David Bowie died on January 10 five years ago.
On the 8th he had turned 69, the same day "Black Star", his artistic testament, was released.
For the fans that succession was a shock: few knew that one of the most revolutionary geniuses in rock history had been a hopeless patient for some time, but on that sad day in 2016 everyone understood that that farewell had been prepared as the last act of an artistic adventure that changed the world.
And, in some respects, the shock was even greater, when, listening to the notes of "Black Star", an album of lacerating depth, we were faced with the masterpiece of a man who has decided to tell his own end by canceling in the most definitive way the boundary between art and life.
David Robert Jones, the name under which he was registered in Brixton, South London, proved that a rock star can be much more than a rocker and something other than a star.
For example, an alien fallen to Earth called Ziggy Stardust who made the world discover the idea that a musician could at the same time be a figure who, far ahead of his time, brought into play a brazen sexual ambiguity and at the same time mixed with Cabaret. Berlin, the Kabuki theater, Lindsay Kemp's Mime.
An artist other than Bowie probably would have lived his whole life on Ziggy's laurels, but he decided to free himself from that cumbersome alter ego to first assume the identity of the Thin White Duke, the White Duke launched to conquer America but a slave to cocaine and then plunged into the Berlin of the mid-1970s to produce the famous Berlin Trilogy with one of the many shocking stylistic twists.
It is impressive to think how many things David Bowie was, that of "Let's Dance" and that of the very hard rock and commercial failure of Thin Machine, a crooner with unparalleled charisma, a brilliant author, a style icon, an explorer of sounds, an actor, an artist who, after all, paid little attention to the market but earned mountains of money thanks to the Bowie Bonds, an unprecedented financial operation, a painter linked to German Expressionism, an actor with an important curriculum consisting of films like "The Man Who Fell to Earth", "The Last Temptation of Christ", "Miriam wakes up at midnight", "Furyo", "All in one night", "Labirinth" and who has allowed himself a self-deprecating cameo in "Zoolander" and an appearance in Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige".
A unique, enlightened character, driven by an inextinguishable curiosity and an unstoppable desire for knowledge, almost as if to communicate that change and the discovery of the new are a method for putting order in chaos.
David Bowie was and continues to be one of the most influential artists in the history of popular culture, as demonstrated by the exhibition created by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
One of the first to understand that Rock'n'Roll could be much more than the music that announced to the world the birth of young people as a social category, to understand that it was possible to go beyond borders and conventions, that around music he could build a real universe of signs.
Even death was transformed into something beyond its ineluctable truth.
When, faced with the last act, David Duncan Jones and David Bowie are once again the same person.