David Bowie was born David Robert Jones on January 8, 1947, in Brixton, South London. From an early age, he was captivated by music, art, and the idea of reinvention. He was the sort of person who could sketch all afternoon, play saxophone in a school band, and lose himself in American rock & roll records late into the night. In the mid 1960s, after dabbling in various R&B and pop groups, he decided that “David Jones” wasn’t distinctive enough - especially with The Monkees’ Davy Jones suddenly in the charts. He rebranded himself as David Bowie, taking the name from the American frontiersman Jim Bowie’s famous knife. Reinvention would become his signature. For a few years, success eluded him. Then, in 1969, he struck a chord with “Space Oddity”, a haunting song about an astronaut drifting through the void, released just as the world watched the Apollo 11 moon landing. It was the first sign of Bowie’s gift for catching the cultural moment. The 1970s saw him explode into a series of transformations that made him one of the most iconic figures in music history. First came Ziggy Stardust, the alien rock star with flame-red hair and a taste for glitter, who led Bowie’s “The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars” (1972) into glam rock legend. Then came the plastic soul of “Young Americans” (1975), the stark experimentalism of the Berlin Trilogy, recording with Brian Eno (“Low”, “Heroes”, “Lodger”), and the swaggering showmanship of “Diamond Dogs” and “Station to Station”. Bowie wasn’t just a musician - he was a cultural shapeshifter. He blurred lines between genders, mixed theatre and rock, and embraced new technologies before they became trends. On stage, he was magnetic; off stage, he was thoughtful, private, and always one step ahead of the crowd. In the 1980s, he reached peak mainstream fame with “Let’s Dance” (1983) and its string of global hits, but he kept reinventing, from his work with the band Tin Machine to his genre-blending albums in the 1990s and 2000s. Bowie was also an accomplished actor, appearing in films like “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (1976) and “Labyrinth” (1986). Even in his final years, he refused to fade quietly. In 2016, just two days after his 69th birthday, Bowie released “Blackstar”, a bold, jazz-infused album filled with cryptic, haunting lyrics. The world soon understood it as a parting gift - Bowie died on January 10, 2016, after an 18-month battle with cancer that he had kept secret. David Bowie left behind not just a body of music, but a philosophy of constant reinvention, fearless creativity, and the belief that identity is fluid - something you can write, paint, and perform into existence. He didn’t just ride the waves of pop culture; he made them.