David Bowie

David Bowie’s chameleonic persona and tireless musical adventurism made him one of the most influential rock stars of all time. He was born David Jones in London in 1947, taking up the saxophone at age 13. He began his career in mod bands like the King Bees and David Jones and the Buzz, but found his first commercial success playing a space-age  androgyne on the 1969 hit “Space Odyssey.” It would be the first of his many guises, including the arch glam-rock messiah of his 1972 classic The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, the “plastic-soul” crooner of 1975’s Young Americans, the disco-era Thin White Duke of 1976’s Station to Station. In the late Seventies, he worked with producer Brian Eno on his experimental “Berlin trilogy” of albums. In the Eighties, Bowie crossed over to pop with hits like “Modern Love” and “Let’s Dance.” 

Bowie pushed social conventions as well. In 1972, he told the UK music weekly Melody Maker that he was gay. In a 1976 Playboy interview he said he was bixsexual. He was married twice, to Angie Bowie from 1970 to 1980, and to the fashion model Iman, who he tied the knot with in 1992. Bowie’s creative ambitions extended to film as well: he appeared in The Hunger (1983), Labyrinth (1986), and Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

Bowie’s musical input during the 1990s included less-than-successful experiments like the 1997 drum ‘n’ bass-influenced album Earthling. But he found his artistic footing again in the 2000s, with 2013’s The Next Day, and 2016’s jazz and hip-hop-tinged Blackstar, a twilight masterpiece recorded in secret after he had been diagnosed with cancer. He died on January 10, 2016, only two days after Blackstar’s release, ending his peerless career with a final statement of epic reinvention. —Jon Dolan