Blackstar ★ (2016)

 

The Bowie Project #31 - Blackstar (2016)

After an intensive career that saw incredibly highs and desperate lows, going from an alternative cult act to stadium superstar, through ambient dreamscape and drum and bass freakouts. You can call him Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, Thin White Duke, the Man Who Fell to Earth just to name a few. His career is one of the most long lasting, influential, and interesting in the entire music industry. When taken as a whole the work that he did adds up to a complete body of work that was consistently pushing the boundaries and daring to push pop culture past the point of what was considered appropriate or acceptable. This kid who was born in Brixton just two years after the end of World War II grew up with an innate need for success, a drive that saw him become on of the most recognizable figures on the planet, and a sense of showmanship and theatrically that would bleed through right up until the moment of his death. David Bowie’s life has been a performance that he allowed the world to witness and his last studio album Blackstar would bring all that came before together and act as a final farewell to his audience and a public he’s always had a complicated relationship with.

After his last album The Next Day was released in 2013 it looked as if Bowie was set to make a major comeback. Before that he had been essentially retired for ten years, he’d had a heart attack in 2004 and shifted his focus towards family life and living quietly. That album was released to huge critical acclaim and major excitement among fans for what was coming next but nothing came, there was no tour, there were no interviews, there was no comeback. In mid-2014 Bowie was diagnosed with liver cancer, a diagnosis that he kept private. He continued to work on music himself and in this time started work on some of the songs that would eventually find their way onto Blackstar.

After his diagnosis Bowie started work on something he had always wanted to do and that was get involved with musical theatre. At 21 Bowie drafted a rock opera called Ernie Johnson about a man throwing a suicide party, Ziggy Stardust was envisenged as a hipper Jesus Christ Superstar, and before making Diamond Dogs he tried to secure the rights to make a musical based on George Orwell’s 1984. Since the very beginning of his career theatricality had always been a factor, from the vaudeville antics of his debut record, to eccentric characterisation of Ziggy Stardust, to the boundary breaking artistry of his music videos, it is an area that suits him down to the ground. And speaking of down to the ground it would be The Man Who Fell to Earth that would serve as the inspiration for this musical project as he would write the music and lyrics to a sequel for the 1963 novel and film adaptation he starred in back in 1973. The result was Lazarus, a musical starring extraterrestrial Thomas Newton still on earth and still unable to die, still drinking, and haunted by a past love. The show follows Newton as he encounters another lost soul who might finally set him free. Mixing old and new songs from Bowie this was a show that, like Blackstar, he was using to explore his impending death. Much of the new music written for the show did not appear on his last album and was instead released on the No Plan EP that came out in 2017. David Bowie made his final public appearance at the premiere of the musical Lazarus on 7 December 2015, media reports at the time said that he looked to be in good health but it’s said he later collapsed behind the podium from exhaustion and it was then that the director Ivan van Hove said he realised it would be the last time he’d ever see him. To add to this, the day the cast of Lazarus recorded the original musical soundtrack for commercial release was also the day they found out about Bowie’s death.

Bowie’s final photo shoot

For his final album a local New York jazz quartet led by saxophonist Donny McCaslin, and featuring other musicians including drummer Mark Guiliana, pianist Jason Lindner and bassist Tim Lefebvre, as the backing band for the sessions. Bowie had very specific ideas around what he wanted from the sound of his band and chose a group that could work as unit as opposed to sets of disparate session musicians, he sent them demo recordings of many of the songs that would be featured and recording began in the first week of 2015 at the Magic Shop studio, the same place he had recorded The Next Day two years before. The band was not aware of his declining health and said they worked together for multiple hours everyday and it never looked like he was sick. James Murphy from the LCD Soundsystem was also invited into the studio, Murphy had previously created a remix of “Love is Lost” that was featured as a bonus track for The Next Day.

According to producer Tony Visconti the music on Blackstar was a deliberate avoidance of rock'n'roll and instead they were listening to music from experimental hip hop trio Death Grips as well as rapper Kenrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly as influences. Viconti said that while the final product doesn’t sound like these artists, their willingness to experiment and take chances was influential on them. The music found on this album is art rock and experimental jazz, it brings together a lot of styles that Bowie had experimented with over the years and even features allusions to some of his old songs. Lyrically the album is a direct and compelling investigation into Bowie’s own impending demise, while at the time of recording people might not have known he was sick this is a man desperately grappling with his own mortality. The album is grand and epic and on the outset sounds like nothing Bowie had ever previously recorded, but when you look deeper it actually comes to one of the most complete representations of his artistic output there is just so much happening at once. You’ve got the piano based beauty of Hunky Dory, the grand theatricality of Diamond Dogs, the searching spirituality of Station to Station, the raucous drum and bass of Earthling. It’s all there right before our eyes.

The album opens on its title track “Blackstar”, an epic and grand song which standing at 9 minutes 58 seconds is the second longest in his entire career behind “Station to Station”. The song was originally his longest at over 11 minutes but Bowie cut it down after learning that iTunes did not allow individual tracks for sale that were over 10 minutes, he wanted the full length version to be released and not have people deal with confusion of a single and album version of the track. The name Blackstar is appropriate as it follows a long tradition of space imagery in his music, who’ve also got the repeated symbol of the star in his career going as far back as “The Prettiest Star” from 1970 and followed with “Starman”, “Lady Stardust”, “Ziggy Stardust”, “Shining Star”, “New Killer Star”, “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”, and finally this track. The song mixes avant-garde jazz with art rock and hints of Gregorian chanting and it feels almost otherworldly. While it can be difficult to decipher exactly what the song is about it is obvious that Bowie is confronting his own mortality. 

In science, a black star is like the transient stage between a collapsing star and a singularity, similar to a black hole nobody knows what’s on the other side and it works well as symbol for the mystery of what happens to a person after they die, they become a black star, they go into the unknown. There is also a potential link to the BBC series Peaky Blinders which Bowie was known to have been a huge fan of, even going so far as to send a copy of Blackstar to the shows creator Steven Knight and requesting his music be used in it. In the first series of the show the main character Thomas Shelby is shown drawing a black star in his diary, he’s asked what it means and replies “Black star day is the day we take out Billy Kimber and his men” this might just be a coincidence but the lyrics “I’m a blackstar (I’m not a gangster)” also imply Bowie had imagery from the show on his mind when he wrote the track. The opening verse to “the Villa of Ormen” mutated from the phrase “the villa of all men” and seems to suggest he is addressing something universal within us all. 

The song was accompanied by a surreal 10 minute music video depicting a woman discovering a dead astronaut and taking his jewel-encrusted skull to an ancient, otherworldly town. The astronaut's bones float toward a solar eclipse, while a circle of women perform a ritual with the skull in the town's centre. The video’s director Johan Renck said that he believes the dead astronaut in the video was Major Tom from Bowie’s first big hit “Space Oddity” which further adds to the sentimentality and depth of this record, like Bowie was giving us a chance to say goodbye to his first major character. Renck said Bowie portrays three distinct characters in the video: a “priest guy”, a “flamboyant trickster”, and the introverted, tormented, and blind “Button Eyes”. The song also bears similarities to the Elvis Presley song “Black Star” which contains the lyrics: “When a man sees his black star, he knows his time...has come.”

The song was a success, particularly in the wake of Bowie’s death, and received the Grammy for both Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance and at the time was the longest song to ever chart in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Pitchfork labelled the song as “Best New Track” stating it comes “closer to the cocaine-fueled fantasias of 1976’s Station to Station than almost anything he’s done since”. It’s a mammoth of a track and really feels like Bowie has tapped into something about the nature of mortality, the cryptic and confusion of the lyrics is all the more appropriate because that’s what death is and as it shifts into the middle of the song with the refrain “something happened on the day he died” I can’t help but get emotional, it was a strange song to listen to in the immediate aftermath of his death but as a farewell it couldn’t have been more perfect, you’re a blackstar now Bowie.

The astronaut from the “Blackstar” video, could it be Major Tom?

“‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore” takes its title from the 1633 John Ford play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and along with the later track “Sue” was first demoed by Bowie as far back as 2014. The Blackstar version is highly influenced by hip-hop and it blends modern slang with World War One imagery and it was one of the first songs recorded for the album. The song appears to tell the story of a soldier who visits a prostitute and has his belongings stolen from him. Bowie himself released a public statement on the track stating: “If Vorticists wrote Rock Music it might have sounded like this.” Vorticism was a modernist art movement in London in the early 1900s who created avant-garde geometric works that tended toward abstraction. The play from which the song takes its name is a controversial one, a tragic piece it tells a dark story of love, incest, and betrayal where Giovanni falls in love with his sister Annabella. While this song does bear the same title it is actually another track “Sue” later on this record that takes more influence from the story of the play, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

One of the most powerful moments on the entire record is “Lazarus”, a swan song and self-epitaph; it would be the last single Bowie released in his lifetime. From it’s opening line “look up here I’m in heaven” the track holds an hypnotic power and knowing that he was coming to the end of his life as he sang it just makes it all the more powerful, the style, the lyrics, the entire content of this song just bring everything together perfectly. Bowie sings “by the time I got to New York, I was living like a king” and we are reminded of the life he has lived, the ups and down, the trials and tribulations, fame, addiction, psychosis, he’s been through it all and now it’s all about to end. The title refers to Lazarus of Bethany the biblical figure who Jesus brought back from the dead after four days, Bowie using imagery around resurrection refers to a prediction of increased fame after he dies, he knew that the world would take notice when he was gone, he knew that he was an important part of the culture and of people’s lives. The music video for this song also plays into this theme, it features Bowie with bandages sewn over his eyes lying on his deathbed and was reportedly filmed the week he was informed his cancer was terminal and they would be ending treatment. The video was released just three days before he died and ends with Bowie retreating into a wardrobe which director Johan Renck likened to a coffin.

The “Lazarus” music video featured Bowie on his deathbed

“Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” was a song that was originally released on the 2014 compilation album Nothing Has Changed and is marked as Bowie’s attempt at making experimental jazz music. Jazz was something Bowie was interested in as far back as the mid-1960s with some early Georgie Fame inspired music like “Take My Tip” that he released with the Mannish Boys before he took on the name Bowie, then through the 1990s on albums like Black Tie White Noise and Buddha of Suburbia he let elements of jazz seep in. “Sue” is a track inspired by the writings of the poet Robert Browning as well as the John Ford play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and it depicts the fall of a marriage. The lyrics are in a way a retelling of the events of the play with the character of Sue representing one of the characters Annabella. The Blackstar version was called “Re-Sue” in Bowie’s written notes and went through a number of different iterations before the final cut and it mixes jazz with drum and bass styles harking back to work done on Bowie’s 1997 record Earthling. 

“Girl Loves Me” is a song that has lyrics in both the fictional Nadsat language from Anthony Burgess controverial 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange as well as the gay slang Polari which was used in the 19th century by gay people, actors, circus folk, navy seamen, criminals, prostitudes, and wrestlers. The song also features a likely reference to the George Orwell novel 1984 with the reference to a chestnut tree being a well-known image from the book. Bowie was a huge fan of the Burgess novel and the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation. Nadsat words Bowie used include cheena (woman), malchick (boy), moodge (man/husband), vellocet (amphetamines), polly (money), viddy (see), lubbilub (kiss), litso (face), devotchka (girl), spatchka (sleep), rozz (police), ded (old man), deng deng (money). Adding the Polari lyrics makes things even more difficult to comprehend and require a complete translation to be fully understood. Lines like:

“You viddy at the cheena

Choodesny with the red rot

Libbilubbing litso-fitso

Devotchka watch her garbles

Spatchko at the rozz-shop

Split a ded from his deng deng

Viddy viddy at the cheena”

Translated it comes out as:

“You look at the woman

Wonderful with the red mouth

Kissing, face-obsessed

Young woman watch her testicles

Sleeping at the police station

Part an old man from his money money

Look look at the woman”

The track also features LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy on percussion and synth. The refrain “where the fuck did Monday go?” could be referring to a number of different things, it could be Bowie's lost years during drug addiction and the memory lapses that came with that, or it could also be more recent and to do with the cancer treatment he was receiving and how this often leaves people confused and at a loss. Overall it feels like a dark and menacing track and I think shows a side to Bowie unlike anything else we have seen from him.

One song that wasn't demoed before recording sessions for this album began was “Dollar Days” with saxophonist Donny McCaslin saying one day Bowie just had an idea and started to play it and they all learned it right there in the studio. The song, like so much of the rest of the album, deals with death but also feels like a more tongue-in-cheek look by Bowie at his own legacy and his fan’s expectations of him. The lyrics “I’ll never see the English evergreens I’m running to” could be a reference to going home to England but also on a deeper level feel like they are representing a potential afterlife. But what I find the most interesting part of this track is the refrain “I'm dying too push their backs against the grain and fool them all again and again” which seems to be saying that Bowie wants to come back to his fans one more time, take on the world one more time, relive his fame and legacy, with so many transformations of eras of his career he feels like he’s got one more left in it, he’s got one more gift left to give and that’s this album, “can't believe for just one second I'm forgetting you”.

The final song acts as a last farewell to the world. “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is of course a track about mortality but it’s also about being an artist and creator and what it means to put work out into the world, how much of yourself do you give away, and how much of yourself do you reveal. There have long been questions around who the true David Bowie was, with so many personas and characters it was always difficult to tell what was authentic and what was being curated. However, this song seems to imply that Bowie has given us plenty, he has revealed a lot of himself over the years. The song contains a harmonica part that is strikingly similar to the one found on Bowie’s instrumental song “A New Career in a New Town” from his 1977 album Low. This allusion to the past on the very final track found on a David Bowie studio album only further highlights the incredible career that he has had and how much there is to be explored in his back catalogue. The song would be the last single from the album and be released posthumously. The track brings Bowie’s frailty to the forefront right at the beginning of the song with the line “I know something’s very wrong” and the track loaded with funeral-like imagery and a lengthy plea for peace. After five decades in the public spotlight, so much music and so many projects, this is it, he had no more to give.

Blackstar was released to massive critical acclaim on January 8, 2016, with many publications commending Bowie for releasing one of the most challenging and compelling album’s he had created in his entire career and that he had once again reinvented himself in a new era, finding a new voice, and demonstrating that he still had something vital and important to say. Then just two days later, on January 10, David Bowie died of liver cancer. This caused the hype that had already been swarming around the album to skyrocket and people began to look at the lyrical content and investigations into themes of mortality not just in abstract transient way, but as the message of a man who was truly looking death right in the eyes. This record, much like Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker, released in the same year, was a rare example of an artist managing to bookend their life with a grand artistic statement. It was dramatic and courteous and much like Bowie had speculated in the song “Lazarus” led to a huge renewed interest in him and his career. 

The album which was already on course to go to number one on the UK album charts even before his death shot to the top of the charts all over the world, with four other of his album also then entering the top 10 (a feat only equalled by Elvis Presley), becoming his 10th number one record in the UK. The record stayed at the top of the chart for three weeks and was only overtaken by his own Best of Bowie album. Bowie was also the biggest selling vinyl artist of 2016 in the UK and Blackstar was the fifth best selling album of the year.

For fans there is something that feels a little bit tragic in this record, after so long Bowie had managed to release what appears to be his definitive statement on his life and his work, he put out an expertly crafted collection of songs that manages to cut deep right into our souls, it talks of love, life, loss, and legacy and confirms Bowie as one of the most innovative and compelling musicians who ever lived. Created while actively dying of cancer it seems as if he clung onto life just long enough to deliver this album as final farewell, with a music video showing him lying on his deathbed people barely had time to even see it and he was gone. What feels tragic and almost Shakespearian in its grandiosity is that he still had this record in him, despite all he had gone through, all he had previously created, as well as years of absence from the industry there was still one last surprise in store. What started with the lonely isolation of Major Tom floating through space was eventually catapulted into the stratosphere of fame before eventually imploding into the mystery of an unknown black star. He took us with him every step of the journey, and even though he may be gone, the music never will.

Blackstar - ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ [10/10]