How David Bowie's performance-music taught us to celebrate oddities

As a performer with great earthly powers, David Bowie was an alien: familiar, but different; recognisable, yet unpeggable; pop star, but performance artist. That these qualities are also angelic can be confirmed by the androgynous, anthropomorphic personas Bowie unfurled via his glorious music: Major Tom "sitting in a tin can/far above the world" noting that "Planet Earth is blue/and there’s nothing I can do"; a starman "waiting in the sky"; the pirate eye-patched Ziggy Stardust "who played guitar" and jammed with "the spiders of Mars"; the post-Brechtian cabaret Thin White Duke; the ancient mariner of sounds carrying the albatross of many 20th-century Bowies around his guitar neck….

His genius lay in his ability to make his whole range of music contain theatre. For musicians who steer more to the middle of the road as they age, Bowie was the aristocratic exception. Two days before his death, on his 69th birthday, Blackstar, his 25th album, was released. In the systolic beat of ‘Lazarus’, he sings, "Look up here, I’m in heaven/ I’ve got scars that can’t be seen/ I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen/Everybody knows me now." Bowie was the master dramatist who celebrated human oddities — one of which was that humans did not mind Bowie pointing them out. And he did it with the alien’s wink and tunes.