[MUSIC] More David Bowie in memoriam

[rfmcdonald]

The above GIF is, as described by Wired, Britihs Illustrator Helen Green's "Time May Change Me".

[I]t comprises 29 colored pencil drawings of Bowie during various stages of his chameleon-like career. There’s Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and Major Tom. And then there’s Bowie as Bowie, visually reinvented again and again.

CBC's list of the top ten Bowie songs is worth visiting.

As well, Paul Wells' article in MacLean's, "Life after ‘Let’s Dance': Paul Wells on David Bowie", looks at Bowie's career after his big 1983 hit.

His early years are getting most of the attention in the wake of his death. This is as it should be: his albums from the 1970s were consistently daring and managed to become, almost despite their audacity, the soundtrack for a decade.

But while he had legions of fans who prefer to act as though nothing that mattered came after Diamond Dogs and Low, Bowie himself didn’t really have that luxury. He had to live through the three decades after the Serious Moonlight tour ended, a day at a time. He chose to reject nostalgia and to keep reinventing himself, again and again, from assorted motley shards of the zeitgeist. The construction of “the Bowie character” was always a work in progress.

Not that Let’s Dance didn’t knock him for a loop. Its worldwide sales were well north of seven million copies. He had never had an audience that large. Nor any that distracted: before 1983, the complexity of his assorted personas would have made it difficult for anyone to be a casual Bowie fan, but suddenly his admirers were legion. He freely admitted to Rolling Stone that the goal of the next album, Tonight, was “to keep my hand in, so to speak,” with that mass audience. The results, on Tonight and 1987’s Never Let Me Down, were mixed at best: a couple of disposable hit singles, a reggae-tinged ballad duet with Tina Turner, a (strikingly sombre) Beach Boys cover. One track featured the actor Mickey Rourke rapping. It was all caked in layers of MTV-era studio processing, with plenty of gated reverb on the drums. Already by 1987 Bowie was weary of trying to please a crowd. “I stayed away from experimentation,” he told Rolling Stone mournfully. “Now, I think I should be a bit more adventurous.”

He would be as good as his word. He executed his return to a life of experimentation in three steps. First, in 1989, Tin Machine released their first album. This was, the members insisted, a real band, one whose singer just happened to be David Bowie. (The others included the sons of television comic Soupy Sales, Hunt Sales on drums and Tony Sales on bass.) Tin Machine never amounted to much, but it sounds better in retrospect than it did at the time, because despite the Italian suits the guys wore on their first album cover, their rough, guitar-driven sound foreshadowed the grunge rock of the ’90s with uncanny foresight.