Bowie Left the Planet He Never Quite Belonged To

David Bowie died on January 10, 2016, two days after his 69th birthday and two days after releasing Blackstar, his final album. He had been privately battling cancer for 18 months, telling almost no one, and had used that time to make an album that was, in retrospect, an elaborately coded goodbye. The title track's music video featured a jewel-encrusted skull in an astronaut suit — Major Tom, finally dead among the stars. When the news broke, the album's lyrics transformed from cryptic art-pop into something devastating. "Look up here, I'm in heaven" was no longer a metaphor. Bowie had turned his death into his final artistic statement, which was the most Bowie thing anyone could possibly imagine. The mourning was global and genuine. He had been Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, the Goblin King, a painter, an actor, a fashion icon, and a person who made it okay to be strange at a time when being strange could get you hurt. His influence was so pervasive it was invisible — like gravity, you only noticed it when it was gone.