FEATURE:
I Can’t Give Everything Away
David Bowie’s Blackstar at Ten
__________
THERE is no doubting…
IN THIS PHOTO: The final photos of David Bowie were published on his 69th birthday, 8th January, 2016 (the same day his final album, Blackstar, was released)/PHOTO CREDIT: Jimmy King (via The Hollywood Reporter)
the fact that 2016 is one of the strangest, most eventful and memorable years of this century. Perhaps not for great reasons. In terms of the albums that were produced, some modern classics definitely came about. From Beyoncé’s Lemonade to Frank Ocean’s Blonde to A Tribe Called Quest’s final album, We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service, and Solange Knowles’s A Seat at the Table, there were so many remarkable albums that still reverberate today. However, 2016 was a year when we lost more than one music great. George Michael left us on Christmas Day. Prince on 21st April. Leonard Cohen on 7th November. Sharon Jones on 18th November. An artist who both released a modern classic and sadly died in 2016 was David Bowie. I am going to write a couple of features marking the tenth anniversary of David Bowie’s death. He died on 10th January, 2016, a mere two days before the release of Blackstar. Nobody knew that Bowie was so close to death when he released his twenty-sixth album. 8th January, 2016 was a double celebration, as it was also David Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday. Fans had a couple of reasons to be joyful. Blackstar, in retrospect, has so many references to Bowie’s impending death and mortality though, for those hearing it fresh two days before he died, we did not know that. Rather than dwell on his tragic and untimely passing, I am going to focus on Blackstar. Some of what I bring in may reference his death and how we view the album, though there was vast positivity around the album. One of his masterpieces. An artist who had periods of real genius, and others that were less prolific, definitely finished his recording career with one of his greatest albums.
As it turns ten on 8th January, I know that Blackstar will be assessed and reviewed fresh. What it means a decade since it came out. Of course, people will also remember David Bowie on the tenth anniversary of his death. I am going to bring in reviews for a staggering seven-track album. From the extraordinary near-ten minute title track (listed as a black star symbol rather than the word) to the devastating finale, I Can’t Give Everything Away. The final album track released in his lifetime, it is both a beautiful and hugely affecting way to sign off. I think my favourite track off Blackstar is Lazarus. Bowie’s vocal performance is extraordinary! Even so ill living with liver cancer, he gives his everything to the songs on Blackstar. Some of his rawest and most revealing vocals, the composition and the band he plays with are simply incredible. One of his most experimental albums, with Art Rock and Jazz fusing together, Bowie drew inspiration from artists such as Kendrick Lamar and Death Grips. The singles, Blackstar and Lazarus were released late in 2015 - so there was this excitement and building anticipation. Both has music videos, though we were not looking for clues or noticing anything that suggested Bowie was ill and near death. These two videos especially are so moving to watch now, knowing what we know. However, they are both incredibly power and these amazing visuals that make us remember what an icon and innovator Bowie was! It is no surprise that Blackstar hit the top of the album chart in pretty much every country is was released in. This massive commercial and critical success, there were so many five-star reviews.
Not attacking those who scored it lower, but I wonder why they did not award it five stars! Objectively, Blackstar is a remarkable and unforgettable album without a weak track or moment. Critics did not know about David Bowie’s illness, if they were reviewing it before the album release. But you would have though Blackstar would get a perfect score from all. Maybe it will ten years after its release. I want to start with this article from The Guardian that was published on 11th January, 2016. They ask whether Bowie was saying goodbye on Blackstar. Whether it is an album about his death and the afterlife:
“The songs on Bowie’s inspired new album speak of illness, death and heaven – and offer intriguing insights about the man who sang, ‘I’m not a pop star, I’m a Blackstar”
One thing that struck reviewers who were grappling with Blackstar, David Bowie’s final album, was how tricky it was to interpret lyrically. Kitty Empire, writing in the Observer, described it as elliptical, while the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wrote that the album “seems to offer those attempting to unravel his lyrics a wry ‘best of luck with that’”.
What the critics didn’t know, however, was that the man behind it had been diagnosed with cancer 18 months ago, and that he knew his life was coming to an end. If this had been common knowledge, they would all no doubt have looked at Blackstar in a different light. Was David Bowie saying goodbye on it? And does it seem obvious now that he has died?
I Can’t Give Everything Away, the album’s final track, is perhaps the most potent song to re-examine. “I know something is very wrong,” he begins, then sings: “The blackout hearts, the flowered news / With skull designs upon my shoes.” The sense that Bowie has an unhappy secret he desperately wishes he could share is reaffirmed in the chorus: “I can’t give everything away”.
There is a lot that I want to bring in. However, this feature from Rolling Stone, I can only bring so much in, as it is paywalled, so I cannot include everything. However, it tells the story behind the stunning revelation that was Blackstar. We do get a bit of background and context. I am going to bring in a more comprehensive (and un-paywalled) oral history of Blackstar from NME:
“One Sunday night in the spring of 2014, David Bowie walked into 55 Bar, a 96-year-old jazz joint tucked away on a quiet side street in New York’s West Village. A friend, jazz bandleader Maria Schneider, had suggested he check out the night’s headliner, a quartet led by saxophonist Donny McCaslin. Bowie grabbed a table near the stage and took in a set of exploratory jazz, then left without speaking to the band. “A server was like, ‘Wait, was that David Bowie?'” McCaslin says. “It started dawning on people.”
Ten days later, McCaslin got an email: Bowie wanted him and his drummer Mark Guiliana to join him in the studio. “I thought, ‘This is David Bowie, and he chose me, and he’s sending me an email?'” McCaslin says. “I tried not to think about it too much. I just wanted to stay in the moment and just do the work [he wanted].” That work, initially, was only one song: the trippy, jazz-infused “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime),” which Bowie released on his 2014 compilation album, Nothing Has Changed.
Then, last January, Bowie called McCaslin’s entire group to the downtown studio Magic Shop to begin work on his 25th album, ★ (pronounced Blackstar), which is due out on January 8th, Bowie’s 69th birthday. “It did surprise me,” says Guiliana of being asked to play on the album. “But I feel like he’s built a career and artistic identity on surprises. It falls in line with who he is as an artist.”
The seeds of ★ date to mid-2014, when Bowie met with longtime producer Tony Visconti and drummer Zack Alford to cut some demos at Magic Shop. Then Bowie disappeared for five months to work on the new material at his house. “He’s got a little setup there,” says Visconti. “And there was no clear communication from him until December. That’s when he told me he was ready to make the album.”
Two years ago, Bowie released his first album in nearly decade, the relatively traditional (by Bowie standards) rock album The Next Day, which he cut with Visconti and members of his old touring band. For ★, he was determined to do something very different. “We were listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar,” says Visconti. “We wound up with nothing like that, but we loved the fact Kendrick was so open-minded and he didn’t do a straight-up hip-hop record. He threw everything on there, and that’s exactly what we wanted to do. The goal, in many, many ways, was to avoid rock & roll.”
McCaslin and his bandmates were able to handle whatever Bowie threw at them, from Krautrock to hip-hop to pop to jazz, creating an incredible fusion sound that can’t be pinned to any one genre. “They can play something at the drop of a dime,” says Visconti. “[Keyboardist] Jason [Lindner] was a godsend. We gave him some pretty far-out chords, but he brought a jazz sensibility to re-voice them.” They cut the album on ProTools, though much of the gear was vintage. “Jason’s synthesizer didn’t have a computer with souped-up programs like Omnisphere on it,” Visconti says. “He would just do it with guitar pedals, making all the sounds unique. We’re like old school like that. Also, [bassist] Tim Lefebvre was just phenomenal to work with. He pretty much nailed every take right on the spot”
Moving to an NME feature from 2021. Looking back at Blackstar five years after its release, I am sure that we will get similar retrospectives and examinations on its tenth anniversary. There were recollections from those who worked with him, including Donny McCaslin (tenor saxophone, flute). Produced by David Bowie and his long-term friend and producer, Tony Visconti, it is wonderful that Bowie got to release this stunning album whilst he was still with us. He would have heard some of the reaction to the Blackstar and Lazarus singles, and he would have known how people felt about those. Hopefully it gave him solace and satisfaction:
“Where Bowie often returned to the same group of trusted musicians to join him on his records, ‘Blackstar’ saw him bring in a jazz ensemble to work with him for the first time. Donny McCaslin, leader of New York’s The Donny McCaslin Group, came recommended to him by musician Maria Schneider, who Bowie worked with on the 2014 version of ‘Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)’. McCaslin, a part of Schneider’s orchestra, also appeared on the track.
Donny McCaslin: “Bowie’s team had reached out to Maria to do a collaboration on ‘Sue…’ with her orchestra. During that time, she was talking with me about it, and she called and said that David had been trying to describe to her what he heard as the rhythmic underpinning of the song and that it made her think of me and my group. So she played him a record of mine called ‘Casting For Gravity’ and that led to them both coming to hear my band play at a club in New York called The 55 Bar about a week before the first workshop session for the David and Maria version of ‘Sue…’.
“So they come to the show and I didn’t meet him, but I saw him out of the corner of my eye. Then, a week later, I met him for the first time at this session and we’re talking and he asked for my number and email address. The next morning, he sent me an email saying he’d love to do something and sent a home demo of ‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore’ that he had sequenced at home – he played the saxophone on it and had done everything as far as I could tell.”
Once the recording of ‘Sue…’ was complete, Bowie and McCaslin stayed in touch, with Bowie emailing over several demos for the bandleader and his group to get familiar with.
Donny McCaslin: “It was exciting – that’s the first word that comes to mind. There just felt like there were so many possibilities in what he sent. The framework of the songs was in place in these demo versions and they sounded, to my ear, really strong. I wasn’t sure what to expect from him in the studio so I tried to prepare by really immersing myself in every detail of the songs so I would have the flexibility to pivot if need be in the studio.”
‘Blackstar’ bursts into life
Unbeknown to the rest of the world, 2015 began with Bowie hunkering down at New York studio The Magic Shop with McCaslin, pianist Jason Lindner, drummer Mark Giuliana, bassist Tim Lefebvre and his long-time producer Tony Visconti to begin work on ‘Blackstar’. The recording was split into three chunks – a week a month from January to March – and saw Bowie’s collaborative spirit in full flow.
Donny McCaslin: “The first day in the studio was a mixture of excitement, anticipation and hoping that it was all going to go smoothly. I was loving the music he had sent and I had done some work on it on my end with woodwinds and with voicing things that I hadn’t told anybody about, so I was excited to unveil that. When we got going, it just felt seamless and organic – the analogy I would use is that the group was like a basketball team where we were constantly sharing the ball and throwing it back and forth.
“That first day, the spirit of what David told us was, ‘Let’s not worry about what this will be called, let’s just go have fun and anything you’re hearing I want you to go for it’. He didn’t say ‘no inhibitions’, but that was the spirit of what he said. It was great to have that affirmation before we even started and to sense that he trusted us with this music. You couldn’t have asked for it to be a better environment creatively.”
Inspiration strikes
During the second recording session in February, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy joined the group after his work on Arcade Fire’s ‘Reflektor’ inspired Bowie to remix ‘Love Is Lost’ on ‘The Next Day Extra’.
Murphy’s role was meant to be far bigger than it ended up being, with Bowie and Visconti asking him to co-produce the record – as he explained on Radio 1 in 2017:“I played a little percussion. I was supposed to do a lot more but I got overwhelmed. It takes a different kind of person than me to walk into that room and be like, ‘I know exactly… I belong here, I should definitely insert myself in this relationship because they just can’t manage to make a record without me’.”
Donny McCaslin: “James came into the sessions for the second block of recording. He was great. I remember there was a horn line on a tune that didn’t make the record, but when we recorded that he wanted to do another version where it was messier and not as polished – not even totally in the execution but just in the note twists. I appreciated that and it was fun to work with him on that. It’s hard to know if he had any influence on the sessions even after he’d gone because Ben Monder came in on guitar for the third batch and so there was a different dynamic.”
Even before ‘Blackstar’’s release, the central influence on it was often cited as Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’. Bowie and Visconti had been playing the record on repeat, with the producer saying his friend’s goal was to “avoid rock and roll”.
“He was so full of life and laughing, it was impossible to imagine there was anything wrong with him” – Jonathan Barnbrook
Donny McCaslin: “That record came up as something that he was listening to and checking out. It’s not something that we played in the studio. The one connection I can think of is the song ‘Girl Loves Me’, there’s that sort of a made-up language that’s happening on that song. Some of that was from the language of A Clockwork Orange. But some of it was also very old British slang. It would sound very odd to hear David Bowie rapping in today’s language, right? I think it could be thought of that that was a way that he was looking to find language that would work for him. And that’s the connection that I see, which is brilliant.”
Bowie hits the drawing board
With recording completed in March and overdubs and final additions done by May, it was time to start thinking about the other aspects of the record. Bowie brought back graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, who he’d worked with on all his album art since 2002’s ‘Heathen’.
Jonathan Barnbrook: “It was quite unusual that time because he asked me to go to New York to talk to him about it – normally we do everything by email or Skype. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but he especially just wanted to sit down with me and listen to the album together. It’s quite terrifying with David Bowie sitting next to you, listening to his album and he’s looking at your face to see if it’s good or not! I couldn’t tell he was ill at the time and actually, we didn’t discuss the issues of his health, it was more about the universal idea of mortality that was represented in ‘Blackstar’.
“The idea of the cut out black star was the main idea from the beginning. My feeling was that it should be quite minimal because the music, especially the main track ‘Blackstar’, had such a heavy, dark feeling which…. was very much of the time. It was never the case that it was going to be a nice picture of David and a bit of text saying ‘Blackstar’.”
The first clues arrive
“Look up here, man / I’m in heaven,” Bowie sang on ‘Lazarus’, which featured both on ‘Blackstar’ and in the musical that shared its name with the track. With the power of hindsight, it’s laden with all kinds of clues to the legend’s health issues, but few picked up on them on first listen.
Robert Fox: “I must have heard ‘Lazarus’ for the first time just before rehearsals for the musical started, because it was around then that I went to see the filming of the music video for it. Because I knew what the content of the story that we were telling was, it felt entirely appropriate to the musical. If I hadn’t had the context of the show, it probably would have been quite a different experience. But it completely made sense for the character of Newton to be singing that song in our show. So it was great to hear; it was exciting and felt completely right for what we were doing.
“There’s lots of discussion about to what extent he identified with the character of Newton, to what extent what he was going through in his own life, with illness, and possible death and all of that influenced his work around that time. It was not the first time that he’d had health scares, so I think his own mortality was very much on his mind.”
Mortality is a very big theme of the music video for ‘Lazarus’, which saw Bowie lying in a hospital bed with a bandage over his eyes. It’s ending – which saw him climbing into a wardrobe and closing the door – was later theorised by fans to represent the icon closing a coffin lid”.
Prior to ending with a couple of reviews for Blackstar, there is a 2016 feature from Observer, where Ben Monder (guitar), Tim Lefebvre (bass) and Donny McCaslin (tenor saxophone, flute) shared their experiences and impressions of working on the final masterpiece from David Bowie. Blackstar is an album that everyone needs to seek out. If you do not own a vinyl copy or have not heard it at all, go and find a copy or stream the album. It is such a spellbinding and seismic listening experience. I cannot overstate that! Even if you do not know much about David Bowie and who he was, the gravity of Blackstar and what it means will hit you on the first listen:
“Donny, your sax playing on Blackstar is very reminiscent of Dick Parry from Pink Floyd or even, in certain aspects, Andy Mackay of Roxy Music. Is that what were you aiming for?
McCaslin: Honestly, what I was thinking was more about trying to just immerse myself in these songs. My process was figuring the deeper I got into these songs, the freer I was in the sessions to express myself. So before the sessions, I listened to the demos a lot, and when we were playing I was just trying to play from the spirit of those songs and also reacting to David’s vocals, which were really passionate and really compelling. He was tracked with us live. And so we were already a band and the four of us have played on the road a lot together, but even still he was such a strong and inspiring presence to us in the room. It was so natural.
What was your favorite moment on the album?
Lefebvre: There’s a couple, actually, that still completely blow my mind. Just from how I play the bass, the second two-thirds of “Blackstar,” when it goes from the middle section out, I had fun playing that.
Monder: “Blackstar.” I’m pretty sure that was the first take. I remember David saying, “Well, why don’t you just naturally dissolve it and it will go into this other part,” which we had recorded right after. And that first time we tried to dissolve it, that’s what appears on the record.
‘His vibe was very open and collaborative. I remember him just encouraging us to just go for it…’
McCaslin: In terms of how “Blackstar” was put together, we recorded it in two halves. From what I remember, I think David always knew it was going to be one song, but we recorded it in two different sections. I didn’t know it was going to be sax on the first half and flute on the second. What happened was that flute solo at the end was something I had added on an overdub day when I was there just overdubbing flute parts, so that came a little bit later in the process. It was really cool they included it.
Lefebvre: I also really love the tag outs we did on “Girl Loves Me.” I love that song so much. The end of “Dollar Days” as well, right when things get real colorful. Actually, all of “Dollar Days” blows my mind. You can really feel him in those songs.
It must have been fun to play these songs and to interact with David.
McCaslin: It was tremendous. I felt like just all the tunes to me were really strong, and getting inside them was just thrilling. Yeah, when I had my moments of soloing, it was a great time and always really fun. It’s hard to put into words, it was such an inspiring experience. And I loved the music, and when we were making it, it felt really good. It was emotional and it sounded so great, and it was us.
We had finished tracking in March, and I hadn’t really heard it until recently. It’s neat to hear what David and Tony did and how they put all the pieces together with all the elements that they used. One thing that stands out to me is what we did—me, Tim, Mark and Jason—we do in fact do a lot of improvisation and we always feed off each other. It’s just this constant conversation, and that’s where we try to find the magic with the music we’re playing, be it my tunes or Bowie’s songs. That’s such a part of the whole jazz thing, right? The interaction and the storytelling you create as a band. And then David was right in there doing that, too, and I felt like that was really captured in the finished product, and I think that’s really special.
It’s not like it was this pre-programmed whatever. We were playing live, and we’re playing off each other. You can hear the interaction and you can hear the spirit of the communication in these fantastic songs. And David, he’s singing his tail off, and hearing it all together was really a thrill to me.
Monder: One of my favorite clips of his on YouTube is this acoustic performance of “Dead Man Walking.” It’s just him and Reeves Gabrels on acoustic guitars. And if you’ve heard the original version on Earthling, it’s like this extreme electronica cut. But it sounds so amazing stripped down like that, and the main guitar part was this riff Jimmy Page had taught him in the ’60s. It’s such a beautiful song, and this acoustic version is really striking. I remember hearing it on the radio years ago.
I don’t think it’s ever been recorded, but I think some station like WFUV or something played it on air and I didn’t even know who it was at first. So I decided I needed to learn it, so I was trying to learn it off the YouTube clip, but I wasn’t sure about the tuning of it. So I went to David and said, “Hey David, you gotta show me this,” and I started playing it for him. He got a kick out of that, me wanting to learn this obscure version of the song”.
There are two reviews I want to end with. I am starting out with The Guardian and their detailed and insightful four-star review. I started out by discussing critics who did not give out a full five stars and asked why. I do wonder whether they would change their minds. That one missing star. The black star. Even taking its context out of the equation, Blackstar is one of the defining albums of the 2010s. One that has undoubtably inspired so many artists since 2016:
“More striking still is the synergy between Bowie and the musicians on Blackstar. You can hear it in Bowie’s whoop as McCaslin solos amid the sonic commotion of ’Tis Pity She Was a Whore. He sounds delighted at the racket they’re creating, and understandably so. Simultaneously wilfully synthetic and squirmingly alive, it has the same thrilling sense of exploratory, barely contained chaos found on “Heroes” or Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), or in the tumultuous, wildly distorted version of the Spiders from Mars that rampaged through Panic in Detroit and Cracked Actor. Better still, it doesn’t actually sound anything like those records.
And you can hear it by comparing the album version of Sue (or in the Season of Crime) with the single released in 2014. The earlier version felt like a statement rather than a song; a series of ideas (drum’n’bass-inspired rhythm, Maria Schneider’s high-minded, uncommercial big-band jazz, a fragmentary lyric) thrown together to let the world know that Bowie wasn’t done with being avant-garde yet. It did that job pretty well, but never became a satisfying whole. On Blackstar, however, everything coalesces. The rhythm is sample-based and punchier, the agitated bass riff distorted and driving, the seasick brass and woodwind arrangement is replaced by sprays of echoing feedback, electronic noise and sax. It sounds like a band, rather than Bowie grafting himself on to someone else’s musical vision.
Over the years, rock has frequently reduced experimental jazz to a kind of dilettantish signifier: few things say “I consider myself to be a very important artist unleashing a challenging musical statement, I demand you take me seriously” quite like a burst of skronking free brass dropped in the middle of a track. But Blackstar never feels like that. Nor does it feel like it’s trying too hard, an accusation that could have been leveled at the drum’n’bass puttering of 1997’s Earthling.
Blackstar lacks the kind of killer pop single Bowie would once invariably come up with amid even his most experimental works – a Sound and Vision, a Heroes, a Golden Years – but only Girl Loves Me feels like a slog: lots of Clockwork Orange Nadsat and a smattering of Polari in the incomprehensible lyrics, thuddingly propulsive drums, no tune. Instead, you’re struck by the sense of Bowie at his most commanding, twisting a genre to suit his own ends. Dollar Days might be the most straightforwardly beautiful thing here, a lambent ballad that doesn’t sound jazz influenced at all. But it’s lent a curious, slippery uncertainty at odds with the bullish lyrical pronouncements (“If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to, it’s nothing to me”) by Mark Guiliana’s drumming, the emphasis never quite landing where rock-trained ears might expect it to.
The overall effect is ambiguous and spellbinding, adjectives that apply virtually throughout Blackstar. It’s a rich, deep and strange album that feels like Bowie moving restlessly forward, his eyes fixed ahead: the position in which he’s always made his greatest music”.
I will finish off with Pitchfork and their opinions on Blackstar. It is certainly one of my favourite David Bowie albums. Different to anything he had done before, but still unmistakably him. I do wonder whether there will be any reissues or anything special planned for the tenth anniversary of Blackstar on 8th January. It deserves to marked somehow:
“Because as much as Blackstar shakes up our idea of what a David Bowie record can sound like, its blend of jazz, codes, brutality, drama, and alienation is not without precedent in his work. Bowie’s first proper instrument was a saxophone, after all, and, as a preteen, he looked up to his older half-brother Terry Burns, who exposed him to John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Beat Generation ideals. The links connecting Bowie, his brother, and jazz feel significant. Burns suffered from schizophrenia throughout his life; he once tried to kill himself by jumping out of a mental hospital window and eventually committed suicide by putting himself in front of a train in 1985.
Perhaps this helps explain why Bowie has often used jazz and his saxophone not for finger-snapping pep but rather to hint at mystery and unease. It’s there in his close collaborations with avant-jazz pianist Mike Garson, from 1973’s “Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)” all the way to 2003’s “Bring Me the Disco King.” It’s in his wild squawks on 1993’s “Jump They Say,” an ode to Burns. But there is no greater example of the pathos that makes Bowie’s saxophone breathe than on "Subterraneans," from 1977’s Low, one of his most dour (and influential) outré moments. That song uncovered a mood of future nostalgia so lasting that it’s difficult to imagine the existence of an act like Boards of Canada without it. Completing the circle, Boards of Canada were reportedly one of Bowie’s inspirations for Blackstar. At this point, it is all but impossible for Bowie to escape himself, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try.
Thematically, Blackstar pushes on with the world-weary nihilism that has marked much of his work this century. “It’s a head-spinning dichotomy of the lust for life against the finality of everything,” he mused around the release of 2003’s Reality. “It’s those two things raging against each other… that produces these moments that feel like real truth.” Those collisions come hard and strong throughout the album, unpredictable jazz solos and spirited vocals meeting timeless stories of blunt force and destruction. The rollicking “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” gets its name from a controversial 17th-century play in which a man has sex with his sister only to stab her in the heart in the middle of a kiss. Bowie’s twist involves some canny gender-bending (“she punched me like a dude”), a robbery, and World War I, but the gist is the same—humans will always resort to a language of savagery when necessary, no matter where or when. See also: “Girl Loves Me,” which has Bowie yelping in the slang originated by A Clockwork Orange’s ultraviolent droogs.
Though this mix of jazz, malice, and historical role-play is intoxicating, Blackstar becomes whole with its two-song denouement, which balances out the bruises and blood with a couple of salty tears. These are essentially classic David Bowie ballads, laments in which he lets his mask hang just enough for us to see the creases of skin behind it. “Dollar Days” is the confession of a restless soul who could not spend his golden years in a blissful British countryside even if he wanted to. “I’m dying to push their backs against the grain and fool them all again and again,” he sings, the words doubling as a mantra for Blackstar and much of Bowie’s career. Then, on “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” he once again sounds like a frustrated Lazarus, stymied by a returning pulse. This tortured immortality is no gimmick: Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold”.
I am going to write about David Bowie’s death for other features. That hugely sad day on 10th January, 2016 when we heard the awful news. However, I wanted to isolate Blackstar and the fact that it turns ten soon. The incredible excitement around its release the impact it made, both critically and commercially. Featuring some of David Bowie’s most ambitious and astonishing songwriting, I think his vocals have never sounded as emotionally moving. Even though he was ill and it must have been a difficult recording process, David Bowie sounds utterly entrancing and incredible! Rather than think about the tenth anniversary of Blackstar as a sad thing, instead, we must be eternally grateful for this final glorious album that David Bowie…
LEFT to the world.
