A SCENE IN RETROSPECT: David Bowie – “Blackstar”

‘I still can’t tell if this zebra is white with black stripes or the other way around – as in, I can’t decide if Blackstar is simple in its complexity or complex in its simplicity.‘

-Hanna Ott

Release date: January 8, 2016 | Columbia Records / Sony Music | Facebook | Instagram | Website

How do you quantify the impact of a life? How do you measure the worth of a decades-long career in the arts, ever-evolving, groundbreaking, and influential? Maybe it’s best to approach this through the lens of the love you left behind. David Bowie‘s breathtaking final statement Blackstar turned ten years old two days ago, so we thought it best to try and articulate how the man’s legacy fits into our own personal stories.

I have to admit: iconic as he was, I’ve never been a huge fan of David Bowie. Before Blackstar, I knew a few of his hits – “Space Oddity”, “Let’s Dance”, “Starman”, “Heroes”, that sort of thing. I thought they were cool songs, but it didn’t go much further than that. The biggest impression he left on me was that of his enormous crotch bulge in Labyrinth (which actually became the namesake of one of my own band’s songs, titled “Bulgehunter”). It was only once “Blackstar” – the song – was released that my ears pricked up to Bowie’s music. I’d just never heard anything like it: the layered flutes, twinkling guitar line, stuttering drums, and dark strings impressed me immediately. It feels majestic, dignified, and yet so vulnerable, Bowie’s vocals quavering as they undulate through drawn-out phrases. And let’s not forget the strange and beautiful saxophone solos! The accompanying music video had such a profound impact on me, at a time when my style and sense of musical identity were in flux, that I found myself thinking about it almost obsessively. I listened to the song over and over, each time getting more drawn in to its mysterious dreamscape. There’s something deep and magical about it, a haunting atmosphere that defies explanation. “Blackstar” seized my heart with an unexpected immediacy, and remains one of my favourite tracks ever recorded.

I don’t quite recall when I first listened to the whole album, but its effect on me was immense. I can’t really quantify it – it’s such a diverse album, and yet so coherent. I think part of it was that I was falling deep into a death metal rabbit hole at the time, and Blackstar was just as heavy and dark as all of the extreme music I was listening to, just as bleak and morbid, without being even close to metal. It reminds me a little of the trip hop albums my parents played when I was growing up, Dummy and Heligoland, but also – somewhat surprisingly – of Sunn O))) and Scott Walker’s excellent collaboration, Soused.

I wasn’t the only person in my immediate circle who liked Blackstar. Soon after its release, I started studying music, and one of the other bands in my year got assigned “Lazarus” to play. I already knew it was a fire track, but I was surprised at how much my classmates (who were all into modern rock, reggae, and metal) were taken by it. I immediately volunteered/begged to play one of the sax parts in their performance of it, and they went on to record it as well, not for an assignment, just because they loved it so much. They even performed it again at an end-of-year concert, and for a few months, it seemed like “Lazarus” just completely took over. It was as heartbreaking to play as it was to listen to, and I think a lot of my classmates felt the same way I did – they’d just never heard anything quite like it before.

Of course, the “Lazarus” craze eventually died down, but my love for Blackstar didn’t. It seemed that every time I listened to the album, a different song stood out to me: first the title track, then “Lazarus”, then “Dollar Days”, and finally, my current favourite, “Girl Loves Me”. A drummer friend played “Sue (In a Season of Crime)” for a showcase concert, and once again, I found myself providing the eerie saxophone part. I reckon we did a pretty great job of it, considering none of us are jazz cats.

Speaking of jazz cats: it’s obvious how amazing the players on Blackstar are. Every single musician brings their own unique voice and style to the release – it’s clearly a Bowie album, but it’s more than the sum of its parts, and its parts are already amazing on their own. What I find so tantalising about Blackstar is how simple its construction is: often, none of the parts individually stand out as being crazy complex, the song structures are interesting but not convoluted, parts repeat so much you’re lured into some sort of lopsided sense of security. And yet, there are so many details, subtle changes in feel and layering, and vibe shifts that it can never be comfortable or – god forbid – boring. I still can’t tell if this zebra is white with black stripes or the other way around – as in, I can’t decide if Blackstar is simple in its complexity or complex in its simplicity. I guess I’d have to learn a few more songs off it on different instruments to make up my mind. In either case, it’s so fucking clever. There are only seven tracks on the album, and yet it feels monumental, but also so heartwrenchingly fragile. It also just sounds amazing; it’s clear and polished and still so organic.

The lyrics are another genius part of this album. Some songs, like “Girl Loves Me”, border on dadaist nonsense, and some are very to the point. Moments send shivers up my spine – the final verse of “Sue”, for example: ‘Sue, I’ve pushed you down beneath the weeds/Endless faith in hopeless deeds/I kissed your face, I touched your face/Sue, goodbye’, or my favourite lines from “Dollar Days”: ‘Don’t believe for just one second I’m forgetting you/I’m trying to/I’m dying to’. Absolutely beautiful, and absolutely devastating. The theme of farewells and death runs through the entire record, not just Bowie coming to terms with his own illness, but it seems like a eulogy to those he’s loved and lost. “Blackstar”’s opening line (‘In the villa of Ormen… Stands a solitary candle… At the centre of it all/Your eyes’) may well be a reference to his early girlfriend Hermione Farthingale, who ended her relationship with Bowie to film Song of Norway, Ørmen being the name of a Norwegian town. The chorus of “Blackstar” is widely recognised as a reference to his father’s death, and “Lazarus” seems to be a farewell song, opening with the line ‘Look up here, I’m in heaven’, as if Bowie had already departed this plane of existence. Perhaps the least obscure reference to Bowie’s imminent passing is the final track on the album, the last thing he ever released: ‘I know something’s very wrong/The pulse returns the prodigal sons/The blackout hearts, the flowered news/With skull designs upon my shoes/I can’t give everything away’. Blackstar is a breathtaking swansong, thrown into sharp relief in the light of his death only two days after its release.

David Bowie always was and always will be an icon of style, artistry, and expression, and I love all of those things about him. But in my mind, Blackstar is the single greatest piece of art he ever created, and one of the greatest albums I’ve ever heard. It’s been in my top 5 since 2016, and I truly feel it will stay there forever.

It’s hard to believe that he’s been gone for 10 years now. While many people agree that David Bowie was a one-of-a-kind mind, artist, and person, he was also an enigma until the very end. Bowie never flinched at new ideas, embraced change, and let the stars guide him in a way that few of us ever will. I remember sitting on the sofa, on a dim sunless afternoon, and seeing that a new Bowie song had just been released. It took seconds for me to start watching the unsettling video for the title track and be once again sucked into the world that springs so effortlessly from his mind. The movements of the song oscillated from catchy to darkly comedic, and all the way to the heavens with surrealistic imagery and sounds. ‘He’s still just as strange as he ever was,‘ I thought.

From that moment it felt like a swansong of sorts. Like the last will and testament of an alien who inspired us to be ourselves, our strange and wonderful selves. Passing on just two days after Blackstar was released made the impact of the album feel that much heavier, more salient, and more intentional than any other album I can think of at the moment. This was an entity staring down mortality and embracing it. Never taking it too seriously, never too frivolous, balanced by dance beats and dour lyrics, these songs are love letters to the gamut of those breathing the air trapped on this spinning rock. Ain’t that just like Bowie?

Many things could be said about the sonic tapestries of this album: how alive it sounds, how rich but still earthy it feels. But in truth none of that matters without the golden voice of the main character. Even the odder tracks on Blackstar, “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)” or “Girl Loves Me,” for example, are rife with incredible vocal deliveries and turns of phrase that feel far more genuine and impassioned than pretty much any other voice could make them. His ability to take what feels nonsensical and turn it into true artistry is what made him a different animal altogether.

While the whimsy of this album remains as a seasoning that is applied liberally, the heart of the record comes in the more reflective moments of “Lazarus,” “Dollar Days,” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” ‘Look up here/I’m in Heaven‘ perhaps at the time could have been read in a variety of ways, but for me, this is a message that he’s not gone; we only need to look elsewhere for him. I’m convinced that he simply returned from whence he came. He’s not gone. Hearing this lyric mere days before his departure felt prophetic but also quietly comforting. Things truly haven’t been the same on this planet since he left, but Blackstar is quite the parting gift that reminds us of the beauty of life. The seriousness and unseriousness of it are all just as important. Never forget that.

While measuring the importance, brilliance, and truth of music is a fun but often fruitless venture, Blackstar is for me one of those albums that feels frozen in a single moment but rife with facets which bear consideration. Artistry, comedy, whimsy, religion, life, death, failure, success, sex, confidence, fear. It’s all here. See you in the sky, Starman.

I first heard David Bowie when I was maybe like 13 or 14 years old. A friend made a mixtape for me, because I am that old, that featured Bowie both on the tracks and on a homemade black and white printed insert that serves as the cover. I think it was from Scary Monsters and Superfreaks, but the image didn’t sit well with young Broc for some reason. Eventually, I was checking out and burning CDs from the library and had amassed a modest David Bowie collection. By the time I was out of high school, I had been lucky enough to see him live on his Reality tour.

That was 2004. At that point, Bowie had seemingly lost some of his star power. He was already immortalized in the history of pop and rock music, but it didn’t seem to me that his recent albums, Heathen and Reality, were as respected as his previous works. I liked them, but like many other legacy acts, Bowie’s later career output lived in the shadow of what made him famous in the first place. Anyway, I feel very fortunate to have seen him perform.

Bowie was quiet for 10 years after Reality. He returned with The Next Day, which is also good and received critical praise in 2013. Then, early January of 2016, he released Blackstar. I listened to it the day it came out, thanks to streaming taking over for mixtapes, and felt like I had heard something truly incredible. The lifetime of rock and roll experimentations had paid off dividends on this record, barely registering as rock. There were expansive and hypnotic synthesizers and a sense of jazz from the backing ensemble. Producer Tony Visconti said that he and Bowie had listened to a lot of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, and wanted to capture a similar dark-jazz sensation on Blackstar. Meanwhile, his lyrics were often profound, even by Bowie standards. Blackstar is the kind of album that makes being a huge dork for music so much fun, a sound that makes you rethink what music is capable of while affirming everything you love about it at the same time.

I told a few of my music dork friends about it, but it seemed like a hard sell to them, until 2 days later when news of Bowie’s death sent a shockwave through the music world. Ink hadn’t dried on reviews yet, if they were even written, and immediately the mythology of Blackstar as Bowie’s intended death album began. Lyrics like, ‘look up here, I’m in heaven,’ took on a greater weight, and listening to Blackstar again gave me that same feeling it had the first time, but with the gravity of a black hole, a dying star, now black.

Bowie recorded the album in the aftermath of chemotherapy for liver cancer. We can only really speculate if he knew it was going to be his last album. Album saxophonist and band leader Donny McCaslin said that Bowie had intentions of playing songs on late night shows and recording more, but death is never certain. This accounts for songs like “’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore” or the tense psych-jazz of “Sue (Or a Season of Crime)”, the latter of which was sketched out before the Blackstar sessions. These songs are incredible, but they don’t seem like the premonitions ascribed to “Lazarus” or “I Can’t Give Everything Away”. Regardless of intent, Blackstar certainly feels like a goodbye record, and it rightly has earned its legacy as such. This album pulses in a way that even ten years on has rarely been replicated. In fact, it has been years since I have listened to this album, because it is so impactful. Revisiting it a few times this week to write this has been a reminder of Bowie’s greatness. For as flawed as he was a person, he was also perhaps one the last communally celebrated artists in music who followed his creative ambitions more than wealth or public approval. It is that loss that I mourn more than the man himself.

Bowie’s death has also often been heralded as the beginning of the world’s decline, at least for those of us who care more about Bowie than Harambe. Looking back a decade later, I can see how this opinion was memetic and prophetic, and I do feel like 2016 was a turning point, or perhaps a layer of masking finally eroding from the façade of reality. Whatever the case, Blackstar gave us all a reason to commune and commiserate over the loss of one of the great artists of our time, a man who has redefined himself and popular music perhaps more times than any other artist, so dedicated to the spirit of art itself, he made a dense, jazz influenced album that stands out not only in his own catalogue of masterworks, but in the upper echelons of music history at large.