I was lucky to find David Bowie while discovering the world
It was the 1970s, I had entered my teens, and the first time that I listened to David Bowie he was singing, "I'm drowning in the quicksand of my thought/And I ain't got the power any more", a lyric from the song "Quicksand" that made me start thinking about what pop/rock singers were actually talking about.
The Beatles may have been my mother's influence on me, but it was when I got to high school to freely explore and experiment and make new friends that I heard Bowie's Hunky Dory. This LP came two years after he burst upon the music scene with Space Oddity (1969), a tribute to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey whose title track gave us the everlastingly ominous "Ground Control to Major Tom"; it was followed by one of rock music's landmarks, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. However, it was Hunky Dory that has stayed with me throughout.
The cover of Hunky Dory has Bowie holding his long hair back, Hollywood diva style, and it's designed like an Andy Warhol pop-art paintings (It in fact has a track titled "Andy Warhol"). So for a student at lower Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School like me, Bowie was a window to high art and low art - with Bowie himself a unique, innovative fusion of the two. Ironically, he was not born Bowie; his name was David Jones, but during the late '60s when he was trying to make it professionally, there was another, more famous David Jones - the lead singer of the Monkees, a band manufactured as a parody/homage to the Beatles for a TV show that was popular though unoriginal and derivative. When I heard this, I laughed. It was as if VS Naipaul had to change his name because his name at birth was Chetan Bhagat.
I quietly slipped money out of my father's wallet and bought each of Bowie's albums, stopping only with Let's Dance in 1983, my last year of teenhood in which I was discovering newer things and found Bowie's latest stuff flagging. The striking thing about his albums - after Ziggy there is Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs and the Eno-produced Berlin trilogy of Low, Heroes and Lodger, among others - is how Bowie was consistently inventive. For all other pop/rock acts whose records I collected, their sound was essentially the same, crafted and recrafted till they either died or did old-fogey concerts in India: Pink Floyd, forever whining about best friend Syd Barrett, their founding member who went insane; The Who, whose Roger Daltrey was forever screaming about "My Generation"; the Rolling Stones, forever mimicking down-and-out African-American blues' legends.
If you had to reduce Bowie in the 1970s to a single thread, it would that he forever imagined himself to be Kubrick's alien-newborn from the climax of 2001; but even then, each avatar was so much more intriguing than anything else on the Earthscape. (In fact, he actually played a water-addicted alien in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 saddening sci-fi film, The Man Who Fell to Earth.)
I had forgotten about Bowie until about a decade back when I watched Christopher Nolan's The Prestige; there's a moment when Hugh Jackman's character meets the cult Serbian inventor from the late 1800s, Nikola Tesla. I found Tesla, with his heterochromatic eyes uncannily familiar, until I realised it was Bowie (who in real life had one glass eye). Bowie! I re-listened his albums from my teenaged years and gained a new appreciation for his voice. What range it had. That was his virtuosity, and I wished that I had paid closer attention to it when I was younger. In turns lilting, arrogant, seductive (even to men, as a challenge perhaps), crying, laughing or just plain celebrating: I now realize how fortunate I was, in more respects than I'll ever know, to have listened to him when I was discovering the world.
His death on Monday came suddenly, shockingly. On Twitter, many whose opinions I respect had recently said that his latest album, Blackstar, was incredibly good, and it was an opinion of Bowie that I hadn't heard in ages. I was looking forward to it. I had no idea he was dying from cancer, and someone tweeted that it is now clear that this last album was done with the self-knowledge of death; and that with it, Bowie was saying goodbye.
In "Quicksand" Bowie sings, "I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man/Just a mortal with potential of a superman"; he also notes that "Knowledge comes with death's release". Farewell, Starman. Like Kubrick's black monolith, your sound kicked us up a step on the evolutionary ladder.