The man who heard the future first

Bowie left planet Earth ten years ago today. Ten long years sans David. An age of scary monsters (and super creeps). What would the man who was afraid of Americans have made of 2026 and all the madmen who are selling the world?

Bowie had an uncanny ability to feel the pulse of culture. Gender bending long before pronouns became elective. Berlin before techno. Curated identities before identity became performance. He understood that music, art, fashion, technology, and selfhood move together. You tug one thread, and the rest follows.

That instinct extended beyond sound and style. Bowie was one of the first artists to grasp the internet as a profound rewiring of culture. In the late 90s he spoke about the web dissolving authorship, destabilising meaning, collapsing the distance between creator and audience. At the time it sounded abstract.

Art was the constant. Bowie drew from art brut, modernism, expressionism, theatre, conceptual art, and literature the ideas he would use to stretch the boundaries of pop. He treated culture as something alive, porous, malleable. His studio process mirrored this. Oblique Strategies, cut-up texts, invented characters, broken storylines. Creativity constantly courting accidents.

Where are we now? I suspect he’d have been fascinated by our anxious age. He would have faced the strange. He would have channelled our collective disquiet and turned it into something deranged and beautiful. Stars are never sleeping.