OMG I see it! Totally a different guy. First Paul McCartney and now this. And I’m telling you, they’re not the only ones.  I would now like to advance a theory I have been nourishing since the 1980s. I kept silent then because I knew what was good for me, but I’ll stay silent no longer. Justice must be done. I posit that the real David Bowie died during the recording of the song Let’s Dance and was replaced with an impostor to finish out the song and then continue on in his place in life. I’m sure the replacement was the label’s idea so it could salvage the massive investment it had made in him. But the bigger question is who was behind his death. Go and play the video, but pay no attention to the visuals - the proof is in the audio (even back then they could work wonders with trick photography, lighting, and make-up. Did you see Labyrinth? OK then).  You can tell something is really starting to go wrong at 1:50 into the song. He’s not feeling right. He’s winded. He’s weak. He sounds a bit dizzy and disoriented (close your eyes here and listen). But he’s a showman and he resolves to push on through. “I’ll just ride this out until it passes,” he tells himself, barely able to remember the words to the song. But as he continues to be racked with punishing waves of nausea, you can hear the life draining out of him. The musicians and back-up singers continue on, oblivious, chalking it up to his usual eccentricity. “Let’s all indulge Mr. Smug Bigshot Artist while he prances,” thought Tico, the rhythm guitarist. “God, what a ham,” muttered Bruce in the sound booth. At 2:18 he tries to shake it off, but you can tell he’s in pain. He’s in seeerious pain. He then tries to rally, a return to form almost. But at 2:40 he embarks on the last two sentences anybody would ever hear him say (or maybe it was a compound sentence - it’s hard to tell). At 2:45 he succumbs to the agony and that’s it. Listen to that pain! His final cry of horror. Dead dead dead, right there in the studio. At this point the techs in the booth notice that he’s down, and he’s not just being dramatic like they thought. Recording stops. The wooden block player is the first one to him, because he’s really not doing much in the song, but soon the whole crew swarms around him as the horn section performs tandem CPR. It’s no use. He is GONE. A silence descends thickly on the studio and for about five heartbeats nobody moves. Bowie’s taut face is snarled in its horrid final rictus, the sheen of cold sweat forming rivulets that drain across his now sickly greenish waxlike skin. CPR wasn’t going to do anything for him - HE WAS POISONED. Everyone could see it. Nobody goes from hale and sexy to dead and green that quickly, that horribly, unless poisoned. But who did it and why? That’s where I remain stumped. Somebody in that studio knew. Maybe multiple somebodies. Somebody knew and to this day nobody’s talking. And what could anyone have said to the musicians and sound engineers to get them to go back and finish the song, having seen what they had just seen? It was something powerful. It had to have been the kind of power you don’t oppose if you know what’s good for you. Because they did finish recording the song. Only somebody else was doing the singing in that final part, someone everybody knew wasn’t David Bowie.  The guy from the label had to have locked those studio doors and told everyone the way it had to go down. Somebody had to have dug up a Bowie impersonator with lightning speed and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He gave up his old life that day and became what he’d always wanted to be: David Bowie. He looked just like Bowie, of course, but he even sang pretty well. Not well enough to fool a certain young schoolboy tuning in through the little radio his grandma had given him for Christmas the year before, however. At 3:13 in the song, that boy noted the wild diversion from the singer’s smooth and even style from earlier in the song. PUT on YAH RED shoes and DANCE the blues. Up and down, all over the place. Definitely not Bowie. And nice try at 3:21, but it was evident he was really forcing it, slurring and straining to sound authentic. “They threw in a guitar solo there at the end to try and cover it up and distract us,” thought the little boy. “Can nobody else hear this? Did nobody else notice this? A different man finishes this song than starts it! What has happened to David Bowie?!” Something wicked was at work. That much he knew. Too dangerous for a child to poke around in. So he waited. Well today that astute young boy is me. Today I call out the impostor who continues to call himself David Bowie. Come clean, you rat! What did you jerks do with the body, eh? What did you tell his family? Who got paid off? What was the going rate for conspiracy? (adjusted for inflation, please). Who did the deed? I want a name. Who was the Judas who slipped the poison in his slim white drink between sessions? Let us end this once and for all, David Bowie Impersonator. You can still redeem yourself, can still die with a clean conscience. But not unless you come clean. We know you didn’t kill him. We know you loved him. We know you loved him enough that you agonized over the guilt of stepping into his shoes when he had been so cruelly cut down. We know that love, that anger, that guilt drove you to sniff out the killer. You couldn’t have just left it alone. Is that person alive today, still holding the sword of Damocles over your head? Or did a certain someone else present in the studio that day later meet a quiet and untimely end? Come clean. Let this end. Let it all end. Join me Buzzfeeders. Alone I’m just some nut with a conspiracy theory but together we are justice. I know I risk my life by publicly dredging this story back up from the swamp of mousse where it lay entombed these many years, but they can’t kill us all. Join me! Keep this story alive! Avennnnge Bowieeeee.