Bowie’s ★ at 10
Our next spotlight is on number 299 on The List, submitted by HillardHouseDan. And because this is a big anniversary for an even bigger album, some Fedi friends[1] will be joining me today to collectively share our thoughts on its impact, and our memories of its release. For, on January 8, 2016 – David Bowie’s 69th birthday – Bowie released his 26th studio album, making today the 10th anniversary of the experimental jazz/rock masterpiece ★ aka Blackstar.
rothko: “TENTH?!”
daria: “…10 years???? HOW 😭“
blogdiva: “Shit. It’s already been 10 years?!?!?”
austinross: “Hard to believe it’s already been 10 years.”
peach: “As the general quality of modern music has decayed, one of the last great albums has reached a decade.”
And, as we all know, 2 days later, January 10, 2016, Bowie left us, succumbing to a cancer we didn’t know he had been fighting, making Blackstar – whether intentionally crafted to be or not – his swan song.
harriolkn: “I remember reading the news when I was at work and barely kept it together for the rest of the day. When I finally got home, and saw my partner at the time, we both just burst into tears and embraced each other without saying a word.”
buffyleigh: “When KEXP celebrated the release of ★ with ‘Intergalactic Bowie Day’ [on Friday, January 8, 2016], I instantly fell in love with the album, the first entire Bowie album I had listened to from beginning to end…I listened to the entire 12-hour tribute and planned on working my way through his discography, starting with picking up ★ on vinyl as soon as I could get down to my local record store, seeing as it felt wrong listening to the full album on YouTube, which someone had already posted. When I saw the news on Monday morning, I was stunned and disoriented…called in sick and went to my local record store to stand there and be sad with everyone else.”
The summer of 2014 was both when Bowie first received his diagnosis and when he began demoing songs that would appear on Blackstar and in his musical Lazarus. During the 2015 recording sessions, the cancer was treated, went into remission, and – in November, around the making of the music video for “Lazarus” – returned with a status of terminal. And so, though Bowie had continued writing and recording, planning both a follow-up to Blackstar and another musical, he was facing his mortality head-on the entire time he was creating this album, living with the knowledge that this could very well be the last album he made, that it could be the last statement from an artist known for making a statement with everything he did.
Given this context and the fact that many heard the album for the first time literally just before or just after hearing the news, it’s essentially impossible for the listener to separate their experience and interpretation of Blackstar from Bowie’s death. Even without over-analyzing it all, it’s easy to notice that the album’s lyrics are full of references to death and dying, and that its atmosphere is melancholic and existential at the very least, if not downright foreboding. And the brilliant music videos for the singles “Blackstar” (single and video released November 19, 2015) and “Lazarus” (single released December 17, 2015; video released January 7, 2016)? Well, they’re both chock-full of more symbolism and self-referential imagery a Bowie fanatic could shake a stick at, simply encouraging – nay, inviting – the viewer to read absolutely anything and everything into them.
billyjoebowers: “When the ‘Blackstar’ video came out I remember talking with a friend about how interesting but weird it was, and being kind of amused and confused by it. Then he died, and the ‘Lazarus’ video, and it was like ‘Oh shit!’. Like a punch in the gut. An amazing work, I listened to it non-stop for months, but not for several months after, it was too raw.”
Anomnomnomaly: “To me, the album felt like he was writing his obituary in a lot of the lyrics. So when he passed away shortly after, the whole album started to make a lot more sense for me.”
BackFromTheDud: “@Anomnomnomaly Agree. He knew the end was near, and it shows.”
But, even if our experience of the album is coloured by this context, that by no means takes away from the brilliance of this album.
If we had been fortunate enough to get another Bowie album or two or six after it, Blackstar would remain an absolute standout in his eclectic discography. It was unlike anything Bowie had ever done. Even just Bowie’s decision to not have any familiar faces in the backing band but rather to hire a pre-existing group (i.e., Donny McCaslin’s quartet with Jason Lindner, Tim Lefebvre, and Mark Guiliana) – and a jazz quartet at that! – was a stunning move. That move alone, particularly given what must have been a strong sense of urgency to realize the music Bowie still wanted to get out before it was too late, could’ve made them all rush, cut corners, make compromises. But, instead, the gamble of working with musicians who were new to Bowie’s processes and methods – musicians from a corner of the music world that Bowie had not yet visited – paid off in spades. The result was that the album showcased once again Bowie’s awe-inducing drive to always push himself further and further, even when just shy of 70 years old – never afraid to try something new, never calling it in, and never wanting to rest on his long-before well-earned laurels, all for the love of music, art, and artistry.
Its context simply drew deserved attention to Blackstar much sooner than it might’ve in other circumstances, immediately cementing its status as a masterpiece rather than it taking people a beat or two to grasp what this genius had just dropped into our laps. Indeed, its context ultimately made David Bowie-the-performer the most human he had ever been, in some ways making this album – an otherwise rather experimental if not challenging musical work – perhaps the easiest in his entire oeuvre for people to instantly connect with, in one way or another.
AnxietyDescending: “Released at the same time of Bowie’s passing, Blackstar was a bittersweet release. At first listen it was obviously a masterpiece but that joy was tempered by the fact that it would be Bowie’s last.”
mathzy: “It was going to be one of his masterpieces anyway. And then it was released virtually on the date of his death. My reaction was this was a legend and he put all his legendary artistic endeavour into it. Gorgeous, dark, brooding, triumphant.”
soulforgotten: “Blackstar was a really hard one for me to listen to. Bowie passed away before I got the chance to listen to the album and his death was especially crushing for me and my wife. As much as I wanted to take the album for a spin, I just couldn’t at the time. It was years later that I finally took the opportunity to listen to it, and it was an almost 50/50 split of regret (leaving so long to hear it) and admiration for his final album. It is a solid bookend to an amazing legacy.”
okohll: “Bowie at his best, I’m really glad he managed to pull off a master-work to bow out with. Evokes something strange, extra-worldly, profound yet at the same time can’t escape the Bowie-like elements of fun. He had the gift of being able to make something both unique and banging. Mention must be made of the collection of musicians he pulled together – the drumming is absolutely amazing for example. The success is that the whole is even greater than the sum of the parts.”
serpicojam: “I had been a fan of Mark Giuliana’s (and the rest of the folks on the LP who’d worked with Donny McCaslin) long before Blackstar was released, and I really appreciated his influence on the songs. ‘Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)’ is so dark, but it’s such a masterpiece. I should probably revisit the whole album again.”
evilchili: “Blackstar is astonishing in its ambition: here is a record that is both polemic and meditation, defiantly rejecting endings while saying goodbye, a grand finale and also the start of a new creative direction we will never get to follow. Throughout his career Bowie never told us everything, but he would give us glimpses, and Blackstar is no different: deeply personal, but only to a point. It’s true, but it’s an ambiguous truth. It’s wry and winking and earnest all at once. And full of swagger! It’s a considered, intentional final work by a dying man who is not afraid to remind us precisely how good he is.
‘You’re a flash in the pan
I am the great I AM'”
No matter the whys and wherefores, upon its release 10 years ago, Blackstar became an important album for many of us, whether it changed how we approached the rest of Bowie’s discography, how we approached or viewed modern music in general, even how we played our own music.
NoRestfortheWicked: “Personally, it opened for me more of the David Bowie albums like Low. Also I like the aesthetic of this album and videos. ‘Blackstar’ like a sci-fi film, ‘Lazarus’ has an almost prophetic feeling of a dying man on his bed. For me, it was something new to find, and it expanded my musical taste a lot.”
RobeeShepherd: “I know some huge Bowie fans, so I’ve been exposed to his work, but for me whilst I love his earlier stuff he felt irrelevant to me as a music fan after ‘Absolute Beginners’. I’ve dipped in a little since then and nothing grabbed me, until Blackstar. That didn’t pull me in, it sucked me in and I played it on repeat for months.”
buffyleigh: “I became a fan THE DAY Blackstar came out, listened to Bowie all that Friday and weekend. And then Monday happened. So I was a fan of all of 3 entire days and yet it totally knocked the wind out of me. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that changed how I approach music. I listened to ONLY Bowie for months after that, only broken by Prince dying and then I only listened to Bowie and Prince for another few months. I never did deep dives before that, or re-evaluated my feeling on artists I had written off long before. And now that’s what takes up most of my listening time.”
billyjoebowers: “I worked with a band and thought I heard something with the drummer. ‘Have you listened to Blackstar?’ He laughed and said ‘Yeah, non stop’. I could hear it in the change in his playing.”
And, for some, it remains an album that still profoundly affects us in one way or another, even when it’s not playing. It’s approached reverentially, not just as a memorial for its artist but perhaps of something larger that we’ve all lost.
daria: “I can’t remember when I heard it last time, it’s an emotionally difficult album for me.”
avi_miller: “Blackstar is an album like no other. It will forever be tinged with emotions for me from Bowie’s passing, and I don’t think that is a bad thing. Sometimes I put it on and cry a little.”
harriolkn: “Blackstar is probably my favourite Bowie album but I can’t listen to it very often because it makes me feel more sad than any other music.”
buffyleigh: “I will never get over this album, and feel like every single note of it is totally ingrained in my brain. I literally have never listened to this without crying…is perhaps the first/only record in my collection I would consider sacred (in a non-religious sense). It’s also my least listened to favourite album because I never want it to become background music, and each listen is almost a rite. I essentially only put it on for Bowiemas/Bowienalia.”
austinross: “It is a life-changing album.”
theotherbrook: “I wish I could come up with something meaningful to say, but when I think about that album the nerves are still too raw for me to touch. I know I’m not alone in having an irrational sense that our collective orbit entered a state of rapid decay with Bowie’s death. It is — it must be — coincidental. But still. Leaving us Blackstar wasn’t just writing his own epitaph, but also leaving us a marker for that moment when we could no longer ignore how unstable the trajectory we were on had become. I don’t know… I meant to say I have nothing to say but then I said that.”
At the very least, whether Blackstar is among your favourite Bowie albums (or favourite albums, period) or not, for 40+ years the release of a new Bowie album was a cultural event, and this album was certainly among the biggest of them all if not THE biggest. In the age of the Internet (and so, Bowie’s last five albums, starting with the 1999 release ‘hours…’), such events have brought together people from literally all over the world, from all walks of life, to share in a piece of sonic art that brought beauty, comfort, wonder, and escape. Given the times we live in, where connection is perhaps more important than ever, that this was the last Bowie event we could ever share in, could bond over, could disappear into, is in itself something to be remembered and mourned.
satsuma: “Back in the day, Twitter used to be a friendly place where you could connect with a group of friends to chat about anything that took your fancy. You would accumulate loose networks of common interests with people across the internet, and occasionally closer bonds would form. One such group consisted of people who had realised that if we picked an album and all hit play at the agreed time, then that meant we could share our experiences of listening to music together, even though we might be worlds apart. We started with the odd album at lunchtime, then came up with some rules to add to our choices – the idea was to pick 5 albums by the same artist (their first, their last, the fans choice, the controversial choice and the wild card) and I coined the hashtag ‘5×1’ (for five by one) as a way of tying everything together. The comedian Michael Legge then suggested listening to every album by a particular group or artist at the rate of one a day, so we went through the discographies of Sparks, Gary Numan, Queen and eventually David Bowie, with the tag ‘BowieADay’ starting with ‘David Bowie’ and ending with ‘The Next Day’, the final album at the time.
We all loved Bowie, and so when we heard rumours that a new album was coming out we made plans to stay up after midnight to listen to it as soon as it was released. We laughed, we made jokes, we appreciated the joy of hearing something new and important from our Hero for the first time – it felt like a message from him straight to us and we all knew that we would be puzzling over the lyrics for a long time to come. What was with all of the references to him dying? What was a Blackstar anyway?
We went to bed happy that night, and then woke up two days later to the awful news that David Bowie was gone. We were numb with grief and clung together virtually to process how we felt.
I couldn’t face listening to Blackstar again for a long time – it was simply too painful to think that he knew he was dying as he wrote it. It took almost a year before we undertook another ‘BowieADay’ journey, knowing that this one had a final ending point.
The second time around was more poignant than the first, and I saw more of the connections that had always been there right from the very beginning to the bitter end. Of course there were Low points on the way and the second hearing of Blackstar was both agonising and cathartic, and the beginning of appreciating how much we lost on the day he died.
Of course, I’ve listened to Blackstar again in the ten years since then, but every time has felt like an occasion. It’s not an album to be streamed at random or added to playlists. It demands attention and ritual. To be listened to on the best speakers, with the lights dimmed and with full attention.
Our original ‘5×1’ group is now dispersed across different platforms, only sometimes reconnecting, but it’s not quite the same now. I have new friends in different places, but we still have common bonds in a love of music, and especially with this album that still holds a special place in my heart.
Rest in peace, Starman.”
If you haven’t yet heard this album, it’s waiting for you, whenever you’re ready. And, if you haven’t yet listened to Bowie’s full discography and aren’t sure where to start, perhaps check out our continuation of satsuma’s BowieADay that a few of us did last year, complete with a suggested schedule for what to listen to from January 8 through to the end of the month, including all the studio albums and some extras. I, for one, will be hiding in my Bowie playlist for the remainder of the month.
Thank you, Bowie.
Mastodon/Fediverse usernames shown alongside their quotes. Nearly each participant submitted a single blurb, so some quotes have been split up to fit sections, and some have been very lightly edited for spelling/punctuation/capitalization. Many thanks again to the 20 Fedizens who took part (in alphabetical order): Anomnomnomaly, AnxietyDescending, austinross, avi_miller, BackFromTheDud, billyjoebowers, blogdiva, daria, evilchili, harriolkn, mathzy, NoRestfortheWicked, okohll, peach, RobeeShepherd, rothko, satsuma, serpicojam, soulforgotten, and theotherbrook. (For those with keen eyes but who may not know who is behind the keyboard, I don’t thank buffyleigh simply because that is me. And I know quoting myself is a bit hokey, but I am quoting what I’ve written elsewhere.) ↩︎#Bowie #DavidBowie #DonnyMcCaslin #experimental #JasonLindner #jazz #ListenToThis #MarkGuiliana #music #musicDiscovery #rock #TimLefebvre
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