By Maria Bregman, writer, literary and art critic
It has been ten years. A full decade since the notification popped up on our phones – that stark, black-and-white Facebook post that felt like a practical joke. David Bowie died peacefully today.
January 10, 2016. I remember staring at the screen and waiting for the punchline. It felt impossible, didn’t it? Not just in the “celebrities are immortal” way, but in a specific, structural way. Bowie wasn’t a person who died. He was an entity that shifted. He was supposed to just shed another skin, disappear to a villa in Bali for a decade, and reappear wearing a foil suit and playing an oboe.
But he died. Just like a normal person.
And now, looking back over the last ten years of culture without him, you start to realize what we actually lost. We didn’t just lose a singer with a good back catalogue. We lost the last person who knew how to keep a secret.
The Architect of the Glitch
I’ve been trying to pinpoint why the cultural landscape feels so flat lately. So predictable. And I think it comes down to the absence of friction. Bowie was friction. He was the sand in the gears.
Think about it. In 1972, he goes on Top of the Pops as Ziggy Stardust. He puts his arm around Mick Ronson. He wears a jumpsuit that looks like it was stitched together from a grandmother’s carpet and a nuclear reactor. And he smiles. That moment didn’t just “change music” (a phrase I hate, by the way). It broke the binary. It told a generation of kids in grey, rain-soaked Britain that they could be something else. Something alien.
But here’s the thing we forget. He wasn’t a natural genius. He wasn’t Mozart, born with the symphony in his head. He was a magpie. He was a thief. He stole from mime, from kabuki, from Little Richard, from Nietzsche, from the drag queens at the Sombrero club. He took all these jagged, mismatched pieces and glued them together until the cracks looked like art.
He worked at it. You can hear the effort in those early records. The desperate attempt to be a mod, a folk singer, a music hall entertainer. He failed for a long time before he flew.
And I miss that. I miss the struggle. Today, an artist emerges fully formed, media-trained, their aesthetic curated by a team of twenty-year-olds in Shoreditch before the first single drops. There’s no awkward phase. There’s no “Laughing Gnome.” Bowie wasn’t afraid to look stupid in pursuit of something brilliant.
The 80s and the Art of Being Boring
It’s fashionable to skip over the mid-80s when we talk about him. The Let’s Dance era. The blonde hair, the teeth, the suits. The “Phil Collins years,” as a friend of mine cruelly calls them.
But actually, I think that was his weirdest performance of all.
After a decade of drug-fuelled occultism and Berlin basements, he decided to play the role of “Global Pop Star.” And he played it so well that people forgot it was a role. He looked at the stadium rock machine and said, “I can do that.”
I remember watching an interview from that time. He looks healthy. He looks tan. He looks completely vacant behind the eyes. He was hiding in plain sight. He gave the world exactly what it wanted – hits, accessibility, normalcy – and it nearly killed him creatively.
He knew it, too. That’s why he blew it up with Tin Machine.
God, remember Tin Machine? Everyone hated it. It was loud, abrasive, and stubborn. He insisted on being just “the singer in the band.” It was a career suicide note written in feedback. And I love him for it. Who does that now? Who reaches the peak of commercial viability and decides to form a noisy garage band just to see if the audience will stay?
Nobody. Because the shareholders wouldn’t allow it.
The Silence of the Ghost
The most radical thing Bowie ever did, though, wasn’t wearing a dress or doing a Nazi salute at Victoria Station (a bad move, let’s admit it, he was out of his mind on cocaine and peppers). The most radical thing he did was disappear.
For ten years, before The Next Day dropped in 2013, he was just… gone.
He lived in New York. He walked his daughter to school. He bought coffee. He didn’t tweet. He didn’t do a reality show. He didn’t launch a skincare line or a podcast. He withheld himself.
In an age of surveillance capitalism, where attention is the only currency that matters, silence is the ultimate luxury. It’s a power move.
When The Next Day appeared, it came out of nowhere. No teaser campaign. No leaks. Just “Here it is.” I remember the morning it dropped. It felt like magic. It felt like he had cheated the system. He proved that you could still surprise people if you just learned to shut up.
And then, Blackstar.
The Final Performance
I still find it hard to listen to Blackstar. Not because it’s sad, but because it’s so deliberate.
He knew he was dying. He knew the clock was running out. And instead of retreating, or writing a weeping ballad about the light at the end of the tunnel, he turned his death into a puzzle.
The video for “Lazarus.” Him in the bed, the buttons on his eyes, the frantic scribbling. He was directing his own exit. He was choreographing the obituary.
At the time, we thought it was just “Bowie being weird.” Then, two days later, he was dead. And the code unlocked. The lyrics weren’t abstract; they were medical. They were reportage from the terminal ward.
It makes me wonder if we’ll ever see anything like that again. A public figure using their own mortality as a medium. It was brave, yes, but it was also controlling. He wanted the last word. He didn’t want us to see him weak; he wanted us to see him as a construct, right to the end.
The Cultural Void
So, where are we now? Ten years later.
We have plenty of pop stars. We have Taylor, we have Beyoncé, we have Harry. They are talented. They are massive. They put on great shows.
But are they dangerous? Do they make you uncomfortable?
Bowie was often uncomfortable. He was cold. He could be cruel. He flirted with fascism, he slept with everyone, he abandoned people when he was done with them. He wasn’t a “role model” in the modern, sanitized sense. He was a mess of contradictions.
Today, we demand moral purity from our artists. We want them to be relatable. We want to see their breakfast. We want to know who they voted for and that they recycle.
Bowie didn’t care if you related to him. He was the Starman. He was up there; you were down here. He offered a hand, but he never promised to come down and sit on the sofa with you.
That distance is what created the mystery. And mystery is what creates obsession. Without mystery, you just have “content.”
I look at the charts today and I hear algorithms. I hear songs written by committee to fit perfectly into a 15-second TikTok clip. It’s music designed to be frictionless. It slides into your ear and slides out without leaving a mark.
Bowie’s music was full of friction. The saxophone on “Neuköln”? It sounds like a dying animal. The piano on “Aladdin Sane”? It’s a panic attack. He wasn’t afraid of the wrong note if it was the right feeling.
The Ghost in the Machine
There’s an irony, of course. Bowie was obsessed with the internet. He launched BowieNet way back in the 90s. He saw it coming. He predicted that the relationship between artist and audience would break down, that it would become a two-way street.
He was right, as usual. But I wonder if he realized how much that would destroy the very thing that made him possible.
He thrived in the gaps. In the spaces between the information. You had to hunt for his records. You had to decipher the lyrics. You had to imagine what he was doing in Berlin, because there was no Instagram story to show you.
Now, there are no gaps. The lights are on all the time.
The Aftermath
I walked past the mural in Brixton the other day. The one of him as Aladdin Sane. It’s covered in plastic now, to protect it. People still leave flowers.
It feels like a shrine to a lost religion. The religion of the Outsider.
That’s what he was, really. He was the patron saint of the weird kid in the bedroom who didn’t fit in at school. He told us that we could reinvent ourselves. That we weren’t stuck with the face or the gender or the class we were born with. You could just… paint a lightning bolt on your face and be someone else.
It sounds naive now. We talk about identity politics and fluidity like they are academic concepts. Bowie just lived it. He didn’t write a thesis; he put on a dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World.
I worry that we’ve lost the fun of it. The playfulness. Identity has become a battlefield, a serious business of definitions and boundaries. For Bowie, it was a dressing-up box. It was a game.
A Toast to the Alien
So, ten years on.
I don’t think we’re going to get another Bowie. The soil has changed. The ecosystem that grew him – the art schools, the cheap rent in London, the music press that actually mattered, the scarcity of information – it’s all gone.
We have the archives. We have the box sets. We have the “immersive experiences” and the holograms that are surely coming (god help us).
But we don’t have the signal.
He was a radio receiver picking up a frequency from the future. And since he died, it feels like we’ve just been listening to the static, waiting for someone else to tune in.
Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe there’s a kid in a bedroom right now, ignoring the algorithm, making something ugly and strange and brilliant. I hope so.
But until then, I’m going to put on Low, pour a drink, and sit in the dark. Because sometimes, the only way to see the stars is to turn off the lights.
He changed the rules of the game, and then he took the ball home. And we’re still standing on the pitch, wondering what the hell happened.
Miss you, Starman.
