The Complete David Bowie

As he said in 1976, “The minute you know you’re on safe ground, you’re dead. You’re finished. It’s over. The last thing I want is to be established.”

By contrast, Bowie always delighted in presenting a moving target. Making no attempt to conceal his own short attention span and his assimilation of new enthusiasms, he constantly challenged our complacency as consumers, writing and rewriting the parameters of his work on the tabula rasa he called David Bowie.

Bowie may not have invented glam, but the point is that he conquered it.