David Bowie

Punk, disco, rock, electronica, goth, glam, new wave, industrial . . . is there anything that David Bowie can’t do? Maybe we should ask, instead, if there’s anything he hasn’t done yet. While no one song could ever capture his essence, Bowie’s first hit single, 1969’s “Space Oddity,” with its larger-than-life canvas and life-and-death implications, hints at his seemingly intergalactic ambition. His unofficial farewell to glam, “Rebel Rebel,” reaches its perfectly manicured hand across the space-time continuum between the leather-jacket toughness of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” And perhaps only someone with Bowie’s outsized personality could ride herd — or be heard —over Texas blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan and Chic’s Nile Rodgers playing guitar on the same track, in the eerily robotic, but mesmerizing, post-disco beat of “Let’s Dance.”

In Next Steps, we’ll hear David en duet, collaborating with a certified rock legend, the godfather of Eurodisco, and a giant of

Pulling together sound and vision has always been a big part of Bowie’s career, so we’re saving you the aisle seat for a few of his cinematic collaborations. Mick Jagger and Bowie get a Motown groove on in their cover of Martha & The Vandellas’ “Dancing in The Street” for the 1985 Farm Aid concert. “Cat People (Putting Out Fire),” Bowie’s goth-cloaked collaboration with disco godfather producer Giorgio Moroder, features prominently in not one, but two films set poles apart: the 1982 remake of Cat People and Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 smash, Inglourious Basterds. And jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, who co-composed the score to the 1985 docu-drama The Falcon and the Snowman, collaborates with Bowie — who serves here both as vocalist and lyricist — in the brooding menace of “This Is Not America.”

In Deep Cuts, we’ll journey back to the ’60s, both in spirit and in sonics.

You can take David Bowie out of the ’60s, but — like many of his generation — you can’t take the ’60s out of him. We start off with a cover of the Easybeats’ 1966 hit “Friday On My Mind,” a tune voted the “Best Australian Song” of all time and rendered even more frenetic than the original by the soon-to-be-abandoned Spiders from Mars. Another confirmed shape-shifter with an uncontrollable appetite for novelty gets an appropriately eccentric tribute in the acoustic rocker “Andy Warhol,” which features some captivating dual-guitar interplay between Bowie and Mick Ronson. And fragments of Ray Davies and Burt Bacharach are scattered all over the deceptively simple landscape of “When I Live My Dream,” as Bowie brings a theatrical flair to an airy slice of a pop soufflé that would’ve collapsed in the hands of a less capable singer.

Just about anywhere you turn in rock ’n’ roll, David Bowie’s been there and done that . . . and usually before anyone else. Relentlessly reinventing himself with the manic energy of a freshly caged puma, he’s spent the last five decades setting trends rather than following them. From dancehall crooner to Thin White Duke to icy-hot dance demon to glitter-glam god, he’s barely paused at any one point long enough to let the rest of us catch up before jetting out on some new musical adventure. This level of hyperactivity would be remarkable for an artist in his twenties or even thirties; for him still to be at it when many of his peers have long since abandoned the dream — more than 25 albums into his career — is simply staggering.