David Bowie's Quiet Battle & A Look Back On His Career

David Bowie, the self-described "tasteful thief" who appropriated from and influenced glam rock, soul, disco, new wave, punk rock and haute couture, and whose edgy, androgynous alter egos invited fans to explore their own dark places, has died. Bowie had turned 69 on Friday, the same day he released his latest album which was entitled Blackstar.

But tragically, Bowie died of cancer last night. He had been secretly battling the disease for 18 months and was said to have suffered six heart attacks in the past few years. He died surrounded by his family.

Bowie was trained in mime and fine arts, and played saxophone, guitar, harmonica and piano. A scavenger of musical and visual styles, he repackaged them in striking new formats that were all his own, in turn lending his dramatic, gender-bending aesthetic to later performers such as Prince and Lady Gaga.

There is absolutely no doubt that Bowie had a huge influence on world music.

By the height of his fame in the early 1980s, Bowie had enacted his own death repeatedly, in the form of characters and ensembles he would create, inhabit and then discard. "My policy has been that as soon as a system or process works, it's out of date," he said in a 1977 interview. "I move on to another area."

David Robert Jones was born on Jan. 8, 1947, in Brixton, a working-class south London neighborhood scarred by World War II bomb blasts.

His father, a publicist for a children's charity, was a failed music hall impresario; his mother was a former waitress and model. An older half-brother, Terry, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized when Bowie was a young man. For many years the rock star worried about his own mental health, and the theme of insanity runs through his early songs.

His family moved to the middle-class suburb of Bromley, where young David attended Bromley Technical High School and found a mentor in art teacher Owen Frampton, father of the future pop star Peter. At 14, in a fight with a friend over a girl, David was punched in the eye, resulting in a permanently dilated left pupil that would add to the otherworldly appearance he would later cultivate.

After a few lessons on a plastic saxophone purchased on a payment plan, he began playing in local bands, finding that he liked singing and the female adulation that came with it. To avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees, he renamed himself after the 19th-century American frontiersman and the hunting knife associated with him.

Fascinated by musical theater, Bowie joined a mime troupe led by the dancer (and, briefly, his lover) Lindsay Kemp, who taught him the extravagant, stylized movements he would later bring into his own stage performances.

The hairdo - and the accompanying glittery bodysuits, platform boots and face paint - was intended as a statement against the peace-and-love, denim-clad hippie imagery dominating rock culture at the time. Bowie instead presented fans with cut-and-paste lyrics about the end of the world, and shocked them by dropping to his knees to perform mock fellatio on Ronson's electric guitar or telling an interviewer he was bisexual (though he would later say that was just an experimental phase).

Along with his own music, he promoted the careers of lesser-known musicians such as Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Mott the Hoople, whose signature hit, "All the Young Dudes," was written by Bowie. In 1974 he moved to Los Angeles, whose hyped-up, drugged-out music scene - the "Fame" and "Fascination" immortalized on his album "Young Americans" - took a toll. Extensive cocaine use made him jittery and paranoid, even as it enabled him to be creatively prolific.

Bowie's commercial musical pinnacle also came in 1983, with the blockbuster album "Let's Dance." It blasted him into international superstardom, though critics complained that it lacked the depth of his earlier work. Its unexpected success threw Bowie into a creative tailspin. Having planned to follow it with more esoteric material, he instead tried to duplicate the "Let's Dance" success with albums that were critical flops.

The loss of David Bowie to the world is extremely tragic; we'll be making tribute to Bowie all day on The Hits.

Source- NZ Herald.