On Bowie

Yesterday we lost one of the greats. A very special human who dazzled us with his music and inspired millions of weirdos to step into the sun.

The music press has responded with an outpouring of eulogies and hundreds of thousands of words recounting the amazing life of a true artist.

My earliest memory of Bowie is of a Christmas morning. I was five and the evening before my parents had taken me to a party. While we were out, burglars had smashed one of the windows in our mostly glass house. They took the Macintosh computer, my mother’s jewelry and my dad’s sound system. In the CD player was my beloved Beauty and the Beast soundtrack. I cried all day, devastated at the loss of the CD and the feeling that my home had been violated. Dad found a Bowie CD to play on something that had survived the robbery. It was the singles collection: 1969-1993. I remember the cover of a distorted yellow and red man, even now. The first track was “Space Oddity.” It moved me and as I danced around the house I forgot all about Beauty and the Beast. I wanted Bowie, not Belle from that day forward.

Here are some of the best things I’ve read about Bowie in the past 24 hours. Please add your own in the comments.

x Ally-Jane

Ann Powers for NPR

Adam Sweeting for The Guardian

Carl Wilson for Slate

Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone

An excerpt from Hugo Wilcken’s 33 1/3 on Low.

John Pareles for The New York Times

Joe Gross for the Austin American Statesman

Electric Literature shared David Bowie’s 100 favorite books

Ben Graham for The Quietus

Brian Eno shares an email he received from Bowie last week.