Super-creeps making spooky suggestions were always part of the scenery. Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs was a lurid end-times musical, a semi-canine crawl through the wasteland toward straight-up fascism: Someone to claim us, someone to follow / Someone to save us, some brave Apollo … We want you, Big Brother! After such sentiments, the entrance of that bony Übermensch the Thin White Duke—It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine … The European cannon is here!—should perhaps have been no surprise. The Duke was ultimately retired, with mumbled apologies from Bowie (“What I’m doing is theater, and only theater”), but his bellowing, bonkers rhetoric made a spectacular pop comeback in “China Girl,” from 1983’s Let’s Dance. Bowie’s persona for this, the biggest-selling album of his career, was in some respects the most confounding of all: blond and tanned, rich-guy smile and double-breasted suit, like a dancing arms dealer. “China Girl” is the imperialist highlight: Voice shaking with grandiosity, with the baritone madness from which only his little China girl can deliver him, the singer lays bare his mind. I stumbled into town / Just like a sacred cow / Visions of swastikas in my head / Plans for everyone! That these mighty, crazy lyrics may actually be the work of Iggy Pop, his co-writer on the song, matters not in the slightest—they’re classic Bowie.

The occult writer David Conway, musing upon the sorcerous aspirations he shared with William S. Burroughs, suggested that in a genuine confrontation with magical power, “the magician becomes less the knightly hero that slays the dragon than the damsel who succumbs to its depravity.” Which strikes me as a perfect description of Bowie’s relationship with modernity. He succumbed to it, he swooned before the confusion, even as, via his art, he enjoyed a spellbinding authority over it. His lyrics—sensational, provisional, barbed with ironies, the static or psychic noise of each successive identity-state—are the language of this paradox. There’s a brand new dance but I don’t know its name / That people from bad homes do again and again. These lines are from 1980’s “Fashion,” and while they are certainly about fashion—its contagion and its repetition, and its relation to class—they also, much more mysteriously and impressively, are fashion. They flick at your brain like some cruel street style. You hear Oberleutnant Bowie giving the orders—Fashion! Turn to the left / Fashion! Turn to the right—and you hear drummer Dennis Davis’s disco-giant stomp and the lacerating jags of Robert Fripp’s guitar, and you feel subliminally attacked by fashion itself.

A certain amount of frowning exegesis occurred in the wake of Blackstar, the bereaved-sounding, saxophonous album recorded during Bowie’s last illness and released two days before his death. What was the great artist telling us? Surely the lyrics expressed, or explored, “themes of mortality”? There was the song “Lazarus”—Look up here / I’m in heaven—and the title track itself: Something happened on the day he died. But “themes of mortality” is about as far as you’ll get. These are Bowie lyrics, cracks in the mirror, energy vectors that come and go. Blackstar became the final vanishing in a long and magical series of vanishings, aura yielding to aura and face drifting into face until (as in the “Lazarus” video) the funerary wrappings blank them all out. Ziggy Stardust is dispersed, Major Tom drifts out of range, and light shrinks to a black star, to the point of extinction.

That’s rock and roll. The great rock lyric is not a poem or a story, still less an idea. It’s a shard, a shrug, a shout, the leading edge of an instant. The best of Bowie’s lyrics are right there at the brink: Touch them and they blow apart. They are always dying. They will never die.