It's strange—what use is innovations if no one uses them? Why is the use of innovations "theft" instead of "tribute"? Isn't the entire point of innovations to expand the toolkit?
there is a great Bowie quote on precisely this, it goes something like "It doesn't matter who did something first. What matters is who did something
second"
another version of that would be - about getting a party started - that it doesn't matter who is the first person to step on the dancefloor, what really makes the difference is the second one.
the history of music - and art - possibly science and technology too actually - is full of lonely innovations that just sit there, unadopted, not taken up, of interest now only to scholars who made a specialty of locating lost innovators and turning into a field of study
i suppose Bowie is a bit like Steve Jobs, didn't come up with anything himself, other people had the all the breakthrough ideas first (various proto-Ipods for instance long preexisted the iPod) but he put it all together in this irresistibly consumable series of packages, knew how to hire talent, knew how to delegate, put the overall finish to the product etc
that said i would continue to insist that the melodies are unique and there is some cry of longing in there that gives some kind of edge of realness to the artifice - a sort of soul-less soul - precisely the emptiness of the English suburban petit-bourgeois looking for things to fill the existential void - that's the chase that takes him through the drugs, science fiction, the fame quest, the magic, Germany in the 1920s, etc etc - whatever he can find to fill up his hollowness and take him out of himself, to some absolute elsewhere
his relationship with black music is the classic English one - the soul-less drawn to the soul-ful