Commentary: how David Bowie stood out from baby-boom rock stars

“Most rock stars are about 70 years old these days,”wrote the music critic Kate Mossman on the death in 2013 of American musician Lou Reed, and she was not wrong. Fifty or so years after they began blazing a trail into a new world, we refuse to let go of the pop-cultural generation born in the 1940s, even though most of their creative lights have long since dimmed.

However, that is hardly the point. When the Rolling Stones played Glastonbury in 2013, I watched a crowd of twenty-somethings stand within eyeshot of the main stage, wait for a close-up of Mick Jagger on the big screens, take selfies, and then disappear again. Evidently, the performance was less something to immerse oneself in than a kind of living Mount Rushmore.

Even at 69, David Bowie was a bit different. Though he decisively arrived in the 1970s, he was essentially part of the same cohort as the icons of the 60s, and a collaborator and friend to Reed, Jagger and John Lennon. But whereas most surviving veterans of those decades had long since resigned themselves to becoming real-life monuments, he was restless and creative to the last.

One play of 2013’s supposed comeback album, The Next Day, was enough to prove that he still had lots to say. Moreover, Blackstar, apparently created in the knowledge he did not have long to live and released two days before he died on January 10, is a very good record indeed: exploratory, unsettling, the work of someone still ready to take inspired risks.

The achievements of the latter album informed the almost perplexed response to his death: how could an artist be in apparently full flow, just as he was taken away? But in much of what has been said, there has also been a clear sense of something historic afoot: the passing of one of the most pre-eminent members of a golden generation, confirming that no matter how much we hang onto them, they are now leaving us, at speed.