David Bowie was a time traveler from our hyper-personalized future: the star who made it cool to be a freak.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Culture and Reviews - In memoriam

DAVID BOWIE was weird, even for a rock star.

From his first burst of fame in the late 1960s, when he hit the big time with a song narrated by a barely-keeping-it-together astronaut, he acted like an emissary from our increasingly hyper-personalized future, goading us to try new and different looks, styles, and thoughts. By the time he died January 10 at the age of 69, we had pretty much caught up to him, which is as great a tribute as can be imagined. The world we live in is much less formal, buttoned-down, and uniform than it was before Bowie strutted onstage as the mythic rock star Ziggy Stardust, "with screwed-up eyes and screwed-down hairdo, like some cat from Japan."

Like Bob Dylan, Bowie was a relentless shape-shifter and a persona-generator. Where Dylan mostly veers back in time to become a hobo folkie, fire-and-brimstone preacher, and desiccated crooner (among other identities), Bowie always looked toward the science-fiction future. Over dozens of records and film and TV appearances, he was constantly evolving, mutating, and--maybe most important of all--obviously enjoying himself.

He was an Ovid, forever metamorphosing: from folkie David Jones (his given name) to space-rock weirdo to ambisexual glam monarch to soul man to Berlin degenerate to "Thin White Duke" to MTV pop master to elder rock god. He revealed his final iteration only days before he died, releasing Blackstar, an album that mixes jazz, hip hop, and 17th-century theater. (One track is called "Tis a Pity She Was a Whore.")

Some of the incarnations were much more successful than others--in the '80s, Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs slagged Bowie, with some justice, as "a boring old fart"--but the point isn't that they all worked. It's that he constantly tried different things yet managed to remain unmistakably Bowie. In this, he exemplified what the anthropologist Grant McCracken calls "plenitude": the quickening "speciation" of human social types. The postwar period and especially the last decades of the 20th century, McCracken argues, saw a vast profusion of the sorts of people walking the streets of our cities and towns.

"Teens," he wrote in 1997, "were once understood in terms of those who were cool and those who weren't. But in a guided tour of mall life a few years ago, I had 15 types of teen lifestyle pointed out to me, including heavy-metal rockers, surfer-skaters, b-girls, goths, and punks. Each of these groups sported their own fashion and listened to...