The editors at North Dakota Quarterly have joined the world in mourning the death and celebrating the life of David Bowie. We defer to NPR’s Terry Gross in our reflection on Bowie’s achievement as both a musician and a cultural phenomenon.  

“We wanted to manufacture a new kind of vocabulary,” Mr. Bowie told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2003. “And so the so-called gender-bending, the picking up of maybe aspects of the avant garde and aspects of, for me personally, of things like the Kabuki theater in Japan and German expressionist movies, and poetry by Baudelaire . . . it was a pudding of new ideas, and we were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders the idea that we were creating the 21st century in 1971.”

For the entire interview, go here.

Be sure to check out Bowie’s last album Blackstar. The title single from the album can be heard here.  

And check out a brief reflection on Bowie and “Philadelphia Sound” here.