The Man Who Fell to Earth Has Gone – David Bowie 1947 – 2016

David Bowie was a walking art installation, each eye a different color, hair that could transform his sexual identity with gel and a hair dryer. A face that was born to wear makeup. He could turn around and look like the golden god of 1930s cinema. No other musician before Bowie was able to so fluidly transform his gender identity and his musical styles. Madonna borrowed much from him, she readily admits, but there isn’t any musician who doesn’t, in some way, acknowledge an influence.

Bowie made such an enormous impact on music, art, fashion, cinema, sexuality, bi-sexuality, transgender identity and most of all, on a fairly uneducated drama geek in Nordhoff High School, California, in 1982. David Bowie was a religion back then. He was so much more than just an icon and musician. He really was a whole identity. He starred in films like The Man Who Fell to Earth, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Hunger, as Warhol in Basquiat, even in Zoolander.

I saw him in concert once. A thin white duke in a cream colored suit with a pop riff this time, modern love for modern audiences. With so many people crowding to the front of the stage it was futile to try to get close enough to see him, really see him. He gave us the songs we all wanted to hear. It’s still the best concert experience of my life. Somewhere out there is a film made by my boyfriend in high school where I am the star and the song playing in the background is Life on Mars.

That’s probably at least part of the reason why Ridley Scott’s The Martian embeds so deeply — it is the science, yes, but it is also, somehow, partly David Bowie who brought the idea of Mars in our consciousness. The song used in the film is a good one, among his best.

So now that he’s cycling around up in the universe, maybe he can tell us once and for all if there is life on Mars. Goodbye to the best of the best.