While this is not a round date, and as time goes on it becomes increasingly difficult to find ways to cherish David Bowie and acknowledge him with gratitude, with each calendar year marking a further departure from the day the singer passed away.
And note that we said "passed away" and not "returned to his planet" because Come - talented, successful, groundbreaking and one of a kind as he may be, was still a human being and not an alien, as many prefer to think.
Six years have passed since that awful morning, when an entire world mourned the passing of one of the most influential musicians in history, and quite a bit of text has been shed on the subject since. And here's a little more of it, to mark what is not a monumental date (some of us are starting to think from now on how to mark the tenth anniversary, but there is still time), but without a doubt a day worth mentioning and remembering an important artist who is no more.
In honor of this we have selected six cover versions of varying degrees of importance and familiarity, of artists who have been influenced by my introduction, or just wanted to give their own life to some of his works. Some of the covers are very famous, others are mostly known to connoisseurs, but all were made with the aim of celebrating the person, artist and phenomenon that Bowie had in his life.
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sixth place
The Smashing Pumpkins - "
Space Oddity
"
Admittedly, there is something pretentious about the decision to cover, of all the songs, David Bowie's breakthrough song from 1969, but it's not that Billy Corgan and his friends at Smashing Pumpkins were ever unpretentious.
In a performance from the SXSW Festival from 2013, the American ensemble paid tribute to Bowie, performing a loud and lead guitar of a song that some would claim is basically intimate, dark and lonely.
The contrast between Corgan's singing style and Bowie's in the original song gives the Pumpkins' "Space Oddity" a life of its own, a little less dark and a little more chaotic, in a performance that can sometimes slip into the noise and cacophony realms though, but that's the way it is when it comes to Quite a bit of passion.
Fifth place
White Stripes - "
Moonage Daydream
"
Quite a few of the artists who went to cover Bowie chose to do so for his more familiar works.
Of course, this often has commercial significance and history has shown quite a few times what a good cover can do for the career of an artist or a band.
But trust Jack and Meg White to choose from "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars", the singer's most iconic album, a song that actually doesn't get too many innovations.
"Moonage Daydream" was performed by members of the White Stripes duo even before they became a well-known band.
In fact, some claim that the video in front of you was shot back in 1997, a few years before the band became one of the most successful, appreciated and influential in the wave of rock revival of the early 2000s.
The White Stripes may be seen here in the very early stages of their careers, but the treatment they gave to the song, in which they took it from the glam rock districts to the noisy and mowing garage areas, proves they already had more of an idea about the sound that was going to lead them forward.
fourth place
Garbage - "
Starman
"
Another band that decided to jump head first and challenge, sorry, make a tribute to one of the more familiar songs in David Bowie's repertoire?
well yeah.
The band Garbage decided to renew "Starman" in 2018, as a sideline for the song "Destroying Angels" which came out as a stand-alone single, and it must be admitted that they did a good job at it.
Interestingly, the up-to-date production, distinctive voice and familiar singing style of soloist Shirley Manson compliments the original song, making it for four minutes what could easily have been just an original Garbage song.
Manson & Co.'s performance was recorded as part of a tribute broadcast to the late singer organized by radio host Howard Stern and Bowie's producer and longtime partner, Tony and Siconti.
But the band and members of the band found it so successful that they decided to include it in the deluxe version of the band's seventh album, "No Gods No Masters".
"We decided to do a cover version of 'Starmen' because Bowie was a star man who blew our heads off," the band said in a statement.
Third place
Geva Alon - "
Modern Love
"
When Geva Alon released "The Wall of Sound" in 2007, his second solo album, he was already a well-known figure in Israeli music, thanks to his membership in the late band Flying Baby. The musician has just begun to mark himself as one of the most prominent names in the Israeli indie-folk-rock scene (which experienced a renaissance in those days, thanks to a wave of artists who have done wonders in the fields of the genre), and he is considered one of its most prominent princes. Geva Alon succeeded most accurately in bringing the Americana to Israel.
But not only the influences of American musicians were there, and in that second and successful album also hid a cover of "Modern Love," one of Bowie's more danceable songs, by virtue of his dance eighties.
Geva Alon took the same rhythmic song and gave it a calm and melancholy acoustic treatment, which breathed new and completely different life into the song.
This is one of the most successful covers in Israeli music to date, which entered Galgalatz's coveted playlist and also starred in the promo of a particular cable company.
For many, it was a soundtrack to that winter, heralding the rise of the great Israeli indie wave.
second place
Oasis - "Heroes"
It would not really surprise anyone to hear that just as chords and lines from the Beatles asked, Oasis used to glean influences from other legendary musicians from British history. This is a band that has made a career out of war also between elements from songs by the Rolling Stones, De Ho, The Stone Roses and many others, and as requested, David Bowie is on this honorable list. But towards the end of the nineties, as they usually do for artists they really like, the Gallagher brothers made a conscious tribute to my arrival, in the form of a cover that not many are familiar with but definitely deserves to be included in this list.
This is a cover version of the iconic "Heroes", which appeared as a cover of the single "D'You Know What I Mean?"
Which was released in the summer of 1997, at the height of the band's success.
It was the first song from the band's third album "Be Here Now", and it marked the end of a long period of anticipation since the band became the most successful in the world in some years, after the release of the album "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?"
Hit the hits.
Alongside the single was also this cover, which actually turned "Heroes" into another oasis anthem full of dirt, distortion and a youthful spirit.
First Place
Nirvana - "
The Man Who Sold the World"
David Bowie's album "The Man Who Sold the World" released in 1970 did not exactly conquer the world by storm. The record's theme song did not come out as a single (it appeared as a sidekick in the reissue of "Space Oddity" in 1973) nor was it considered an important, founding or overly successful song by the British musician. Until 1974, when the Scottish singer Lulu gave him a cover version that reached the third and most respectable place in the British singles chart and made him more familiar to the general public. In 1982, the Scottish band Mead Jur also renewed it, and it is clear that Scots tend to like this particular song, for some reason.
But the performance that made "The Man Who Sold the World" truly familiar on a mainstream level was the one they gave him in 1993 Nirvana, in their unplugged show that would become legendary over the years.
Unlike other artists of the time, who performed their original works on MTV in original acoustic, abstract and thin versions, Nirvana did not feel the need to fill theirs with their familiar hits.
Instead they introduced themselves in the softest and most subtle version their fans had known up until then, and covered songs by artists who influenced them, like the Meat Puppets and Born Without.
Among these and the original songs is also this song, from an album that Kurt Cabin rated in his personal diaries in 45th place out of his 50 favorite albums.
The following year Cobain put an end to his life, and in 1995 the unplugged show came out on records and CDs.
"The Man Who Sold the World" was the lead single from it, with many of the '90s kids exposed to a song that made no noise or aroused interest a quarter of a century before.
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