On the last song on the last album that David Bowie ever recorded – “I Can’t Give Everything Away” on Blackstar – its creator attempted to deal with his legacy. As he sang, wracked with the cancer that would soon kill him, “I know something is very wrong/The pulse returns for prodigal sons/The blackout hearts, the flowered muse/With skull designs upon my shoes”, he faced up to his mortality with both allusive wit and sly self-referentiality. The song began with a musical quotation from a song on his Low album, “A New Career in a New Town”, but, as Bowie knew, there would no longer be any new career and no new town.
For the admirers who puzzled over the secret hidden meanings of his songs, he had a simple message. It was as dismissive as his suggestion in his 1980 song “Teenage Wildlife” that he, or some imitator, had served up the “same old thing in brand-new drag”. This time around, 36 years later, Bowie declared that his art boiled down to “seeing more and feeling less/Saying no but meaning yes/This is all I ever meant/That’s the message that I sent”. If you’d expected some greater profundity from Bowie in his final hour, tough luck.
On his first major hit, 1969’s “Space Oddity”, it was a rather different message that Bowie, as Major Tom, the stranded astronaut orbiting the Earth in a tin can, would transmit. Asked by a desperate planet (whose papers “want to know whose shirts you wear”) for some piece of wisdom, all that Major Tom can say is “tell my wife I love her very much”. And then it’s off round the world all over again, until he crash-lands, just over a decade later, into “Ashes to Ashes” and its ironic observation that “we know Major Tom’s a junkie/Strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all-time low”.
Since Bowie’s death on 10 January 2016, aged 69, his cult status has only been cemented, while the standing of his contemporaries has faltered. During that year, three other major musical figures died: Prince, George Michael and Leonard Cohen. In their lifetimes, all were regarded with adulation and their deaths were greeted with solemn mourning.
Yet perhaps it’s only Bowie whose untimely passing seems like the greatest career move he ever pulled off. While it was coincidence that his swansong was released two days before he died – it had been scheduled for October 2015, but delays in filming the music video for “Lazarus” meant that the record was pushed back until 8 January, his birthday – it contributed to both a sense of a definitive final artistic statement and an audacious departure from the stage he had inhabited, to varying degrees of success, since the mid-Sixties.
A mixture of public grief and opportunistic publicity meant that not only did Blackstar sell more copies than any other Bowie album since Let’s Dance over 30 years earlier, but it also acquired the status of a Schubert-in-winter masterwork virtually immediately. Critics who had been sceptical, if not outright hostile, about many of the records that Bowie had released over the previous decades now rushed to salute a timeless genius who was capable of extraordinary, even peerless achievements. Those of us who had long enough memories to recall how every Bowie album from the late Eighties onwards was greeted with the same trope of praise – “his best since Scary Monsters!” – retained a degree of scepticism about whether it really merited such hyperbole.
Still, assessed today, Blackstar is one of those rare records that has continued to grow and deepen. It is a rich, disturbing collection of songs that shares its DNA with another Bowie album, 1976’s Station to Station. Both records contain a ten-minute title track, rich in philosophical and quasi-religious musing; both also feature a dramatic metaphysical song in which Bowie confronts “his” deity about his place in the cosmos. Both were recorded under circumstances of some stress – Station to Station when he was addicted to cocaine, hiding his urine in jars because he believed that witches were trying to steal it, and subsisting on a diet of milk and red peppers; Blackstar when he was dying – and both are remarkably accomplished, despite or perhaps because of this stress.
Nonetheless, Bowie’s continued popularity does not lie in the public thrilling to Kabbalah-influenced epics about death and rebirth, but in a canon of songs that have lucratively waymarked everything from births, marriages and deaths to film soundtracks and jukebox musicals. It says a lot for the versatility of his music – and the willingness of theatrical and cinema producers wilfully to misunderstand it – that “Heroes”, a song about two lovers from either side of the Berlin Wall, has often been interpreted simply as an uplifting power anthem, rather than the more nuanced, even cynical examination of life in Seventies Germany that it is. When it became part of the soundtrack of the recent Live Aid musical Just for One Day – which, of course, took its title from the song’s lyrics – it is likely that the audience were too busy bellowing its chorus to consider the irony of such lines like “And you, you can be mean/And I, I’ll drink all the time”.
A tension inherent in Bowie’s career, and now afterlife, is that he was a strange, bookish outsider who, by dint of ambition, opportunism and luck, found himself inhabiting the position (or predicament) of a multi-millionaire, world-conquering rock star. Now that his slender corpse has long since vanished, cremated without ceremony in the days immediately following his death, it is his spirit that lives on. Like Auden’s Yeats, “he became his admirers”.
Bowie said in 1999 that, “I am only the person the greatest number of people believe that I am. So little of it has anything to do with me, so I just have to do the best I can with what I’ve got – knowing that it has a complete second life by the time it leaves me.” In the past ten years, this “complete second life” has taken over. There have been endless cash-grab reissues, box sets and remasters. An entire album, 1987’s dreadful Never Let Me Down, was rerecorded in 2018 – at some expense, with guest appearances by Laurie Anderson and the composer Nico Muhly – apparently to fulfil an off-the-cuff remark that Bowie made in 2008, when he commented, “Oh, to redo the rest of that album!” This posthumous noblesse oblige is not offered to lesser talents; only the Beatles, with their steady stream of Lennon demos being exhumed and tarted up by the surviving band members, come close to the circus rattling on regardless of the departure of the ringmaster.
Of course there are biographies, apparently nearly a hundred since his death. He never authorised any, and to this day the estate will refuse any formal cooperation, although tacit backchannel support exists if the project embarked upon is felt to be original, respectful or otherwise worthwhile. But David Bowie remains a enigmatic figure ten years on.
The man who led millions to mourn his death in January 2016 is probably not the same man who recorded the albums that they sang along to in their homes, at gigs or in pubs. Who that man is seems unanswerable. It is this desire to answer the question – to find out who the real David Bowie was – that lies at the heart of his continued popularity. The former David Jones is long gone, but that was the case during his lifetime. The autodidact polymath lives on – tantalisingly so. The final picture released of Bowie shows him grinning, delightedly, at the camera. It is hard not to feel that he is still having the last laugh at our expense, even now.
[Further reading: The music acts to follow in 2026]
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This article appears in the 14 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Battle for power
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