Pushing Ahead of the Dame

But, lo, as you would quaffoff his fraudstuff and sink teeth through that pyth of a flowerwhite bodey behold of him as behemoth for he is noewhemoe. Finiche! Only a fadograph of a yestern scene.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake.

1.

The David Bowie Is exhibit opened in London in March 2013 and closed five years later, its last port of call the Brooklyn Museum in the spring and summer of 2018.

In the Brooklyn Museum, before you reached the Bowie gallery, you saw a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, hung on a wall to give Washington command of the room, as if he stood atop a pitcher’s mound. When I went, there were children running around the painting. For these kids, I imagine there was no great difference between George Washington and David Bowie. Both now live in museums, keeping company with tapestries, suits of armor, and uncomfortable wooden chairs.

There was something more akin to the pharaoh’s tomb to the Bowie exhibit, with its treasures under glass and ceremonial costumes fitted to mannequins, some of which had Bowie death-masks for faces. Walls hung with objects of obscure significance except to the initiated: a set of heavy keys, which looked as if they opened wine cellars and priest holes; an elegant hairpin-sized cocaine spoon. Paintings and preserved telegrams. Handwritten notes mounted like butterflies in cases that you had to shoulder through the crowd to see.

After circling the rooms, you were pooled into the last, where the far wall had rows of screens showing loops of performances—Mick Rock’s “Space Oddity” video, a Reality tour “Heroes,” the Top of the Pops “Starman.” Costumed mannequins watched the show from state boxes.

Geoffrey Marsh, who co-curated the exhibit with Victoria Broackes, said that after all their work, he still had no idea who David Bowie really was. The man had escaped his memorial. There was close to nothing in the exhibit on Bowie’s family, and his friends were only there in work they had done for him. Apart from a few photos, his youth’s representatives were magazines, book jackets, film clips, LP covers; the first set piece was the Bromley bedroom where he’d dreamed up the life whose leavings would fill a museum wing.

“It’s an archive about a character,” Marsh told Dylan Jones. “It’s about this construction…I don’t think I ever got to the heart of it, the reason he did what he did.”

This was apparently Bowie’s aim—he’d feared that an exhibit of his life would seem grandiose, and while he originally planned to help curate it, at some point he pulled back, making a public statement that he’d have no connection with David Bowie Is besides being a supplier of goods. (The truth of that statement is questionable: Marsh had the sense of Bowie orchestrating things from “behind a screen, like the Wizard of Oz.”) He would just be another visitor. Bowie and his family had a private viewing in London. Broackes handed him a pair of headphones and watched him walk around his life.

The Brooklyn exhibit had a unique section. The Blackstar case held two rows of loose-leaf papers and notebooks, all of it work: lyric sheets, tracklists, sketches for costumes, the “Blackstar” bible that Bowie wields in the song’s video. This case was the last thing you saw before the exit. If you were distracted or exhausted, you could have missed it.

2.

The last three years of Bowie’s life run from the surprise release of “Where Are We Now?” on his sixty-sixth birthday to the release of Blackstar on his sixty-ninth, two days before his death, and while his play Lazarus was running at the New York Theatre Workshop. The mind can’t help but consider it to be one design. His Acts of the Apostles: resurrection, a time of last visitations, then a final farewell, with Blackstar as the Feast of the Ascension.

Tug at a thread, though, and the idea of some master-plan goodbye frays apart. Blackstar was meant to come out in autumn 2015. Its release was delayed because its videos (particularly “Lazarus”) weren’t completed. To avoid the release being neglected during the Christmas season, it was decided that Blackstar would come out on Bowie’s birthday. Nor was Blackstar meant as his last album: Bowie was working on writing the next one and researching and drafting a post-Lazarus play (which we now know was to be a musical set in 18th Century Britain, The Spectator). “I can’t stop it. It’s coming full force and I’m just creating and creating and creating,” as he reportedly wrote in an email to the director Floria Sigismondi.

Blackstar was conceived as a wilder, funnier Heathen—another album that he’d make with Tony Visconti as a side-road adventure, a dark vacation from his standard rock, with a unifying concept of spiritual and bodily decay. Visconti recalled that in the early 2000s he and Bowie had kicked around ideas for albums to do after the Reality tour, including an “electronica” record where “he’d make up a group name. He wanted to have more fun and not have the pressure of releasing another David Bowie album for a while.”

Given that he’d started cancer treatment by late 2014, he wrote much of Blackstar as a hedge: this could be the last album, let’s dress it as such, but I pray it’s not going to be. And then it was. One of Bowie’s “Last Albums” was finally the end. Even he couldn’t keep rolling sevens.

3.

“Blackstar” was planned from the start as two sections (“a two-part suite rather than two different songs,” as the keyboardist Jason Lindner recalled) that would be married in the studio with a “freeform middle bit,” as per Bowie’s emails to the band. Guitarist Ben Monder recalled Bowie’s instructions: “‘We’re going to do a section and it’s going to dissolve and morph into the next section,’ which is more like a pop tune, ‘then it’s going to morph back into the original thing with a stronger beat’.”

Where “Station to Station” has a three-part structure, an ominous opening section leading to a manic middle part which bursts open to a romping finale, “Blackstar” is circular, ending as it had begun. “We looked at [“Blackstar”] sonically as a film,” said Erin Tonkon, Blackstar’s assistant engineer. “The thread that ran through it all was David’s backing vocals with reverbs and delays. It all sounds completely different, but it’s a cohesive piece of music.”

Bowie thoroughly demoed the opening section (“the first part of it, with all of the droning stuff, is sticking to David’s plan,” bassist Tim Lefebvre said). As he had on much of the album, Mark Guiliana approximated on his drum kit the beats that Bowie had programmed (“I play some embellishments and some fills here and there, but the core groove is true to the demo”), using a tuned-down and dampened snare and a kick drum that’s often overdubbed with Lindner’s Moog Voyager: the kick beats sound like samples. While he stays within Bowie’s structure, Guiliana courses with energy, always looking to break free. It’s part of a wider dislocation in the opening section—everyone is moving at their own speed, like ships of different sizes navigating a river together. Monder finger-picks contemplative lines on guitar; Donny McCaslin darts in and out, playing shards of melodies. Lindner is the backdrop artist, contrasting the warmth of his Prophet ’08 with some colder, more industrial synth pads from his Prophet 12.

Into this coalescing world falls Bowie, in a chorale of himself, his two lead vocal lines having an interval of a fifth between them. He’s in his declamatory, liturgical voice, as on “Sue.” We’re hearing the opening of a mass. “In the villa of Allmen,” as he originally wrote for his opening line. “Stands a solitary candle.” He wails a wordless response, amen to Allmen. He changed the name to Ormen (if still singing it at times like “Allmen”), which prompted internet sleuths to unearth all known connections to Ormen, from a 1966 Swedish film (The Serpent!) to a village in Norway. But Ormen is also a response to, and a correction of, his original idea. The villa of all men is now where “men” is one choice, and the other half of the “or” conjunction is hidden.

4.

McCaslin recalled Bowie once telling him that “Blackstar” was about ISIS, and its recording coincided with ISIS’ peak territorial gains in Iraq, Syria, and Libya and its peak media attention (e.g., the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic, see above). Bowie never told this to anyone else involved in the sessions. He could have been having some interpretive fun (“here’s another clue for you all/ the Walrus was ISIS”), or talking through some ideas he’d later discard.

But it’s easy to imagine him being fascinated by the terrorist group—ISIS as a tentacled organization that lives in night and shadow until it strikes. It was something out of “Panic in Detroit,” although much of the 21st Century could be a Bowie song from the Seventies. In his rough draft lyric, there are some scratched-out lines: “I’m not a christstar…shia/ I’m not a jewstar… sunni.”

The lines in “Blackstar” that most suggest the ISIS concept are in the second verse: the day of execution at the Villa of Ormen, where the women kneel and smile when the axe falls.

It’s Ormen as an incarnation of Georges Rodenbach’s purgatorial Bruges (see “The Informer” and “Dancing Out in Space“). “Bruges-la-Morte, the dead city,” Rodenbach wrote in his novel. “A sensation of death emanated from the shuttered houses, from windows blurred like eyes in the throes of death.” A cloistered city where passion is clandestine, where residents keep small mirrors on their window ledges: “little reflecting traps that, unbeknownst to passersby, capture their antics, their smiles and gestures… transmitting all of it to the interiors of houses where someone is always keeping watch.”

The verses have the same cycling progressions, chords changing on the last beat of every measure, then again on the first beat of the next. McCaslin takes a solo, and the song seems poised to open up in his wake. Instead, the opening ceremony loop returns, with Bowie locked into his invocations and amens. The band quiets down, as if falling to sleep.

5.

It’s one of Bowie’s greatest fake-outs. Until now, “Blackstar” has kept to the shadowy path of “Sue” and “Lazarus.” But now comes a key change, a “string” line on keyboards, and a gorgeous, fragile-sounding Bowie vocal, like a shaken sun emerging after the rains have passed.

The transition is roughly thirty seconds of guitar, bass, saxophone, and vocals that sound as if they’ve gone through a sandstorm, and drums murmuring and freefalling before a keyboard progression announces the new regime. It was improvised in a single take. The band was asked to “somehow dissolve this into the next section of the tune,” Monder recalled, and “somehow we did that dissolution perfectly on the first attempt, and that’s what you’re hearing on the album—no punching-in or anything.” Each player trails off in their own way, then they come back together. It’s as if the audience has gone out to the lobby, then resumes their seats in time for the next act.

After a break (whether of a few hours or a day—by most accounts, it was the former), the band cut the second section, the “pop song” segment of “Blackstar.” In F# major, it has Lefebvre playing a looser bassline (“some Sixties Serge Gainsbourg-inspired stuff and some Justin Meldal-Johnsen kinda busy pick-bass stuff”) to complement Guiliana, who keeps to a simple pattern, building up reserves.

The last man in the villa has been put to the sword. His spirit leaves his body and someone else takes his place: a sly cut-up who sneaks into the song. Wait a sec, doc, like Bugs Bunny breaking up a black mass. The sacrificial victim dusts himself off, laughs at the crowd. He tromps on the altar, knocks over the sacred relics. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman once wrote. To hell with that, the singer says. I’m one thing, and nothing else. Not the Thin White Duke. Not a Marvel star, not a pop star, not a film star, just one thing.

There’s an army of reasons why Bowie chose the name “Blackstar” (see the list below), and one was likely the term’s astronomical sense. “We talked about black stars as a force that drives you out and drags you back in,” as Jonathan Barnbrook recalled of a conversation he had with Bowie about the album. Bowie had been fascinated by black holes for decades: the aliens who announced themselves to Ziggy Stardust were the “black hole jumpers,” for instance.

But there’s a difference. Black holes have an event horizon beyond which nothing can escape their gravity. To reach that point, they must collapse past a radius that’s a sort of “point of no return,” where not even light escapes its pull. A black star is something else, a more recent theory: a developing black hole stuck in a limbo in which the collapsing star never gets smaller than a certain radius, so that light can still escape and so the black star never becomes enveloped in an event horizon. As a group of scientists who theorized on black stars in a 2009 Scientific American article wrote:

The gravitational field around it is identical to that around a black hole, but the star’s interior is full of matter and no event horizon forms… If a black star could be peeled layer by layer like an onion, at each stage the remaining core would be a smaller black star… The black star’s collapse may one day stop just short of forming an event horizon.

Or a black star may collapse at incrementally slower and slower and slower rates, inching ever closer to an event horizon yet never forming one.

“I’m a blackstar,” Bowie sings. I’m what lies between the promise and the reality, always changing, always collapsing, never arriving.

6.

Another trail to follow. On a sketch sheet of Bowie’s “Blackstar” lyric, there’s a parenthetical, “(Lucy),” in the margin of the first “villa of Allmen” stanza.

Bowie was listening to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly in the latter stages of Blackstar, while writing lyrics and cutting vocals. And on Butterfly, “Lucy” is a Lamar character. His tormenter: Lucifer, voice of temptation and greed, as heard on Lamar’s “For Sale?”: “Lucy gon’ fill your pockets/ Lucy gon’ move your mama out of Compton…Lucy just want your trust and loyalty.” “I see it all around, man,” Lamar told an interviewer at the time. “It’s not just the positive energy that speaks to me. It’s the negative, too; it’s the evils, too—Lucy is me coming to a realization of the evil.” Later on Butterfly, at the end of his track “I,” Lamar declares “black stars can come and get me!”

Is the mid-section of “Blackstar” Bowie playing with the idea of doing a Lamar-esque character? “Lucy” as the forces being summoned in the opening section, and now in the circle is a no-fucks-given figure who stands there, mocking any wishes you ask him to fulfill. Some of Bowie’s scrapped lines for this section were “I got no gas, I don’t have coke…I’m not a no-show, I’m not a go-to…I’m not a black mark…I’m a blackstar on my way up….goldstar rockstar rappstar.” Midway through the song, at the center of it all, “Blackstar” starts to groove.

Also in rotation during the track’s making was D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, released at the tail end of 2014, and this section of “Blackstar” seems indebted to it, in the way Bowie sings “I-can’t-an-swer-why” on one fat note that he makes sound like a roaming melody, in the snap of the rhythm section (Lefebvre called D’Angelo’s Voodoo as being key among his influences, as it has been for a generation of jazz musicians), in the way the ominous monk voices of the opening section are now a call-and-response team.

When “Blackstar” drifts into its final section, resuming the key of the opening section but now with a more swinging beat, it’s the sound of a transformed music, of a revivified music. Lefebvre described his playing in the last part in various interviews as “sort of a Sly Stone or Pino Palladino mode, playing loose fills over the top of it… certain bars are pretty jagged but they kept it all… that humpy kind of eighth-note thing.”

The ceremony starts again. The same lines are recited, the same movements are made at the altar. Loops and loops of motion, like the jittering dancers of the “Blackstar” video. But something is new. Something has gone and something else is there in its place. “Blackstar” starts to crumble from within.

Its last minute slows in tempo, with Monder using the shimmer effect on his Strymon blueSky Reverberator pedal (“it has that upper register sheen to it and all of those nice overtones”). McCaslin is a small flock of birds, his flute and clarinet and saxophone notes pecking and squawking. A synthesizer starts up in response, excitedly, making contact, but then there’s a hard close. Project cancelled.

7.

There are other interpretations, of course.

“Blackstar” is an Elvis Presley homage. A 1960 Western directed by Don Siegel, Flaming Star was the post-Army Elvis’ return to “serious” film acting, with Presley playing a half-Kiowa, half-Texan renegade (poster tagline: “The White Man’s Song Was on His Lips… But an Indian War Cry Was in His Heart!”). Originally called Black Star, the film’s title change meant that Presley’s theme song had to be scrapped, as he now needed to sing “Flaming Star.” The original recording was only available on bootlegs until the Nineties.

“Black Star” is Presley’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”: a horseman spies doom in the sky and rides faster, trying to keep his black star behind him. “There’s a lot of living I gotta do,” he implores, but no one’s listening. Likelihood: Bowie and Presley shared a birthday, he’d covered Presley before, the lyric has obvious resonances. If it was a subconscious reference, Bowie’s subconscious deserves a posthumous award.

A black star is a cancerous lesion. “Black star” specifically applies to a lesion on the breast (also called a radial scar) that’s generally benign or precancerous. Someone Googling on the morning of Bowie’s death likely came upon it and eureka: Bowie was secretly telling his fans that he had cancer. Likelihood: Too inaccurate, too pat.

“Black star” is the name of Saturn for “ancient religions.” “Saturn is referred to as Black Star in ancient Judaic belief,” as per an unsourced line on Wikipedia that has spread through the internet like a norovirus. It’s complete hooey, conflating all sorts of things, such as the belief that worshiping a black cube (such as the Kaaba in Mecca) is to worship the alchemical symbol for Saturn. Likelihood: Low. That said, this is the writer of “Station to Station” and “Loving the Alien” we’re talking about.

“Blackstar” refers to a government space conspiracy. In March 2006, the trade magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology published an article that claimed the US government was running a secret orbital spaceplane program known as Blackstar, a program yet to be verified or acknowledged in the two decades since. Likelihood: Low. Though, again, it’s Bowie.

A black star refers to: Episode five of the first series of Peaky Blinders (2013) where gangster Tommy Shelby plans a “black star” day on which he’ll eliminate his rival (almost certainly); Talib Kweli and Mos Def’s hip-hop group, named after Marcus Garvey’s shipping line, which was also referenced in a host of magnificent reggae songs, e.g., Fred Locks’ “Black Star Liner” and Culture’s “Black Star Liner Must Come” (possible); a Greek anarchist group active around the turn of the 21st Century (too random); leadoff track of Avril Lavigne’s 2011 Goodbye Lullaby and the name of her first fragrance (epic if so); a series of crime novels by Johnston McCulley from a century ago (“the Black Star had terrorized the city for the past four months. Whenever a master crime was committed a tiny black star had been found pasted on something at the scene of operations”) (not random enough); title of a 1969 novel by Morton Cooper described by The Crisis as “a black girl’s search for identity in a white world she cannot understand or control” (could be the Rosetta Stone to the whole album); “Chemosh, or black star, who was reputed God of the Moabites,” as per Iconography: A Tract for the Times, an 1852 treatise by “Vigil” (Bowie probably did read this); a short-lived 1981 cartoon in which astronaut John Blackstar is swept through a black hole into another universe, where he becomes the champion of the “Trobbit” people in their fight against the cruel Overlord (another possible Rosetta Stone).

Villa of Ormen = “Lover of Iman.” Likelihood: A sweet sentiment, but you know that he would’ve done a proper anagram.

8.

There were no Bowie music videos of real significance in the years after ‘hours…’. He said at the time that making them was a waste of money, as they wouldn’t get played. Then in 2013, with YouTube and his website as his personal MTV, he returned to video. As he no longer toured or gave interviews, his videos became his music’s primary supplement.

Johan Renck directed the “Blackstar” video, drawing from Bowie’s sketches. For instance, having a trio of dancers wriggle and convulse came from Bowie noticing how in Max Fleischer cartoons of the Thirties (like Popeye), animators would put marginal characters into loops of motion, repeating actions in the background of a scene for half a minute. The video also has a young woman with a tail (Renck recalled Bowie saying that he thought the idea of gender was changing; this was his attempt to symbolize it); a planetscape out of Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon; a jeweled skull in an astronaut’s helmet, like a Fabergé saint’s relic; an empty town that’s basically the Goblin City of Labyrinth; a trio of crucified scarecrows who start bumping and grinding.

Bowie played three characters. A blind, bandaged figure who sings the opening section, whom he dubbed “Button Eyes” (see “Lazarus”) and whose look he’d designed anticipating that he could lose his hair via his medical treatments. An imposing figure, brandishing a blackstar bible like a country preacher, and posing as if he’s in the vanguard of a Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda poster: he’s the rationalist/control element (he never sings). And finally a soft-shoe artist dancing up in the brain-attic (a set with a similar triangular design as the artist’s loft in David Mallet’s “Look Back In Anger” video), who takes the middle section. Cut the symbolism any way you’d like. The idea of “Bowie” severed in thirds: dying mortal, immortal scamp, dictatorial ego.

Some of the video was stunning and eerie, some of it was silly (a coven summons a Lovecraftian demon out of Seventies Doctor Who; the demon attacks the bumping-and-grinding scarecrows for the video’s climax—you remember that this is the man who did the Glass Spider tour). The “Blackstar” video is the song’s preset interpretations. Use what Bowie gives you, or break it up and rework it, or drag it into the recycle bin and start fresh.

9.

Blackstar was the digital equivalent of Tony Visconti’s analog editing heroics on Scary Monsters. McCaslin’s group said they were stunned upon hearing the album. Some tracks they expected to hear weren’t there, some pieces that seemed destined for the scrapheap instead had been quarried for a lead riff or solo passage. The master mix of Blackstar drew on everything from Bowie’s home demos to in-studio “mistakes” to late-in-the-day overdubs. As McCaslin said of the Blackstar sessions, “David and Tony were gathering information, laying it down, then the two of them would comb through everything.”

Some of the title track’s most striking instrumentation was owed to improvisations, such as McCaslin’s flutes in the outro (“something I had added on an overdub day, when I was there just overdubbing flute parts”) and Ben Monder’s repetitive guitar line, which Bowie and Visconti promoted to a motif and Bowie used as the basis of his vocal melody.

With Bowie’s vocals completed by early June 2015, Bowie and Visconti planned to mix the album at New York’s Electric Lady but learned that the room they wanted was booked by British engineer Tom Elmhirst, who was mixing Adele’s 25 and Frank Ocean’s blond at the time. It was a final bit of serendipity— Bowie asked Elmhirst to mix Blackstar, with Bowie and Visconti showing up each afternoon for critiques. Elmhirst’s work, done in about ten days, was a finishing coat. He made the album’s seven tracks flow together sumptuously (he soldered “Blackstar” and segued “Dollar Days” into “I Can’t Give Everything Away”), and created a narrative in the mix, with the last two pieces mixed more softly (almost “blurred” in at times) than the more dynamic Side One tracks.

“Blackstar” kept changing. Like “Bring Me the Disco King,” it debuted in a remixed form—a fragment used in the opening titles of The Last Panthers. A trailer aired a month before the single’s release. For Last Panthers, Visconti and Bowie took a verse from the third section of “Blackstar” and added different guitar tracks and effects than those heard on the album.

And upon learning that iTunes wouldn’t allow a user to purchase “Blackstar” individually if it was over ten minutes, Bowie whacked around a minute’s worth to get the track down to 9:57. “It’s total bullshit,” Visconti told Rolling Stone. “But David was adamant it be the single, and he didn’t want both an album version and a single version, since that gets confusing.” So “Blackstar” is both an intricately-designed piece of music and has a few last-minute edits—e.g., the cut at 9:00 and the abrupt disappearance of McCaslin’s saxophone at 7:42—done to conform with Steve Jobs’ edict for a pop single.

10.

Though I imagine most have heard Blackstar on CD or via download or streaming, Bowie’s ideal form for the album was its LP release, with its Barnbrook-designed five-point-star cutaway gatefold cover and a thick, glossy paper stock that loves fingerprints. According to McCaslin, Bowie originally wanted Blackstar to have a vinyl-only physical release, and a worksheet in the David Bowie Is exhibit lists sequenced sides for a two-LP set (one provisional side: “Blaze”/ “Lazarus”/ “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore”/ “No Plan”).

“I wanted to make it very much a physical object,” Barnbrook said of the Blackstar LP, in late 2015. “Vinyl is in an interesting place at the moment, similar to letterpress, where the craft and tactile quality of it is everything. So that’s why the cover is cut away and you can see the physical record—the opposite of the digital download. I wanted to give it the feeling that it contained something quite threatening.”

The LP is a souvenir book from the farewell tour that never happened. Solidly black, with even its lettering a lighter shade of black, it’s the paper and vinyl embodiment of the title track, as imposing as the monoliths of 2001: A Space Odyssey. A dense light-absorbing square, an event horizon at 33 1/3 rpm (its CD cover has a white background with black images—the universe beyond). “The role of the LP cover is different today,” Barnbrook said in a 2016 interview. “(It) has to complement all this, be robust on different technologies, quickly identifiable and stand up to all the noise around it.”

On the LP’s back cover, track times are as prominent as titles: each strip of time (9:57, 4:40, 6:22) the price of a song. Barnbrook worked hideaways into the LP sleeve and booklet: a photograph of Bowie overlaid with a matrix of lines that Barnbrook said was the “depression a star makes in spacetime”; the starfield photograph in the inside gatefold, with a constellation of a “starman” figure. Stars that appear when the gatefold is held up to direct light. Using ultraviolet creates 3-D effects and, allegedly, Shroud of Turin-esque images of Bowie’s face on the spinning vinyl.

Album and song title are officially ★ (Unicode +2605). Bowie had thought future typography letterforms would become the new hieroglyphics, with emojis in texts as a harbinger. “People [are] creating whole narratives out of them, as well as using them in everyday communication,” Barnbrook recalled him saying of emojis. “Will there be a time when we use only these to express thought?”

His last album cover doesn’t show his face or his name (or so it seems). A hard break with tradition. A Bowie album cover almost always has a photo or drawing of him, his name, and its title (almost always a song). The Next Day began the process by obscuring his face. On Blackstar, Bowie is the man who isn’t there: you have to know how to look for him. B O W I E appears in star symbols. He’s handed over his name to the future.

11.

To compare “Blackstar” to “Station to Station” is inevitable—he must have intended some correspondence, if only for his listeners, between two of his epic songs. Roughly the same length, they hold the same position on their respective albums.

“Station to Station” was the work of a worn-out, addicted, lonely man who was exiled in a city that he hated, who dreamed of transformation and escape while fearing that it was too late. “Blackstar” was made by someone whom the writer of “Station to Station” could never have imagined being: a family man whose circle was confined to people whom he loved and trusted. A man who could stand outside of the personae he’d created, could even take a walk around them in a museum. Look, there’s the coke spoon, the koto, the wasp-waisted suits that he can’t imagine ever having fit into. The Thin White Duke Bowie could have conceived of something like “Blackstar,” but he never could have made it: there are too many jokes, for one thing.

It’s as if Bowie’s covering a packed-up self, playing a Variation in the Style of Thomas Jerome Newton.

To chronicle the music of David Bowie is to chronicle a decline in rock music. A decline, because it’s not the decline of rock by any means. There are great rock musicians today; there will be others when you and I are dead. But the centrality of a certain type of rock music, particularly one that was marketed to the working- and middle-class white youth of the late 20th Century, has fallen away. Rock music may well mean less to many young people today. The myths no longer have the same kick. Rock ‘n’ roll closed as many doors as it opened; it oppressed as much as it purported to liberate—we have only just begun to come to terms with how many people, particularly young femmes, were exploited in the age of the rock star. The subject of this essay is one of many with an allegation of abusing their power and celebrity at the time. If young people today have passions stronger than a love of rock music, if they can see through the star-maker machinery, well, all power and strength to them.

And with the end of rock as a centerpiece of youth culture, there are fewer chances of a “David Bowie” coming along again. He’d lived by tacking and weaving, going to obscure corners of the map, returning with what he’d picked up along the borders. Still, he’d needed the map. Perhaps we no longer do. David Bowie today is a language, a set of precepts and responses, a code that anyone with the requisite amounts of style, guts, shamelessness, and weirdness can access. Unlike his music, it’s in the public domain.

“Blackstar” is the dissolution of “David Bowie,” a commercial enterprise created by an ambitious London suburbanite around 1965. Time to move on. Take your passport and shoes, he says. Get some pills for the plane. I’ll take you there, but I’m not coming with you. In the grand Bowie tradition, “Blackstar” is sillier than it seems and more sublime than it should be. “I’m the great I Am,” he sings, an audacious moment in a life of them. Bowie as Yahweh (“I AM THAT I AM,” as Yahweh boomed at Moses), one who’s cashed in his shares.

12.

Beyond Blackstar, No Plan, the unreleased outtakes from the Blackstar sessions (which Visconti said in 2016 he thought might appear in a deluxe set one day), and the recent revelation of Bowie’s idea for an 18th Century musical, there remain five last songs.

These are the demos that Bowie made at home, in his final months in New York (as per Visconti). Were these meant for The Spectator? No one but his those in his inner circle have heard them, and perhaps not even them. The question is whether we, as an audience, should hear them one day.

There’s the argument for history. If we found five last poems by Keats written before his death, should we not read them? A Kafka story? A half-finished Woolf manuscript? The world grows rounder with new “lost” works; our knowledge of the artist broadens. Hasn’t my blog, haven’t my books, been a rummaging through a magician’s cabinets, guessing what went into his tricks, where he stole from, which ones worked, which blew up in his face? To hear his last demos, to guess where Bowie planned to go next, to imagine the music that he’d never get make: it would be invaluable.

Then there are the artist’s intentions to consider. Bowie rarely made sketch work public, hardly ever released demos (even the posthumous archive box sets have been guarded in what they reveal). If he was ailing and not up to par when he made these recordings, what good would it do for us to hear them? Shouldn’t we remember him as he’d wanted us to—the creator of a strong, meticulously-designed album?

A final perspective. There are five new David Bowie songs, songs that we know nothing about, not even their names. We may never hear them, but we know that they exist. Let them be unheard. Let this be our gift to the future. There will never be a last David Bowie song if there are always five more to come. The end of the David Bowie story is that it doesn’t end. There will always be another chapter to write. An old-time ambassador, may he forever keep pushing ahead.

★

Recorded: (backing tracks) 20 March 2015, Magic Shop; (flute overdubs) ca. April 2015; (vocals) 2-3 April, 15 May 2015, Human Worldwide.

David Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Donny McCaslin: tenor saxophone, alto flute, C flute; Ben Monder: guitar; Jason Lindner: Wurlitzer, Prophet ‘08, Prophet 12, Mopho X4, Moog Voyager, Micromoog, clavinet; Tim Lefebvre: bass; Mark Guiliana: drums; Tony Visconti: string synths. Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Kevin Killen, Visconti.

First release: 20 November 2015 (UK #61, US #78).

Sources: Above all, Nicholas Pegg’s The Complete David Bowie. Leah Kardos’ Blackstar Theory is an essential guide to this period.

Quotes: Dylan Jones, David Bowie: A Life (“the reason he did what he did…handed him headphones”); Rolling Stone, 11 February 2016 (“coming full force…not have the pressure”); Rolling Stone, 4 December 2015 (“two part suite”); DownBeat, May 2016 (“morph into the next section”); Forbes, 26 February 2018 (“cohesive piece of music”); Premier Guitar, 15 January 2016 (“sticking to David’s plan…somehow dissolve this…busy pick-bass stuff”); Modern Drummer, 26 February 2016 (“groove is true to the demo”); Rolling Stone, 25 November 2015 (“He told me it was about ISIS,” says McCaslin. (McCaslin’s ISIS assertion is news to Guiliana and Visconti, who say they have no idea what the song is about.”) Also the source of Visconti, “total bullshit…adamant it’d be the single”; Irish Times, 13 April 2016 (“we talked about black stars”); Uncut, January 2016 (“David and Tony were gathering information…robust on different technologies”); Kendrick Lamar, MTV News interview by Rob Markman, 31 March 2015 (“I see it all around, man”); The Observer, 20 January 2016 (“added on overdub day”); Elmhirst quotes are mostly from an interview with the Grammys website, 15 May 2017; Creative Review, 26 November 2015 (physical object…quite threatening”).

And black star theory! Carlos Barcello, Stefano Liberati, Sebastiano Sonego and Matt Visser are the authors of “Black Stars, Not Black Holes,” in Scientific American, October 2009. I remain grateful to Deanna Kerry, who was an atmospheric physics graduate student when I originally wrote this piece in 2018, and clarified the theory and improved my none-more-layman’s understanding of black stars.