David Bowie^†

One Top of the Pops performance in July 1972 accomplished what three prior albums couldn't: orange mullet, androgynous makeup, Bowie's arm draped over guitarist Mick Ronson's shoulder on national television. He'd released 'Space Oddity' in 1969 and spent three years circling without breaking. Ziggy Stardust, partly based on a mentally ill singer Bowie spotted on Carnaby Street who claimed to be an alien, gave him the vehicle. He came out as bisexual to the press the same year, five years after the UK decriminalized homosexuality. Nobody had a category for him yet.

Blackstar dropped on January 8, 2016, his 69th birthday. He'd recorded it in secret with a jazz ensemble he put together from the New York underground, and kept his illness completely private until the day he died. The album's lyrics about departure landed differently once everyone knew he'd been dying while writing them. Blackstar won five Grammys posthumously. He'd turned down a CBE in 2000 and a knighthood in 2003, so the posthumous awards carried an odd weight. He designed it as an exit statement. It worked.

His mismatched eyes weren't heterochromia. Both were blue. A fight at age 15 over a girl left his left pupil permanently dilated, and the friend who threw the punch, George Underwood, later designed artwork for several of his albums. They stayed close for decades. In 1997, he launched BowieNet, his own internet service provider, which ran until 2012. His 1977 Christmas duet with Bing Crosby exists because he refused to sing 'Little Drummer Boy' and demanded something else be written on the spot. It was Crosby's last single.

Fans gathered outside his SoHo apartment within hours, and the German Foreign Ministry tweeted 'Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes.' A Carnegie Hall memorial concert that had been booked months in advance sold out almost immediately once the news broke. Lady Gaga performed a tribute medley at the 2016 Grammy Awards. Spotify logged a 2,000% increase in streams the day he died.