Ashes to Ashes

David Bowie’s best singles sound no less eye-poppingly pop-savvy than they did in 1970, ’75 or ’82.

David Bowie, who died last Sunday after a long cancer battle at 69, was more than Ziggy, or the Thin White Duke, or any other incarnation over his long pop career: he was our Plastic Man. He looked at pop music as a mold that could be reshaped in any way he fancied. No wonder people wondered who the real Bowie was.

Bowie’s latest album release, “Blackstar,” was dropped on his 69th birthday, just before his death, it turns out. But recent years’ sped-up activity pointed toward a formal marshaling of his legacy, if not a slowing down of his output: there was the art retrospective “David Bowie Is” at Victoria and Albert Museum in London, gathering costumes and personal regalia from decades of touring and just being David Bowie; then there was a “comeback” album in 2013 (“The Next Day”) that remixed the cover art from “Heroes” for a meme-friendly generation.

Then came 2014’s “Nothing Has Changed,” an inspired “best of” compilation that gave us Bowie’s career in reverse: 60 songs starting with his most recent, counting backwards to his first singles as David Jones in the mid-‘60s, presenting the artist as a kind of Benjamin Button reborn as rock star.

It’s hard to impress Bowie’s impact upon a generation that never heard songs like Space Oddity or Fame (a deep-funk collab with John Lennon from ’75 that inspired Chic’s Nile Rodgers, among others) in their original context; or who were never empowered by his coming out as a bisexual at a time when that wasn’t really considered a career move; or never saw the surreal videos for Ashes to Ashes or Let’s Dance at a time (the ‘80s) when rock was hungry for a visual complement. He seized upon whatever was new — whether it was glam, funk, new wave — and fashioned it into weird, pop-friendly shapes like no other chameleon could. Bowie was the right guy in the right place at the right time so many times, it became painful to see him sort of slip into the shadows by the ‘90s.

But he did, after capping off his glam career with an “art trio” of recordings with Brian Eno at Berlin’s Hansa Studio (the kind of cool-ass move that most indie bands just love to emulate now); then arena rock touring success on the “Let’s Dance” album gave him a second ‘80s life with the MTV generation. By then, Bowie had done it all, so what was left but selling his songs on Wall Street (Bowie went I.P.O. in 2004), relative domesticity with wife Iman and kids, the occasional acting role (like his goofy cameo in Ricky Gervais’ Extras, playing a lounge lizard pianist), a satiric, though loving tribute by Flight of the Conchords (Bowie’s in Space), and a heap of albums that people will have to very patiently listen to over the next decades.

Possibly the biggest surprise on Bowie’s “Nothing Has Changed” anthology was the opening cut, Sue (or In a Season of Crime), an 11-minute drum ‘n’ bass tone poem that pointed toward the more cryptic art jazz that Bowie would release on his very last album, “Blackstar” (though in a shorter, more fuzzed-up version). Sue shows us that Bowie was leaning more towards the tonal music of Scott Walker in later years, now that all the pop cards had already been played.

A compilation like “Nothing Has Changed” keys us into the sort of inspired mash-ups that would later become commonplace in our remix era: with Lennon, then Freddie Mercury (a duet on Under Pressure), Mick Jagger (Dancing in the Streets), Pat Metheny (This Is Not America), to be followed by the legions who sat by his feet: James Murphy (Love Is Lost), Pet Shop Boys (Hallo Spaceboy) and edgy Trent Reznor (I’m Afraid of Americans).

Ah, but we’ll miss those hits: those hook-heavy songs like Starman, Rebel Rebel, Modern Love or Loving the Alien, because they showed us how pliant and resilient the Bowie brand was. In a sense, Bowie’s shallowness was his strength: it allowed him to pick up and master so many different styles that he was hardly ever in danger of repeating himself. Whether making love to his ego, or throwing darts at lovers’ eyes, he always keyed into the weird cha-cha-changes shifting around him. And now Bowie’s in space. Ashes to ashes, funk to funky.