idea of multiple personalities, multiple ways of perception, really is one of the most defining radical aspects of late 20th century culture.”