From near the start to the end, from pre-Ziggy to postmortem—the vinyl re-release of Bowie At The Beeb and final album Blackstar present stinging, electric bookends to a story you never believed could be snuffed out by something as plebian as death.
That David Bowie closed that book musing smartly and wearily about death’s door (floating toward Heaven on “Lazarus”), the illness that claimed him (“Blackstar” is slang for cancer spots), critical evaluation (“I’m dying to push their backs … fool them all again,” from “Dollar Days”) is pretty damn canny. Even the idea of knowing him (“Seeing more and feeling less/Saying no but meaning yes/This is all I ever meant” from “I Can’t Give Everything Away”) is given the boot. And yet …
Heralded for keeping cool distance, every bit of Blackstar gets right up in there, into every crevice (yours, his) with its elongated Middle Eastern sonic twists, soulful vocal swoons and ambient synth-and-sax gurgle on the title tune. The twisted jaunty cabaret of “’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore” finds him referencing his gender-bending past (“she punched me like a dude”), an ideal so now it stings. Sick as he was, Bowie wanted to leave listeners with something audacious; something that spoke to the human condition (mostly his), to the savage violence man interacts with throughout time, to love and antilove—all done at full volume Bowie-croon and to a soundtrack (an altered form of avant-garde jazz) that he longed to play.
Kudos to producer Tony Visconti and the tight jazz team around them for making Blackstar dynamic. If Bowie indeed knew time was tight and death’s release was imminent, this treatise to magic and loss is a gorgeous way to say goodbye.
—A.D. Amorosi
