It’s a moment that’s hard to fathom for music lovers around the world: ten years have passed since David Bowie, the Starman himself, left this planet. As January 2026 marks what would have been Bowie’s 79th birthday, tributes and retrospectives have poured in, reflecting on a legacy that continues to shape the worlds of music, fashion, and identity. From his meteoric rise in the 1970s to his poignant final days crafting the album Blackstar, Bowie’s journey remains as compelling as ever.
Born David Jones on January 8, 1947, Bowie’s ascent began with the haunting single “Space Oddity,” and over the next decade, he delivered a string of classic albums—Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, and more—that redefined rock and roll. According to Live for Live Music, “It seemed as though each year in the 1970s brought a new hit record; a testament to Bowie’s incalculable ability to write and execute original music.” His songwriting genius fused the catchy hooks of rock with the intricate progressions of jazz, and his live performances were legendary for their mysticism and energy.
This January, fans have been revisiting one such performance: Bowie’s April 10, 1978 show at the Dallas Convention Center. The setlist reads like a greatest hits collection—“What in the World,” “Ziggy Stardust,” “Heroes,” “Fame,” “Five Years,” and more—underscoring the breadth of his catalog and the power of his stage presence. As Live for Live Music notes, “There’s an element of mysticism that pervades Bowie’s work, and that certainly finds its way into the live setting.”
Yet Bowie was never just a musician; he was a shape-shifter, a provocateur, and an artist who challenged the very fabric of identity. His personas—Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Man Who Fell to Earth, the Thin White Duke—each brought new dimensions to his artistry. As Tablet Magazine’s Armin Rosen describes, Bowie’s album covers alone are a study in transformation: “Bowie personally appears on the cover of 24 of his solo albums, depicting himself as a bowl-cut heartthrob, an androgynous blond, a space alien in human disguise, a cigarette-smoking lounge creature, a sideways pair of legs, and an oddly undersized boxer.”
Bowie’s restless creativity reached an apex in the late 1970s during his Berlin period, where he produced a trilogy of groundbreaking albums while grappling with personal demons. On “Sound and Vision” from 1977, he sang, “I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision,” capturing the tension between discipline and the mysterious spark of inspiration. Rosen writes, “There’s an entire aesthetic theory proposed in this song: Art results when discipline and a confidence in the mysterious higher powers of creativity meet the basic stuff of sense perception.”
But it was Bowie’s final act that has perhaps resonated most deeply in the years since his passing. Blackstar, released on his 69th birthday—January 8, 2016—arrived just two days before his death from liver cancer. The album, with its stark cover featuring a five-pointed black star and enigmatic glyphs, immediately took on the aura of a deliberate farewell. The video for “Lazarus,” filmed as Bowie learned his cancer was terminal, is haunting: “Look up here — I’m in heaven,” he croons from a hospital bed, eyes wrapped in gauze, hair the color of a sunless afternoon.
Producer Tony Visconti fueled the narrative that Blackstar was a parting note, telling Rolling Stone he joked with Bowie about writing a farewell album, to which Bowie only laughed. Yet, as Stereogum reports, the truth is more complicated—Bowie was working on a sequel to Blackstar and a musical, The Spectator, set in 18th-century London, even as his illness advanced. The album’s songs—“I Can’t Give Everything Away,” “Girl Loves Me,” “Lazarus,” and the title track—bristle with allusions to mortality, but also crackle with adventure. “Whenever I play Blackstar, which I do every so often, I reconnect to my initial reaction, my excitement at hearing something unexpected,” writes Chris DeVille. “It’s not a morbid meditation, it’s playful as it is profound.”
Even the technical details of the album’s release tell a story. The title track was trimmed to 9:58 to meet iTunes’ requirements, a minor footnote in a project that otherwise defied commercial conventions. The original unedited version has yet to surface, but, as DeVille notes, “The version that ushers in Blackstar feels finished, the overture to an album that retains a sense of wonder and urgency even as it fades into history.”
The legacy of Blackstar has only deepened over time. Its themes of transformation and acceptance resonate not only as Bowie’s farewell but as a final act of artistic self-reinvention. As Rosen observes, “On Blackstar, already a 21st-century classic, self-creation merges with the immutable substance of selfhood right at the moment of death, the terminal point of each and every earthly self and one of the few real commonalities linking an almost inexplicable creative freak like Bowie to the rank and file of the human race.”
This spirit of reinvention has inspired a generation of artists. Rosen draws parallels to Tyler, the Creator, who, like Bowie, crafts new personas and pushes the boundaries of pop music. Yet, Rosen argues, the true inheritors of the Bowian spirit are few and far between. “It is a flaw in current rock music that it has so few extravagant self-creators left, and no real inheritors of the Bowian spirit of limitless exploration through music.”
On January 8, 2026, Bowie’s daughter Lexi Jones, now 25, posted a touching tribute on Instagram, sharing childhood photos and a homemade birthday cake for her father. “Da big 79 today. Happy birthday pops, miss ya!” she wrote, prompting an outpouring of affection from fans worldwide. Lexi, who has largely stayed out of the public eye, is now forging her own creative path, mindful of but not defined by her father’s towering legacy.
Bowie’s influence remains incalculable. He challenged conventions of gender, identity, and artistry, leaving behind a catalog that continues to surprise and inspire. As the world remembers Bowie on what would have been his 79th birthday, the sense of loss is palpable—but so too is the enduring power of his vision. The Starman may be gone, but his music and spirit are still very much alive, orbiting somewhere just beyond the stars.
