J-Speaks: The Untimely Death of a Music Icon

For five decades, an all-around Englishman pushed the envelope in terms of being an artist. He was a true triple-threat that can sing, dance and act, but he did in a way that was accepted and loved by all who watched. He had a thirst for knowledge and he used that to become the great artist that he did and he inspired all of who saw and watch him to become smarter, better and more than anything else to be ourselves and never apologize for it. At the start of the week unexpectedly, that great artist left us.

Daytime Emmy, MTV Video Music, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class of 1996 and Grammy Award Winner David Bowie passed away this past Sunday after a brave 18-month long battle with liver cancer. Bowie passed on just 48 hours after his 69^th birthday and on the heels of the release of his latest album “Blackstar.”

Bowie is survived by his wife of 24 years actress, model and entrepreneur Iman, who full name is Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid, their 15-year-old daughter Alexandria Zahra Jones and film director Duncan Jones, Bowie’s son from his first marriage to Angie Bowie.

“David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer,” a message on his Facebook page ready at the start of the week.

“While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief.”

This past Monday, fans of the legendary artist, who was born David Robert Jones on Jan. 8, 1947 in London’s gritty Brixton neighborhood, showed their love by placing candles in front of a mural of Bowie in Brixton, London, England where Bowie was born. The same thing took place in front of an apartment SoHo in Manhattan, NY, where Bowie has had an apartment since 1999.

Jones changed his last name to Bowie as a way to avoid people confusing him for Davy Jones of The Monkees.

While she did not publically comment about his passing, Iman through a series of tweets sent prior to the passing of her husband, who she married in 1992 gave a hint of that he was on the verge of passing on.

One post from the 60-year-old stems from what Bowie told a crowd at Madison Square Garden when he turned 50-years-old, “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but, I promise it won’t be boring.”

Another post from Iman said, “Sometimes you will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”

More than three million people took to twitter to pay their respects to Bowie. Among them was Kanye West, who tweeted, “David Bowie was one of the most important inspirations, so fearless, so creative, he gave us magic for a lifetime.”

Another music legend Billy Idol tweeted, “Nearly brought me to tears by sudden news of @David Bowie. Real David Bowie passing. RIP.”

Bowie’s journey to greatness as an artist began with “Space Oddity” in 1969, a very haunting story about a lonely astronaut named Major Tom. The song ended up being a minor hit though. Bowie did refer to Major Tom in passing in his 1980 hit “Ashes to Ashes.” Peter Schilling however would continue the saga three years later in the hit “Major Tom (Coming Home).”

He hit the right cord, no pun intended when he brought out his alter ego that he would become well known for in Ziggy Stardust, also known as, “Lady Stardust.” The persona describes a bisexual alien who was a messenger for extraterrestrials that delivered messages through glam rock hits like “Suffragette City on the 1972 album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” which Bowie to stardom and along with it, he changed music forever.

It was not just the music on the album that separated it from the pack, but how Bowie presented himself through the futuristic costumes, the jarring makeup, dying his hair different colors that mirrored the hippie culture of the late 1960s and that it bent the levels of sexuality.

From that point, Bowie dominated the music charts in the 1970s with a string of anthems, which included “Rebel, Rebel,” “Young Americans,” in 1975, which was co-written with superstar John Lennon yielded Bowie’s first No. 1, “Fame,” with backing vocals contributed by Carlos Alomar.

It was also during this time period that Bowie played a crucial role in the careers of two very influential performers Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.

Bowie played a major role in the resurrection of the career of Reed after the breakup of Velvet Underground helping to produce his 1972 comeback, LP “Transformer,” as well as Pop’s album “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life.” Both Bowie and Reed became lifelong friends after that.

“David’s friendship was the light of my life. I never met such a brilliant person. He was the best there is,” Pop said earlier this week.

In the 1980s, Bowie traded his “Ziggy Stardust” persona to a more MTV-friendly, dapper image and that resulted in the creation of Let’s Dance, which was co-produced by Chic’s guitarist Nile Rodgers. That album went platinum in both the United States and United Kingdom. Three singles on the album landed in the top twenty on the hits list in both countries and the title track hit the No. 1 spot. No bad for two men that crossed paths back in 1982 at an after-hours club in New York, NY called The Continental.

As mentioned earlier, Bowie success stems from him from taking chances, being comfortable in his own skin and his continued thirst and lust for learning and sometimes bending the envelope when it came to his sexuality.

His public acknowledgement of him saying that he was bisexual during the 1970s played a major role in the gay-rights movement, in particular in the UK, which decriminalized homosexuality only in 1967.

Despite being married to his first wife Angie, Bowie made the claim that he was gay in an interview with the British music magazine Melody Maker back in 1972.

Some of Bowie’s confirmed conquests according Nicki Gostin of the New York Daily News were Bebe Buell, the daughter of Liv Tyler; Oona, the widow of Charlie Chaplin who was 22 years his senior; transsexual Romy Haag and actress Susan Sarandon.

Biographer Wendy Leigh once wrote that when Bowie and Angie met because they were intimate with the same man.

Angie once told an interviewer that she was very suspicious of Bowie and that he did a lot of “cavorting.”

“When we got married, it soon became apparent that it had to be an open marriage if it was going to work for him,” she said. “I liked him, loved him, cared about him, but I was not going to be humiliated and not treated with dignity and respect.”

Four years later, Bowie told Playboy in an interview that he was a bisexual and backed it up by saying “I can’t deny that I’ve used that fact very well. I supposed it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Four years after that interview, Bowie and Angie split and in 1983 he told Rolling Stone magazine that admitting he was bisexual was, “the biggest mistake I ever made. I was always a closet heterosexual.”

Nine years later he married the aforementioned Iman, from Mogadishu, Somalia and remained together up to his death.

According to The Sunday Times of London’s Rich List, it placed Bowie and Iman’s wealth at about $175 million dollars in 2015.

Professionally, Bowie continued to adopt new personas, with “The Thin White Duke,” from his 1976 album Station to Station being one of them.

The release of the album was followed in February of that year by a 3 ½ month concert tour of Europe and North America called the Isolar-1976 Tour.

The concerts were highlighted by songs from the album, which included the dramatic and lengthy title track, the ballads “Wild Is the Wind” and “Word on a Wing,” and the funkier “TVC 15” and “Stay.”

No place took these songs in more than Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum on Mar. 23, 1976, which was regarded by many one of rock’s best live concerts ever.

It was also during this time that Bowie had a major cocaine addiction. It got so bad that one time he once sneezed and was quoted as saying, “half my brain came out.”

To get clean and sober, Bowie moved to Berlin and he also made three more albums that were reliant on electronica. Producing “Low,” “Heroes” and “Lodger” with him was former Roxy Music keyboardist Brian Eno, who he frequently collaborated with for more than four decades.

News about Bowie’s passing, “came as a complete surprise, as did nearly everything else about him,” Eno said.

While Bowie’s 1983 album Let’s Dance and his “Serious Moonlight Tour did not have a name for his incarnation, the well-dressed star did give off a clean-cut image and a new wave of music videos and singles like “Modern Love” and “Let’s Dance.”

Accompany Bowie on the six-month tour were guitarist Earl Slick and backing vocalists Frank and George Simmons. The tour itself was very popular.

Along with his final album before his passing earlier this week, Bowie had been working with Ivo Van Hove, a Belgian theater director on the New York Theater Workshop production of “Lazarus.”

“I saw a man fighting. He fought like a lion and kept working through it all. I had an incredible respect for that,” Van Hove told NPO Radio 4.

“We never directly touched upon it apart from when you made morbid jokes,” “Lazarus” director John Renck wrote in his Instagram tribute to Bowie. “It obviously colored our talks on work…I embraced it all as a note on mortality, a nod on aftermath a comment on the concept of legacy.”

Through his music and his performances on the big and small screen and by how he lived his life, Bowie in his own way showed us all how to be comfortable in our own skin. Regardless of your race sexuality and all that comes with who you are, no one should think any less of you just because you are different. Every person on this planet should be able to write their own story and be proud of who they are and what they stand for, just as long as they do not put others down for their own pleasure.

That is what makes the Supreme Court decision to recognize gay marriage as legal in all 50 states last year was long overdue and it is because of people like Bowie that showed us it does not matter who you love. If it will make the best you possible, that is what matters.

“He was completely unafraid at a time when so many people were afraid,” Robb Leigh Davis, director of cultural engagement of The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York City.

It is because of Bowie, we have the likes of Boy George, Katy Perry, Madonna, Cher, KISS and specifically its leader Gene Simmons to name a few.  

Artist Pharrell Williams of NBC’s “The Voice” called Bowie a “true innovator.” Academy, SAG and Golden Globe Award Winner Russell Crowe said Bowie is, “One of the greatest performance artist to have ever lived. British Prime Minister David Cameron called Bowie a, “master of re-invention who kept getting it right.” The best compliment and what truly describes David Bowie is what Madonna called him a, “Game Changer.”

He found a way to make music and display on the big and small screen and on live stage a different form of artistry that gained the respect of the young, the old, the curious and along the way showed the value of what it meant to be a true seeker of knowledge to not only better yourself, but to give a better outlook on the world.  

Information and quotations are courtesy of Jan. 12, 2016 New York Post article “David Bowie (1947-2016) Stardust Stardom and the Golden Years,” by Bob Fredericks; Jan. 12, 2016 Newsday article “Bowie 1947-2016,” by Glenn Gamboa; Jan. 12, 2016 New York Daily News article “Remembering A Legend David Bowie 1947-2016,” by Ethan Sacks and Stephen Rex Brown and excerpts ‘Modern Love’ and Then Some by Nicki Gostin and “A Chameleon Over Sexuality” by Jacqueline Cutler; http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie; http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iman_(model); http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations_received_by_Russell_Crowe.