ashes to ashes.

a moment of clarity.

words.

"This was not supposed to happen. Ever. Because he had been so many people over the course of his grand and immense career, it was inconceivable that he wouldn’t continue to be many people—a myriad of folks in a beautiful body who would reflect times to come, times none of us could imagine but that he could. He always got to the unknown first.

...Bowie’s rendition of “Foot Stompin’ ” was the artist’s tribute to the Flares, a doo-wop group that recorded in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties. Back then, a young David Robert Jones thrilled to the records his father brought home, including those made by that outrageous, vulnerable showman Little Richard. When he heard “Tutti Frutti,” Bowie said once, he knew he’d heard God. Little Richard’s uncommon look and feeling were part of what he meant to project in this common world. Bowie, too. He was an Englishman who was sometimes afraid of Americans and fame but, on his final record, could sing “Look at me / I’m in heaven” as a way of describing where he wanted to end up, maybe, but definitely where Bowie—that outsider who made different kids feel like dancing in that difference, and who had a genius for friendship, too—had lived since we knew him."

THE NEW YORKER: Postscript: David Bowie, 1947-2016