Remembering the Normcore David Bowie
HBO’s <em>The Last Five Years </em>examines how the star unraveled—and recemented—his own legend in his final phase.
It's a tribute to David Bowie’s mystique that the most striking footage of is of him on stage in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans. Taken from a 2004 stop in Germany on the aptly named Reality Tour, this was, in fact, the image Bowie left the world with: He collapsed after the show, and would never play a full set again. Yet the visuals to be popularly enshrined after Bowie’s death in 2016 were of the more fantastical sort. Aladdin Sane and his lightning bolt became the memorial. Normcore Bowie didn’t.
