I Can't Change Time

Interestingly, on a night in which the entertainment industry celebrated some of its most ephemeral ephemera at the Golden Globe awards, musician, actor and artist David Bowie passed away peacefully at home. He was 69.

Bowie's education at an arts-focused high school fueled a great deal of his career. Rather than simply show up on stage and sing, he created characters and relied heavily on staging and imagery to help communicate through his music. His initial forays into the world of working musician were attempts to follow the patterns of others, but it was not until he created "Space Oddity" in 1969 that he started to draw some notice (the song is often misunderstood as being named "Major Tom" after its astronaut lead character).

From there a procession of characters, both musical and onscreen, followed. Bowie seemed to make an entire career out of asking the question, "I wonder what it would sound/look like if..." In later years he noted that some earlier statements that seemed controversial -- such as the Thin White Duke-era positive assessment of fascism -- owed as much to being in character and excessive drug use as anything else. He was the rare popular musician who went onscreen with actual talent and received some excellent notices for his work in movies like The Man Who Fell to Earth and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. 

As Kevin Williamson notes at National Review, Bowie was pretty perceptive about the economic side of the entertainment business as well, anticipating crowdfunding by selling bonds against his own future royalties. He also saw where internet technology would be the biggest problem for the way the music business had worked.

The post title is a riff on lyrics from 1972's "Changes," in which Bowie asserts, "Time may change me/But I can't trace time." Time didn't change the essential Bowie, as his final album Blackstar is as much a collection of innovations, questions and experiments as Ziggy Stardust or Scary Monsters ever was. But he could not change time, and the liver cancer diagnosis of 18 months ago marked the final chapter in his interesting, questing life.