Featured Image: (Pacer Graphic / Sophia Phillips)

During the seventies, David Bowie was one of the most interesting characters in pop culture. He dressed odd, wore heavy amounts of makeup, acted as characters, etc.

Due to how he experimented with several different sounds, every Bowie album you bought would sound more distinct than the last. He would likely be portraying an entirely different character as well. One week he was “Ziggy Stardust,” a rock and roll playing flamboyant alien, and the next he was the “Thin White Duke,” who sparked controversial statements that Bowie deemed “in character.”

Bowie broke ground and changed Rock & Roll with his lavish performances and costumes. Without Bowie’s flair for the dramatic, it’s unlikely we’d see acts like KISS and Alice Cooper dress up the way they did. The concept of Daft Punk being two DJ robots doesn’t seem possible without Bowie’s influence and stagecraft. While you can credit Marc Bolan and his band T. Rex for starting the glam rock genre and style, Bowie popularized it and took it to another level with Ziggy Stardust.

With the roll around of Ziggy Stardust and the glam rock genre as a whole, fashion became incorporated into rock & roll itself. If you look at today’s hip hop scene, the fashion is almost important as the music itself. While it’s definitely a stretch to connect this back to David Bowie, it’s still interesting to think about.

In terms of the music Bowie was creating, he really was all over the place. In 1976, he released “Station to Station”, an album based on his “Thin White Duke” persona. The record was a funk rock work with hints of Krautrock, a new genre in Germany at the time. Then only a year later, he completely ditches the funk rock motif and goes all in on the new Krautrock experiment. During this period, he ended up creating his electronic rock masterpiece, “Low.” This was an electronic rock experiment made in Berlin by Bowie, with help from producers Tony Visconti and Brian Eno. This was part of the “Berlin Trilogy”, which was composed of “Low”, “Heroes” and finally “Lodger.”

“Lodger” is another great example of Bowie’s diversity in sound. The album took inspiration from world music on the first half of the record, before returning to his more established electronic rock sound on the second half.

Bowie’s music provided influence on acts like the Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Radiohead, etc. Bowie had such a large impact on rock & roll that our generation has unfortunately begun to forget. In case there are those of you out there needing a recommendation, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” “Aladdin Sane” and “Low” are all phenomenal works by one of history’s greatest artist.