David Bowie was thinking of dying in late 1971. His father had died, and his brother had been committed to a mental asylum. "I'm frightened by the total goal / Drawing to the ragged hole / And I ain't got the power anymore / No, I ain't got the power anymore." We can safely assume he got it back. Possibly at the very moment he identified its absence, in the act of writing the magnificently cold-hearted song in question: Quicksand, off the album Hunky Dory, in which Bowie flirts with fascism before allowing himself to be elegantly deflowered by the vacuum cleaner of Nietzschean oblivion. In the chorus, he offers some bracing self-help advice to the denizens of a rotting counterculture: "Don't believe in yourself, don't deceive with belief / Knowledge comes with death's release."Quicksand was godlessness for grown-ups - an inadvertent riposte to John Lennon's Imagine, that happy-clappy jingle for reductionist atheism released two months before Hunky Dory hit the airwaves.Bowie was smarter than all the Beatles combined, with room to spare in his cognitive space capsule to throw in half the Stones. He was a technically supreme musician - but via the Trojan horse of song he was also a sci-fi novelist, actor, cultural historian, fashion guerrilla, sexual revolutionary, lyrical pornographer, satirist, conceptual artist and terrestrial alien.None of his peers could compete with the self-transcending scope of his imagination, his on-board factory of personae, styles, planets - even after many of them were upgraded by the mythologising fairydust that follows a glamorously premature death.Compared to Bowie, Lennon is a naïve, whiny sentimentalist. Compared to Bowie, Jim Morrison is a glorified campus stoner. Compared to Bowie, Leonard Cohen is a narcissistic groaner. Compared to Bowie, Jimi Hendrix is a fader who couldn't handle his drugs.Only Bob Dylan can match Bowie's lyrical genius, if not his vocal polish and generic agility. But whose house party would you rather go to? Would Dylan have teased himself as stylishly as Bowie did in Ricky Gervais's Extras - writing a masterful spoof of his own songwriting?He was lucky, Bowie. He would have been saddled with his stodgy birth name, David Jones, had the '60s fame of Davy Jones of the Monkees not compelled him to adopt a stage surname. As a schoolboy, a clumsy playground klap from a friend permanently dilated one of his pupils; enter the spookily galactic peepers of Ziggy Stardust.And he certainly didn't shirk the hedonistic workload that comes to rock divinity - he gave both heroin and cocaine years of patient effort, and slept with literally thousands of girls (and boys) in his 20s and 30s. But then he grew gradually bored with sin and morphed into a beautiful old emperor of the thinking world, with his beautiful empress Iman. He seemed pickled by the formaldehyde of untormented, grown-up genius. Death would be too pedestrian, too banal an instruction to accept.But he accepted. He left us a record, one as fearless as any he has made, and fell elegantly into the ragged hole...