David Bowie (January 8, 1947-January 10, 2016)

David Bowie All-Time Lows: A Spotify Program of Bowie's Finest, 1970-1980

If I coulda been any "Rock Star"-type rock star, it would have been David Bowie. I was just reflecting on that a couple of days ago, when we were celebrating his 69th birthday and the widely-admired release of his recent album, Blackstar.

There is no one who straddled the avant-garde and the commercial music worlds as well as he did, as consistently as he did, in as many ways and styles as he did. While many credit his impact on the fashion and image worlds, I am less interested in that. Many people try to wade into those waters, lured by its perceived glamour. I find that road, in itself, to be artistically vapid and inevitably leading to dead ends. I would say, our world of Kardashians, Hiltons, Rhiannas and Gagas are exactly the kinds of dead ends a fetishization of fashion and image leads to (I blame Warhol).

What made Bowie special was, for all of his wild looks and character creations, those characters never took precedence over Bowie's supreme underlying musical craftsmanship. Simply put, Bowie put out around a dozen albums in a decade, and almost every one of them is either excellent, important or both, with several of them among the greatest albums in rock history. That's Complete Art, sound and vision.

Just as importantly, Bowie lived a LIFE. He did almost anything you can imagine at least once, and emerged from his experiences only wiser and more sophisticated. Only a few days before his death, he still looked like a zillion bucks. It's hard to imagine there will be another quite like him...

Here is a program of Bowie's finest from Man Who Sold the World (1970) through Scary Monsters (1980).