David Bowie

David Bowie remains one of popular music's most restless shape-shifters, transforming from mod dabbler to glam messiah to Berlin experimentalist across five decades. Born David Jones in Brixton, 1947, he achieved breakthrough with the androgynous alien Ziggy Stardust persona in 1972, collapsing barriers between rock, theatre and sexual fluidity at a moment when British youth culture craved transcendence. His imperial phase stretched from Hunky Dory through the fractured soul of Station to Station to the Brian Eno collaborations Low and Heroes, records that married Krautrock's motorik pulse to art school detachment.

Bowie understood pop as permanent reinvention, each album a conceptual molting. Let's Dance brought him MTV ubiquity in 1983, though later years saw uneven output until Blackstar, released days before his 2016 death, proved he could still unsettle. His influence extends beyond music into fashion, film and the performance of identity itself. He made artifice authentic, teaching generations that personas need not be prisons but launching pads for exploration.