THE reverberations from the death of some well-known individuals are an interesting phenomenon.

Those who did not know the dead person except as a media construct experience a very real and at times overpowering sense of loss. When Princess Diana died in 1997 you could almost feel it — an unnerving experience and there wasn’t social media around at the time to blame that on.

It seems that the majority of people of a certain age in the overdeveloped world are being carried along by an irresistible current of emotion and are, for the moment at least, incapable of serious reflection.

With David Bowie, the intensity of feeling is all the more unnerving because of the way that all those grieving knew or could ever hope to know him via photos, films, videos or recordings remains with them.

With the exception of live concerts, those means of “knowing” him and feeling connected to his persona are as real as they were when he was alive.

Bowie was even so obliging as to spend his last few months making an album to mark his passing and in so doing — as some have breathlessly claimed — “made a performance of his own death.”

Was Bowie acting a part or did he really believe in the pop star myth he’d created?

Certainly that myth glosses over aspects of Bowie that his fans and PR retinue would rather see consigned to the rubbish bin of history, one being his alleged underage sex activities in his early career.

I don’t know if the reports of 26-year-old Bowie having sex with underage girls as young as 13 are true. To my knowledge, he never denied it.

He was immersed in a milieu that was pushing the boundaries of what was permissible and the way that some have responded to those allegations suggests that the abuse of girls barely out of puberty by rich and powerful men is excusable if those rich and powerful men are cultural heroes.

Of course, the unhinging effects on young men of drugs, fame and involvement in an exploitative industry which, with the aid of the parasitic enterprises that feed off it, encourages and condones hedonistic, self-indulgent and abusive behaviour have been — and still are — all too evident.

That may help explain but it doesn’t excuse and anyone who wants to forgive their heroes for fucking impressionable young girls needs to ask themselves whether they are prepared to extend that forgiveness to all powerful, rich men who choose to have sex with girls or boys barely out of puberty — Gary Glitter and Jimmy Savile spring to mind.

Anyone involved with the anti-racist movement in the 1970s would have been aware of the poisonous effects of anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions and when massively influential “working-class heroes” like Bowie and Eric Clapton — a musician I admired — publicly flirted with fascism, I didn’t see it as just some youthful, drug-fuelled high-jinks.

Clapton’s public statements in support of Enoch Powell at a time when the extreme right was working hard to recruit kids who admired and were influenced by musicians like him, added fuel to the flames.

The same applies to Bowie’s flirtation with fascism, downplayed by his supporters, and which he attributed to the effects of drugs and his immersion in the “Thin White Duke” persona. That may well have been a post-hoc rationalisation.

If I’d really liked Bowie’s music I might have forgiven him his early transgressions as it was clear that he did “move on” and expressed regret about at least some of them.

For all his theatrical flair and gender bending, Bowie’s music was firmly lodged in the mainstream.

He was a hugely successful and prolific writer and singer of pop songs, created for a popular audience and within the formats imposed by the corporations which produce and market them as hugely profitable commodities.

But he didn’t have a great voice and only people who have never listened to really great voices could think that he did.

What he did have was the ability to catch a musical wave as it was forming and ride it so well and so confidently that he was widely credited with being the originator of it. And he knew when to get off a spent wave and catch another that was forming.

In pursuit of the fame and money that, within the music industry, only pop stardom brings, he voraciously devoured influences and ideas from others. Lindsay Kemp’s mine, kabuki, African-American rock and soul, “krautrock,” the Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, Marc Bolan and glam rock — Bowie borrowed and synthesised, presenting it as his own with flair and aplomb.

And ruthlessness. An astute and calculating businessman — he amassed a fortune reputedly worth £135 million — he took advice in 1997 on how to benefit from the changes the internet was about to force on the music industry, issuing “Bowie Bonds” which sold the rights to the royalties on his songs for 10 years.

If David Bowie’s last album was indeed a “final gift to his fans” then he could have given it away. His estate could well afford it but, as with any celebrity, Bowie’s death is a very rich harvest — from sales of the newly released album and the back catalogue, the making of TV specials, the writing of books and the staging of memorial concerts.

Behind all the glitz, the glamour, the hype and the crocodile tears are cold and often pretty ugly commercial realities.

The popular music business is all about money and the edifice rests on the shaky foundation of novelty. Bowie’s greatest gift was his ability to keep being novel.

Occasionally novelty and true genius combine but, very often in the music business, the truly gifted go largely unremarked, uncelebrated and unrewarded while the mediocre are elevated to the level of greatness and rewarded beyond any sensible measure.

This is not to say Bowie was mediocre but to ask: was he truly that great and will his output stand the test of time?

Fame, fortune and talent are not always congruent and fame is a precarious and often ephemeral thing.

Talking to an acquaintance about Bowie’s death, I was musing that given Bowie’s love of wordplay, his Thin White Duke persona was both a nod to both the dapper, white, fascist Duke of Windsor and another dapper but black duke — Ellington.

She looked bemused and said she’d never heard of the Duke of Wellington.

• This article is an edited extract from the blog Te Whare Whero. A full version is available at tewharewhero.blogspot.co.uk