Anticipate David Bowie's BLACKSTAR

feel like this album cast a dark spell over this whole year, so much death in both popular culture and also my personal life :(

― robbie ca$hflo (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

You know I'm on that wavelength.

yeah i read your piece on that ez, sorry again about your friend :(
was very affecting writing

I'm curious how this record will sound a few years removed from his passing. Will it sound universal and open to personal discovery or will it be a historical relic, like a tombstone?

Will it sound universal and open to personal discovery or will it be a historical relic, like a tombstone?

future blog headline

I should give this another listen soon... it's been a while since I last gave it a deep listen, but the last time I did after all the info regarding its recording came out, I found it a bit unsettling.

I still find that it works best if you listen to it front to back, as a single cohesive work (like a jazz album), rather than as a collection of songs.

Y'all, look!

http://i.imgur.com/DWfh36J.jpg

Apparently, if you expose the sleeve of Blackstar to sunlight, a starfield emerges.

wow, just the vinyl or the CD as well?

Unsure. I don't own either format, but it clearly needs to be tested.

have not exposed my copy to sunlight, but i like this; it's magical.

i like the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of these out there in the world, but since so few bowie fans expose themselves to sunlight it is only now being discovered

ha ha yeah. my records are stored in a long, windowless hallway and will likely not see the light of day until my "heirs" inevitably dump them at goodwill.

If you close the door

Tried it. Didn't work.

apparently if you place a light behind the inner cover this happens
i.e. its not a chemical reaction to sunlight.

Good way to sell people a second copy, though...

"sue" is SOOOOOOO good

Listened to this again today for the first time in a few months. It really holds its impact, and demands to be heard as a whole - you can't pull out individual songs and discard the rest. As I've said before, it's like a jazz album in that way.

I'm not a film star!

yes, this holds up quite well. I love knowing that albums heard at the beginning of the year will be among the year's best

I heard if you held the cover long enough under a fluorescent light the tattooed arm from White Light/White Heat appears.

Where the fuck did Monday go?!

I imagine that's David's reaction to hard chemo treatments.

I'm still not 100% down with this album, but "I Can't Give Everything Away" hits me hard every time

"Where the fuck did Monday go?!" - I think he was euthanized, and died on a Sunday...

you sure have a lot of terrible opinions

http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/article/52185-image/Catch-the-pigeon-Here-are-the-best-and-worst-Flappy-Bird-clones.jpg

http://pitchfork.com/news/69088-listen-to-one-of-david-bowies-last-recordings-no-plan/
http://pitchfork.com/news/69085-listen-to-final-david-bowie-recordings-when-i-met-you-and-no-plan/

Really gorgeous, especially "No Plan." Listening brought me back to January in a big way this morning.

this thread is a grim read

Giving this a listen for the first time in a while and christ, this album has definitely retained its impact for me. I fucking love the rhythm section on this record, particularly on 'Sue'

Tis a Pity She Was a Whore is the one I listen to the most (title track is just too heavy most of the time). just an absolutely thrilling and grim death march of a song. those two final "WOO!"s Bowie lets out at the end have made me cry, facing death head on with such dignity for most of the record, but on Tis a Pity it's just primal rage.

The meat of the record is in the first four tracks and the last track, IMO.

"I Can't Give Everything Away" is such a fantastic last Bowie song. He had the class and dignity to keep his personal life private, and conveys through this song that it was always about the art and being a creative master of many disguises.

I Can't Give Everything Away is such a great performance. There's so much joyful release in it. My first reaction to the whole record was "He's really got it back, this is the best since Outside, I hope he carries on in this way". Obviously that never happened.

last five posts otm

The only thing I would change about 'I Can't Give Everything Away' is the drum loop. Everything else is OTM.

the tracks released on the Lazarus soundtrack, on the other hand, are a let down. almost wish they'd remained unreleased, as it's better to have this as his last word

I can understand that. On one hand, not having heard them yet, it's good to have more Bowie to listen to but on the other hand Blackstar is such a great final statement that it doesn't need half-fleshed out postscripts. Not just yet anyway, he's not even been gone a full year.

That was one of the things moved me the most about that Lazarus video after I heard the news: the part where he's frantically scribbling away just as he's about to disappear. The man had a very analytical brain, and while thankfully I don't know how it feels like to be dying so I can't project too much I get the sense that as angry and upset and relieved in equal measures as he would have been there was also that questing artist part of his brain going "Now as horrible as this is it's giving me so much to write about. A whole new way to talk about mortality". Let's face it, anything any of us write could easily be our epitaph if we died after writing it. Any aged artist's work contemplating The End from now on will be, in journo shorthand, "their Blackstar". At the risk of getting tedious thinkpiece-y about it that's a very fitting way to go out - he'd changed the way a lot of people thought about their lives and now he's changing the way some people think about their death too.

^ Great post, Dan.

This is one of those records that I feel it's true enjoyment and exploration for me is deferred until I'm ready to properly take it in, it's like walking away backwards from a huge object far enough to actually be able to see it all clearly, it's going to take a long while I think.

Think it's important to remember that there have been other records dedicated to contemplating the end of life from a knowing and immediate perspective -- Zevon's a good example, and Cohen just recently. Not to take away anything about Blackstar in the slightest, but while Bowie's own private contemplations can never be known now, given Visconti said that mid-2015 Bowie was in remission, it's just as possible that we'd be considering this as his 'brush with death' album as opposed to a 'this is it' album, with a later record taking another turn again. Ultimately circumstances have locked in a particular view that wasn't necessarily intended or meant, however much it was clearly a driving force thematically.

Yes! Just focusing on Bowie many last songs off his records could've been a fitting epitaph.

If he'd died after making Reality, what a poignant set of last words "Soon there'll be nothing left of me, nothing left to release" would have been.
If he'd died after making The Next Day, what a poignant last record! Starting with "Here I am, not quite dying", distorting his own past on the cover and the many references to other phases in the songs and videos ("You Feel So Lonely You Could Die" with its Five Years drums, him bringing out the headless guitar again unfortunately in the Valentines Day video).
If he'd died after making Heathen, well, the title track is one of the ones that really gave me a lump in my throat after hearing the news.

You could go on to an insane extent. This record happens to be his epitaph just because he died after its release. Anything could be your last words, and even if you didn't mean it to be significant someone's going to attach their own meaning to it anyway.

Yeah. With Cohen people keep saying daft things about how it was "obvious" that this was his last album & its like, I know he was very ill but it was inconceivable that he wouldn't hang on for, say, another year? That seems a failure of imagination more than anything else. Critics were calling each album his "final statement" for over a decade, during which time he went on two international tours, playing 3.5hr sets & literally bounding on & offstage. I mean have you ever met an old person? They talk about how they're going to die soon like all the fucking time ime

I do wonder what our reactions to Blackstar would have been if he'd stuck with the same general players as on The Next Day. The sonic novelty of the Blackstar performers in question and what resulted has, to at least some degree, given everyone a convenient talking point -- "trying something new, innovative to the end!" Yes but...he might not have.

None of which -- at all -- is meant to take away from such a remarkable album. But the combination of emotions that that three day turnaround from its release to the terrible confirmation has ultimately left a very long shadow that will be hard to escape.

The last rites have been read for Cohen since at least 1988, and Dan S. otm about Bowie. I was lucky to file a review five days before his death.

Come to think of it, Chris O'Leary pointed out on the Bowiesongs blog a while ago that if Bowie had passed in the late 2000s or at the turn of the decade, his 'last song' would have been that goofy-ass ditty for Ricky Gervais's Extras. And I'm sure people would have read THAT through a lens.

a beautiful swansong

xxp that's insane, cohen was 54 in 1988

My point is he's been in love with easeful death for a loooong time.

well his friends were gone

Think it's important to remember that there have been other records dedicated to contemplating the end of life from a knowing and immediate perspective -- Zevon's a good example

Yeah, I was about to mention this... Blackstar is certainly not the first album written and recorded by a person staring death in the face and it won't be the last. There's also examples such as Queen's Innuendo, which although it tackles the issue of Freddie's health here and there, isn't a total rumination on mortality even though he was undoubtedly seriously ill when it was made.