And so here we are again, then. This, look you see, is the penultimate edition, or if you like episode, of all of this. Just one more album I have yet to write of here after this one, and then I have covered all of his, being Bowie, commonly accepted releases. So, Blackstar it is. As the previous episode was called as something of a subtitle How It Started, then this, to be blunt, should be called How It Ended.
Yes. For the pedantic, or those who consider such to be important (and by no means do I say you are wrong to be so), indeed the album isn't really supposed to be called or referred to as Blackstar as such, but rather ☆. Or even, if this works on this black background, ★ . It will, however, be a good deal easier for me to simply type Blackstar, so if you don't mind I shall stick with that.
One thing I have tried to do with these posts is to deliver some quickfire, fantastic facts at the start. When it comes to this one, however, oh boy. Very well. Blackstar was 25th solo album by David Bowie as per the commonly agreed method of counting them. Even if that method excludes one of his finest works, and for that matter one of his most iconic. Recorded mostly in secret (of the seven songs, two we released as a double a side single in 2014, two as "digital downloads" in late 2015), it would also prove to be his last. Well, as of time of writing - you never know if some sort of "previously unreleased" (like, for instance, Toy) album will surface. The album was released on his birthday, 9th January 2016, and some two days later his death was announced to the world.
With much of that paragraph in mind, I think it's pretty much or all but impossible to speak about Blackstar without focusing heavily on the context and the apparent motivation for recording it. Someone, and I think it was the album's producer, long term Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti, did confirm the record was always intended as a flat out thank you and goodbye from him to us all. Although a lot of people have taken it upon themselves to say a lot of things about Bowie since he died, in this instances there is absolutely no reason at all to doubt or question that what Mr Visconti says is absolute truth.
Let me try and start with the two lead singles, then, although as it turned out they were the 3rd and 4th songs from the album to be heard. Yes, titular track Blackstar ("★") and Lazarus. Right, then. Just what I am I supposed to say about these two songs that hasn't been said already, or better still, isn't said (in retrospect) by the songs themselves?
Before we knew that 'Tis Pity She's A Whore and Sue (In A Season of Crime) would be on the album, the first new track we got was the titular Blackstar. It came as something of a surprise release, if not quite the high impact surprise of The Next Day. Knowing that Bowie was "back" after a decade or so away from releasing new music meant that it was not too much of a shock to see further releases. Few, however, would have anticipated what came along.
In truth I was not all that enamoured with Blackstar when I first heard it. The first four or five minutes seemed to be him off on one of his "jazz fusion odyssey", with a bit of a repetitive beat and little lyrically that seemed to say much of sense. And then the song reaches a point were it, and all that surrounds it in the world, apparently ceases to focus on anything else but the beautifully eloquent way in which Bowie sings the line "something happened on the day he died". Perhaps this was a hint, but with it being spoken of in the third person I suspect few, if any, clocked that he was trying to tell us something. A bit, I suppose, how we all casually overlooked the line "here I am, not quite dying" in The Next Day.
The line "look at me, I'm in Heaven" from the second "single" was rather more difficult to brush aside, but somehow we did. Oh sure, some of us, there can be no doubt heard the line, saw the video which appeared to show Bowie on his deathbed and thought "maybe he is telling us he is dying", but few if any spoke it. We could take shelter in the fact that, although quite patently speaking directly to us, he was in character, for the song was for the musical Lazarus. A musical based on The Man Who Fell To Earth, and consisting of Bowie songs chosen by Bowie. Not much shelter, then but taken all the same.
You have to wonder about the timing of the release of Lazarus. Well, I do. I mean, it had a kind of "locked in" date, due to the Broadway debut of the play. But part of me thinks maybe Bowie, with the love of subversion that's often cropped up in these episodes / editions of Random Bowie, toyed and tinkered with the idea of the song being released after his impending death, or even as a means of announcing the news. Maybe, but then again perhaps that notion or idea proved to be "a bit too much", even given the circumstances.
On that note, an aside. The overwhelming majority of people see, or if you like hear, Blackstar as an astonishing, unique (more on this aspect later), generous, breathtaking and outstanding way for an artist to bow out. A smaller number branded it as "sick". They felt horrified, "disgusted", shocked and many other words that someone should take what is arguably one of their most personal experiences - death - and for want of a better term "exploit" it, be it for purely artistic reasons or as base as financial gain. Whilst I disagree with this smaller number, in my heart I cannot say they are wrong to react the way they have. As there is no precedent and nothing to hold it to the standard of, there really is no explicit "right" way to have reacted to Blackstar and what happened next. To my mind, there is only one entirely wrong way to react, and that would be "indifference". Nowhere can I find anyone referring to Blackstar as "meh" or "so-so", meaning that it prompted some form of reaction from all who came within reach of it, and you'd kind of like to think that is ultimately what Bowie wished to achieve.
Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but we have to assume that absolutely nothing is on Blackstar by accident. By this, or that, I mean that surely it is a given that the other five songs on the album are not just window dressing to pad out the "message" being sent with Blackstar and Lazarus. Is there anything of interest of curiosity hiding away?
Difficult to tell. Bowie was private, not reclusive. As mentioned in the past, when he did VH1 Storytellers, David shared some wonderful, entertaining stories. Virtually all of them, however, focused on other people, and said nothing about himself. This, I know, I have mentioned before, but when quizzed on doing something overtly autobiographical, he had no interest. Whenever he was asked, he would just tell people to "look at the many different biographies of me out there. Find the one that you find most interesting, and just assume that it is true". No, I am not sure if he said that before or after Backstage Passes by Angie Bowie came out.
Which may or may not lead us into a look at anything of interest possibly lurking in other songs on the record. Let us randomly start with 'Tis Pity She Was A Whore. Although the title is a derivative of a 17th Century play, one that has been used and reused over the last 300 or so years, the lyrics seem not to reflect that particular work. Of particular interest would be lines such as "she punched me like a dude", and references to sexual entrapment or emasculation, and stealing his purse. Ahem, should Bowie have used Blackstar as a conduit to shed some light on his feelings about people who had been in his life, well, over to you to interpret who this song might have been about.
By far the most intriguing possible source of "messages" on the album (as opposed to the known sources, Blackstar and Lazarus) is, for me, Girl Loves Me. There is a whole stack of stuff to find meaning in, if you want it. Most striking, perhaps, is the casual use of Nadsat, the slang invented by Anthony Burgess for his rather well known novel A Clockwork Orange. If I remember right, this would be the first time Bowie has used Nadsat in a song since Suffragette City on Ziggy Stardust. Perhaps a reference to the delicious rock myth or urban legend that Bowie was considered for the role of Alex in the film adaptation of the novel, but Kubrick considered that his famously different coloured eyes would add "too much symbolism that need not be there". Bizarrely this, if true, would not have been the first instance of a rock star not getting the part; there was an intention to turn the thing into a Beatles like comedy starring The Rolling Stones.
Questions posed by or hinted at the song? For a start, who is the "girl" of the title? Iman? His daughter? An unspecified lady from the past? There's also the sweary bits. It is with desolation, despair and resignation he sings "where the f*** did Monday go", it is with some sinister bullying overture that he soon after sings "who the f*** is going to mess with me". Perhaps it was all something thrown together just because it sounded good, maybe it is all a new You're So Vain mystery that we as a collective have not clocked yet.
Hinting at how perhaps the record is Bowie saying more than we may think is the final track, I Can't Give Everything Away. There is one lyrical couplet that most tend to pick up on, "seeing more, feeling less, saying no, meaning yes", interpreting it as his reaction to knowing he was at the end of days. It is the next two lines which interest me more, though - "this is all I ever meant, that's the message that I sent". Is he referring to that couplet before, or the album, or something else entirely? Well, as the title says, he can't - or won't - give everything away.
The thing I "like" most about this final track is the remarkable, possibly accidental but perhaps not, Can't bookmarks he has given his collected works. Whereas one was not strictly speaking his first song and the other was possibly not the last ever recorded, to me it just seems if not lovely then something special about his musical career commencing with Can't Help Thinking About Me and ending with I Can't Give Everything Away. But maybe that's just me that thinks that.
Finally on this idea there is Killing A Little Time on the No Plan EP. This was released on his birthday a year after his passing. Ostensibly the three "new" songs are ones he wrote for Lazarus, with only cast recordings previously available. Yet you can't really hear lines like "I've got a handful of songs to sing, to sting your soul, to f*** you over" without suspecting that there are very distinct messages aimed at quite specific people within the handful of songs which form ★.
I can sort of half remember those two and a bit days that I had the ★ album and played it a fair few times, never giving Bowie himself a moment of thought beyond how good it was to have a new record off him. Things changed, though, by the third day, when the news came that he had passed away. We cannot unknow that what we know, I suspect that, at least for this generation, no one will be able to hear the album for the first time without knowing what the specific intention was. But, you never know, in the years to come it may come as a surprise. There are, after all, kids today discovering the wonders of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, entirely unaware of how each and every song on it is a drug and jealousy infused bile spilling exercise by members of the group against each other.
Was, or is, ★ unique? Strangely not. Oh, without question it is the most audacious, bold and brave way in which an artist has used their art to say farewell that I can think of, but it is not a one off. Bowie even appeared on one such "dying musician makes a goodbye record" in the form of Mick Ronson's Heaven And Hull in the 90s. Other examples? We could pretty much take it as a given that Freddie new his time was coming with some of the final songs he recorded with Queen. Wilko Johnson persuaded Roger Daltrey to record Going Back Home with him when the doctors had (incorrectly as it turned out) given Wilko "months" to live. My favourite, however, is one that I cannot confirm. It's another rock myth legend, but please let this one be true. According to it, Warren Zevon was literally on his deathbed when he ordered recording equipment and musicians be brought in, so that he may record a cover of Knockin On Heaven's Door. The legend says that family and friends in tears pleaded with him not to, to which he responded "well, if not now, when?". Just, please let that story be true.
There is a lot more I could write, I suppose. Like, for instance, how come Bowie was apparently so clumsy with his phone, going on the Lazarus lyrics. Further, there is the whole connection to The King, Elvis Presley to be found in the lyrics to Blackstar. But, let me let you either discover these things yourself, or read any of the many things written about both of them, and more, across the internet.
Normally I would end these by posing the question as to whether or not this particular Bowie album was worth taking ownership of by you, the more casual Bowie fan. The astronomical sales (a lot of which we made before the announcement of his death) and all those "streaming" figures suggest that most of the known world already has it. Oh. Well, if you don't own a copy, then yes, I would certainly suggest you pick this one up, soonest.
How do I feel about Blackstar? Three years later and I do not know. At once it is an astonishing and beautiful way for someone I and millions of others held in such high esteem to say thank you and goodbye. It's perhaps the personification of not going gently into the night, of raging, raging against the dying of light. But it's strange. I muddled on for the ten or so years between Reality and The Next Day just enjoying music, you know, and whenever thoughts of Bowie came up it was that he was probably in his swanky New York address, or fancy Italian castle. With him returning and then going for good, there is an inexplicable, nonsensical sense of a gap in my life, a missing of someone that I never knew personally and never in all likelihood would. Perils and sins shall forever the outright devotion to a musician, I suppose.
Next up will be the final edition, then. Oh, boy. If you have found the writing here convoluted, patchy and messy, I shudder to think how I will get on tackling that which is my favourite album. Yes I've saved it for last because sometimes it is just too damned hard to articulate what you want to say about that which you love the most. But, I shall give it a go.
Many thanks, as ever, for reading.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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