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  <p>David Bowie, original name David Robert Jones, (born January 8, 1947, London, England—died January 10, 2016, New York, New York, U.S.), British singer, songwriter, and actor who was most prominent in the 1970s and best known for his shifting personae and musical genre hopping.</p>

  <p>To call Bowie a transitional figure in rock history is less a judgment than a job description. Every niche he ever found was on a cusp, and he was at home nowhere else—certainly not in the unmoneyed London suburb where his childhood was as dingy as his adult life would be glitzy. While this born dabbler’s favourite pose was that of a Great Artist beguiled by rock’s possibilities as a vehicle, in truth he was more a rocker drawn to artiness because it worked better than any other pose he had tried (not that he was not eclectic—he admired Anthony Newley and Jacques Brel and studied mime with Lindsay Kemp).</p>

<h2>The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust</h2>

<p>At once frivolous and portentous, this approach was tailor-made for the 1970s, Bowie’s signature decade. In the wake of the counterculture’s failure to achieve utopia or even a workable modus vivendi, Bowie concocted a series of inspired, nervily grandiose pastiches that insisted on utopia by depicting its alternative as inferno, beginning with the emblematic rock-star martyr fantasy The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). In the process he stayed so hard on the heels of the zeitgeist that the doomsaying of Diamond Dogs (1974) and the disco romanticism of Young Americans (1975) were released less than a year apart. Bowie also became the first rock star to turn a confession of bisexuality into a shrewd career move (and also the first, some years later, to suspect that times had changed enough for recanting to be an even shrewder one). Yet all this took a private toll.</p>

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