Blackstar

10/10. What an album to go out on, Bowie's last, and one of his most adventurous, is truly an all-timer. It is a wholly unique album sonically, blending jazz, electronic, industrial, and psychedelic sounds into a tight, 7 song, 41 minute album. Famously, he took inspiration from Kendrick Lamar and Death grips. He made the album in collaboration with a jazz ensemble led by Donny McCaslin. The album is Bowie's farewell. If The Next Day was a retrospective on his career, Blackstar is a retrospective on his life. It seamlessly blends themes of mortality, legacy, spirituality, and decay.

The Blackstar personifies Bowie himself. In astronomy, a theoretical black star is the last point in the life cycle of a star. It is what happens when a star dies, implodes and forms a white dwarf. That white dwarf then cools entirely until it no longer emits heat or light, a dead mass floating through space. Bowie personifies this as his star imploded when he died, forming a white dwarf that is now cooling. One day, when Bowie is long forgotten, he will finally become that black star, and like everything that has existed previously, he too will be forgotten.

Opener Blackstar is an epic, two-part masterpiece. The first half cold, dark, and ritualistic, and the second half warm, and full of life. The music video sees Major Tom, dead and decayed. His skull, bedazzled with jewels, is taken for a ritual. Through this ritual, Bowie shows his becoming a myth, immortalized through his art. He embodies three characters in the music video. The blind prophet represents his physical body, torn apart by illness and unable to see the future. Not quite dead, but dying. The trickster, representing his unending creative spirit that refused to be conquered by fear. The priest, Bowie himself, looking into the distance, facing the afterlife and death as if it was a friend he'd known for 12 years.

The second track, 'Tis A Pity She Was A Whore, opens with a breath in, an unmistakable sign of life. The song is frantic, driven by a loud rhythm section and screeching saxophone. To me, the song sees Bowie fighting cancer, blow for blow, punch for punch. Bowie doesn't fear it, he sees it as a worthy rival. The song reflects all the adrenaline and excitement of this fight. In the great words of Technoblade, If you die, the cancer dies at the same time. That's not a loss. That's a draw. This is what the song is about to me, it's an exciting, bare-fisted brawl, David vs. Goliath. David goes down, but he takes Goliath with him.

The third song, Lazarus, is perhaps the most personal and human song on the album. Taking its title from the biblical figure whom Jesus rose from the dead. In the opening lines, Bowie forces the listener to look back at his celebrity status and focus on David, the individual. He references his years living in New York and his 10-year retirement, reflecting on his fame and aging, realizing that no amount of success and status can buy more time. The music video sees him as his blind prophet character once again, lying in a hospital bed, on the brink of death. He rises, dying, perhaps already dead. It then shows Bowie, the real Bowie, dancing and full of life, writing until he runs out of paper, writing like he's running out of time, writing until he is dragged off of this earth, kicking and screaming, representing Bowie's hope to make art until the day he died.

I would go into the other songs, but I don't have all day haha, and I would love for anyone reading this to listen to the album and form their own opinions (though I certainly have mine). Ultimately, to me, this album, despite the experimental Jazz and electronic sounds, is perhaps the most human Bowie has ever sounded in his entire career. So much about Bowie's career involved personas and performance. He rocketed to fame on the back Major Tom, was a rockstar under the moniker of Ziggy Stardust, was tortured and looking for love as the thin white duke, and crashed back down to reality as Pierrot. Even in the 80s when he dropped the idea of an explicit character, he was still performing: He was the rockstar Bowie, the Bowie the world wanted him to be. In the 90s, he performed as the Bowie he wanted himself to be, the introspective family man.

I've loved this album for a long time, and in the last few months as I've been listening to, and falling in love with, the music of David Bowie, I realized more and more how much of himself he often lost in performance. He was a true artist in every sense of the word, and every aspect of his music has a deeper meaning that can only be found through thoughtful listening. However, I found myself asking a simple question: Who was Bowie, the man? This album answers that question. He shows his true self, himself as an person, beyond the performance and the music. He shows himself as a father and a husband in the second half especially. He shows his failures and his successes. He shows how he wanted the world to remember him and how he thought the world would actually remember him. This album is David Bowie attempting to tell the story of David Robert Jones, the human behind the performance of David Bowie.