As you say, he ages well, except for his molesting young girls in the '70s. There's at least two 15 year olds that admit having sex with him.
I'm a Bowie fan but it's difficult to separate those unacceptable acts from the great things he did.
Generally though, I don't think it's that hard to separate. Everyone is a combo of good and bad–that's how humans are. It's childish to expect otherwise. The fashion of denouncing historical figures by anachronistic standards is especially lame. No one who ever lived would pass such a test.
The related internet habit of saving the worst thing one can say about anybody in a big hash table [1] and then looking it up and repeating it every time the name is mentioned, is also a bit silly. What are we doing when we do that? certainly nothing interesting. But I rant. I take your point that "ages well" needs a qualifier!
Edit: I noticed something else that's mildly interesting—calling this "woke" is also an anachronism. The word that Bowie uses in the interview is "integration". That places him ideologically as a civil rights moderate, and of course wokeness (whatever it may mean) didn't exist yet.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Using your fame to exploit young, impressionable women is pretty awful and was awful 50 years ago. Even if "everyone did it!"
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Great job HN!
If you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to (almost) the end, you'll see that comments like this are explicitly off topic.
Where is this evidence he molested girls?
> There's at least two 15 year olds that admit having sex with him.
That in and of itself isn't molestation. Love the hyperbole though.
He raped two 15 year old girls. And likely many more that haven't came out publicly.