What David Bowie taught us about style

In this haunting farewell, a bedridden Bowie writhes as he levitates above his sheets, then dances backwards into a coffin-like wardrobe.

Representatives of the star posted on his official website and social media accounts that the entertainer died peacefully Sunday, surrounded by his family after an 18 month battle with cancer.

The song, Lazarus was released on his 69th birthday, just two days before his death. It wouldn’t be the last time he took on a new identity: Bowie went on to create several larger-than-life, magnetic personas-Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke-each of whom secured their own place in Bowie’s sui generis discography over his roughly five-decade career.

Blackstar was Bowie’s 25th album and his longtime producer Tony Visconti called it his “parting gift”. It was as amusing as always, and as surreal, looping through word games and allusions and all the usual stuff we did. “For now, it is appropriate to cry”, he added.

Bowie later said of the concert, “It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done”.

Candles and other mementos are pictured at the star of British rock star David Bowie on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, California, January 11, 2016. I’d never gone after anything in my life with such passion in all my life. “Sometimes I think my head is so big”, Bowie keened in-character, “because it is so full of dreams”.

He’d already blown us away with a string of iconic albums from the late 60s through the ’70s and into the 1980s. That same day, he released his album, Blackstar. In the metro, one board read: “I don’t know where I’m going from here but I promise it won’t be boring”, while the BT Tower flashed “David Bowie Rest In Peace”.

It began with his role in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 science-fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which he played an alien visiting earth from a dying planet.

Earlier Monday, the Vatican’s culture minister, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, paid tribute to Bowie by tweeting the opening lyrics to “Space Oddity” – “Ground Control to Major Tom/Commencing countdown, engines on/ Check ignition/and may God’s love be with you”.