Watch 50 David Bowie Music Videos Spanning Five Decades of R…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

Each of us has a dif­fer­ent idea of when, exact­ly, the six­ties end­ed, not as a decade, but as a dis­tinct cul­tur­al peri­od. Some have a notion of the “long six­ties” that extends well into the sev­en­ties; if pressed for a spe­cif­ic final year, they could do worse than point­ing to 1972, when David Bowie made his epoch-shift­ing appear­ance as Zig­gy Star­dust, backed by the Spi­ders from Mars, on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. It was also the year he released music videos for “Space Odd­i­ty,” the sin­gle that had begun to make his name at the time of the moon land­ing in 1969, and “Jean Genie,” the first sin­gle from Aladdin Sane, an album inspired in part by the debauch­ery of the Amer­i­can Zig­gy tour he under­took after blast­ing off into star­dom.

Hav­ing strug­gled in the six­ties to find a suit­able iden­ti­ty and audi­ence, the young Bowie devel­oped an unusu­al­ly strong under­stand­ing of not just the music indus­try, but also the cul­ture itself. One era was giv­ing way to anoth­er, and nobody knew it bet­ter than he did. When all those hir­sute fig­ures in beards and den­im, singing with osten­ta­tious earnest­ness about love and free­dom, dis­ap­peared, who would replace them?

In Bowie’s vision, the next phase belonged to clean-shaven, made-up androg­y­nes in flam­boy­ant design­er cos­tumes work­ing grand, some­times sci­ence fic­tion­al, and often inscrutable themes into what would strike con­cert­go­ers as almost com­plete the­atri­cal expe­ri­ences — and he would be the first and fore­most among them.

Bowie, in oth­er words, made the sev­en­ties his own, oper­at­ing on his knowl­edge of and instincts about the media envi­ron­ment of that decade and how images would be made in it. By that time, he’d seen too many flash­es in the pan of pop music to get com­pla­cent about his own prospects for endurance. The recep­tion of “Space Odd­i­ty” as a nov­el­ty song did its part to moti­vate him to come up with his bisex­u­al space-alien rock-star alter ego — and to moti­vate him to ter­mi­nate that per­sona on stage in 1973. A cou­ple of years before that, he had already sung of the impor­tance of changes, a kind of man­i­festo that would guide his career through all the decades that remained. Nev­er would Bowie adhere to a par­tic­u­lar musi­cal or aes­thet­ic style for very long, an abid­ing ten­den­cy vivid­ly on dis­play in this playlist of 50 music videos on his offi­cial YouTube chan­nel.

The expe­ri­ence of putting out music videos in the sev­en­ties placed Bowie well, espe­cial­ly com­pared to oth­er artists of his gen­er­a­tion, to make his mark on MTV in the eight­ies with a sta­di­um-ready hit like “Let’s Dance.” The nineties found him tak­ing the form in new direc­tions, as with the cinephili­cal­ly astute video for “Jump They Say” and the dar­ing­ly action-free visu­al treat­ment of the reflec­tive “Thurs­day’s Child” (from the album Hours…, which began as the sound­track to the com­put­er game Omikron: The Nomad Soul). Apart from this playlist, his chan­nel also con­tains music videos for his lat­er songs from the two-thou­sands and twen­ty-tens, from “New Killer Star” to “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” to “Black­star” — the nature of star­dom hav­ing been a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion since the begin­ning, even though he kept on chang­ing to the very end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch David Bowie Star in His First Film Role, a Short Hor­ror Flick Called The Image (1967)

Watch David Bowie Per­form “Star­man” on Top of the Pops: Vot­ed the Great­est Music Per­for­mance Ever on the BBC (1972)

David Bowie Per­forms “Life on Mars?” and “Ash­es to Ash­es” on John­ny Carson’s “Tonight Show” (1980)

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Trib­ute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphav­ille, Welles’ The Tri­al & Kubrick’s 2001

Watch David Bowie’s New Video for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” With Til­da Swin­ton

When Bowie & Jagger’s “Danc­ing in the Street” Music Video Becomes a Silent Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.