Scars That Can't Be Seen
David Bowie's Blackstar
There are certain albums that are inextricably connected to the memory of an artist’s death. Oftentimes these are posthumous releases after particularly surprising and tragic deaths, as in the case of both Tupac with The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (1996) and The Notorious B.I.G. with Life After Death (1997). Sometimes, a “death album”, as I’ll term it, becomes such because the tragedy comes after its release, and the work is then a shrine to lost potential, like in the case of Jeff Buckley’s Grace (1994) or Nick Drake’s Pink Moon (1972). And while these works can be poignant, hinting at the tragedy to come, they weren’t made knowing death was near (even if some suspected).
There are, of course, a few exceptions. Johnny Cash recorded his entire series of American records in the 90s and 2000s knowing that it would be his final chapter. J Dilla, even more timely, released the monumental album Donuts (2006) just three days before he died of a cardiac arrest brought on by his illness. And again, ten years ago, David Bowie released his final album just two days before his own demise, well aware it was coming.
Bowie’s career was defined by mutations, and that continued right up until the end. The album he released two days before his death (on his 69th birthday), Blackstar, is a notable artistic recalibration in a career full of artistic recalibrations. There are a few remnants of his prior album – 2013’s The Next Day – in Blackstar’s instrumentation; but never had Bowie committed so thoroughly to the experimental jazz sound that defines his last album. Beyond just the new sonic texture Bowie was exploring, Blackstar announces itself as a darker, stranger, more ethereal album than Bowie had put out in decades, starting from the very first track.
The album kicks off with the eponymous track (stylized “★”), a 10-minute, three act story that sees Bowie playing different characters, marked by different voices, accompanied by discordant jazz drums and horns in the first half, and a bass and strings-heavy funk instrumental in the second half. The atmosphere of the song is otherworldly, and its lyrics make allusions to, among other things, Nordic mythology, occultism, and the fall of Lucifer. It is, obviously, dense. The song leaves itself open to vast interpretations; but fans have largely agreed on a read that tells the story of a man in conversation with the angel of death as he’s transitioning to the afterlife.
What’s less agreed upon is the meaning of the “black star” that the album and song refer to again and again. In gravitational theory, a black star is like a black hole, but it has no event horizon. Meaning, in overly simplistic terms, that though a star has died, its light has not vanished (as it would in a black hole). Metaphorically, this aligns with Blackstar as Bowie’s “death” album – the final remnants of a body of work that will long outlive him. There are lyrics in the song that lend themself to this clean interpretation as well: “something happened on the day he died/Spirit rose a meter and stepped aside”; “how many times does an angel fall?”
Yet, the definition we get more directly in the song is more opaque. The repetitive backing vocals that persist through the second half of the song (sung by Bowie in a strained, alien-like voice) define the concept of a black star solely through negation:
I’m a blackstar
I’m not a gangster
I’m a blackstar
I’m not a filmstar
I’m a blackstar
I’m not a popstar
I’m a blackstar
I’m not a marvel star
The non-narrative point Bowie seems to be making, addressing the audience directly, is that he (and perhaps all people) are defined by the fact that they can’t be defined. It’s a mode of deception inherent to Bowie’s oeuvre. He enjoyed his unknowability, so it makes sense that he found truth in the idea of the gravitational black star: you can only have a theory of what someone is, never an understanding. In a career composed of many many masks, it’s a reminder that none of them quite told the real story.
The album is full of lyrics and full tracks that can be parsed for Bowie’s thoughts on his own demise. “Dollar Days”, the penultimate track on the album, feels again like Bowie speaking directly to his audience, offering a farewell, saying, “I’m falling down/Don’t believe for just one second I’m forgetting you” and ending with a repetitive refrain of “I’m trying to, I’m dying to.” Blackstar ends with “I Can’t Give Everything” away, another song in which Bowie takes time to address the audience directly, and one that now lives on as his very final statement. In the song’s lyrics, Bowie repeats the song’s title again and again “I can’t give everything away,” in a tone both reflective and sorrowful. Here, it’s easy to read this as Bowie bemoaning his inability to get all he needs out before his death, and perhaps, once again, playing the deceiver. “I can’t give everything away,” he says, refusing to give a straight answer to any of his work, leaving it for us to make sense of after he’s gone.
The discourse at the time of the album’s release was dominated, unavoidably, by Bowie’s illness and death, especially present on the lyrics of “★”, “Dollar Days” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away”. In retrospect, however, for all of its weight, Blackstar feels less novel than it did at first. Many of the themes that felt distinctly tied to Bowie’s own journey toward death, are actually just the final sentence on a nearly career-long dialogue. The parallels can be found in yet another 10-minute intro track.
Forty years before Blackstar, Bowie released Station to Station, an album that began another, and perhaps the most important, artistic shift in his career. Like Blackstar, Station to Station begins with a 10-minute, genre bending, disorienting intro track. It was Bowie announcing a new era. Having fully transitioned from his glam-rock of the early 70s, Bowie released a comparatively uninspired record Young Americans in 1975 which, despite its hits, feels like Bowie merely imitating the sounds that inspired him, instead of finding himself in them. He himself referred to the record as “plastic soul” and later dismissed it as “the phoniest R&B I’ve ever heard.”
Station to Station was a far more actualized record. Bowie maintained some of the soul and funk of his previous record, but blended it with krautrock, electronic music, and his rock roots to create a true new path forward. Over the length of the song, Bowie transitions from a haunting, almost marching piano riff, mixed with bevy of sounds both musical and mechanical, to a more recognizable Bowie sound of rock and soul, albeit a panicked one, building to a pleading crescendo in which he repeats a refrain of “it’s too late - to be grateful/it’s too late - to be late again/it’s too late - to be hateful” again and again and again. The experimentation that defined Station to Station was inspired by, to that point, the darkest point in Bowie’s life. On that same opening track he explicitly says, multiple times, “it’s not the side-effects of the cocaine/I’m thinking that it must be love!” Bowie’s drug habit had reached its own desperate crescendo.
Bowie was living in Los Angeles while recording Station to Station and filming the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie plays an alien who has come to Earth and, notably, can not die. During this period he became intensely isolated, confining himself to his room for days, doing drugs, writing music, and having full fledged mental breakdowns. At its worst, Bowie’s diet consisted entirely of red and green peppers, milk, and cocaine for extended periods. He claimed to have hallucinations of bodies falling outside of his window and believed the Rolling Stones were sending him hidden messages in their music. He often went three or more days without sleeping. He was meant to record the soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth; but, weighing just 80 pounds and high out of his mind, he collapsed in the studio during the Station to Station sessions. Either due to burnout, lack of creative control, or a scrambled psyche, he never finished the film’s score.
What followed the tumultuous end of the Station to Station phase of his career became the fundamental artistic shift in Bowie’s career. He left Los Angeles (a city he later referred to as “the most vile piss-pot in the world” and said it should be “wiped off the face of the Earth,”) and moved, first to France and then West Berlin with Iggy Pop of the Stooges. Both men were seeking isolation in a new place in an effort to kick the drug habits that they believed to be killing them.
Over the next three years, Bowie released three albums: Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977), and Lodger (1979) in a run that is now famously known as “The Berlin Trilogy.” Even though Low was mostly recorded in France and Lodger was mostly recorded in Switzerland, it is widely understood that the three albums came out of Bowie’s recovery period in Berlin, while he was quite literally saving his own life. Through collaboration with Iggy Pop and Brian Eno during his time in Europe, Bowie threw away the Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke personas of his previous eras and re-introduced the world to David Bowie as himself, with a distinctly different energy and sound. While Station to Station contains the seeds of some of what was to come from Bowie’s music, the Berlin Trilogy is fully immersed in Bowie’s krautrock and ambient influences. The sounds are more varied, the structures more experimental, and the energy of the albums markedly different from the barely-contained psychosis of Station to Station. It is as if, song by song, album by album, you can sense Bowie reconstructing his mind and choosing a path forward as you work through each record. This doesn’t just reveal itself through Bowie’s tone, but explicitly in the lyrics of all three albums as well.
The “real” Bowie, crying for help, was able to break through the veneer of the Thin White Duke character that he sang as on Station to Station. Notably, “Word on a Wing”, the album’s third track, finds Bowie in conversation with God (a pretty un-Bowie thing to do at that point in his career). On that track, he says the following:
Just because I believe don’t mean I don’t think as well
Don’t have to question everything in Heaven or Hell
Lord, I kneel and offer you my word on a wing
And I’m trying hard to fit into your scheme of things
It’s safer than a strange land, but I still care for myself
And I don’t stand in my own light
Clearly, Bowie was aware, even if just subconsciously, that his life was unsustainable. There was a real sense of life and death in Bowie’s music on Station to Station, but only if you dig for it. In the Berlin trilogy, with no personas to hide behind, it became unavoidable.
The first of those albums, Low, is a work clearly composed in the early days of recovery. As he returns to his right state of mind, we follow his path, reliving the worst of it, fighting through. On “Always Crashing in the Same Car” Bowie recounts a real incident from the height of his addiction in which he rammed his car repeatedly into a drug dealer’s car, then drove in circles for hours in an underground garage. On three different tracks he refers to isolating himself in his room. One of these is “Sound and Vision” – one of Bowie’s most famous songs, and the namesake of this Substack. He sings:
Pale blinds drawn all day
Nothing to read, nothing to say
Blue, blue
I will sit right down
Waiting for the gift of sound and vision
Those lyrics have been enough to induce tears from me in the past. In my mind’s eye, Bowie was a man realizing how close death was, working to reclaim his mind, waiting for the joy of seeing the world clearly again. Low ends with five straight tracks that are purely instrumentals. The last of them, “Subterraneans” is a track Bowie finished for the score of The Man Who Fell to Earth – a final goodbye to that tumultuous period and what was lost.
“Heroes” features the song “Blackout” which can easily be understood as a song about Bowie’s repeated collapses during the worst of his drug use as he begs in the song “get me to a doctor!” and later repeats, “get me on my feet, get me off the street” as the song fades out. The last of the trilogy, Lodger, features another personal favorite Bowie track, “Move On”, in which Bowie reflects on his need to do as the title suggests and seek new experiences in new places, perhaps as a way to satiate his curiosity and creativity, perhaps as a way to protect himself from his worst habits. A later track, “Look Back in Anger” paints a picture of an angel visiting Bowie (recalling shades of “Word on a Wing”), telling him “it’s time we should be going.” Through all three albums, and even with Station to Station as a prelude, Bowie was working through a relationship with death that he very suddenly needed to consider.
The point being, for all of the death and philosophizing on Blackstar, Bowie had been here before. He’d looked over the edge into the abyss 40 years prior and, perhaps subconsciously, he re-accessed that part of his mind when it came time to peer into it again. There is the major sonic and tonal shift, and the opaque, death-ridden lyrics connecting Blackstar to the Berlin trilogy in Bowie’s discography. There is a feeling that Bowie is reconnecting with his old self, recognizing similar feelings and being drawn back to that time; and the connection is not always merely implicit but, at times, explicit. The aforementioned closing track on Blackstar, “I Can’t Give Everything Away” opens with a sample taken directly off of Low (the song “New Career in a New Town”). Here, there is no argument needed. Bowie himself creates the bridge between the two albums, the two eras, and the two states of mind.
Blackstar is Bowie’s death record. But you get the feeling that he made several “death records”, always leaving enough hints that this could be the end, always living somewhere between here and the next world, out in space. So many of those parts of Bowie are present on Blackstar because he was approaching death, yes, but also because he was seemingly always thinking about it. From the time he found himself on the floor of that recording studio in Los Angeles, Bowie painted with hues of death in the color palette of his work. In a 1995 interview, following the release of his concept album 1. Outside, Bowie said, “I love death, the more of it the better. I think it’s a good thing.” It was always there somewhere. Perhaps had Bowie died in the 70s, we would comb through Station to Station or any of the Berlin trilogy and find new meaning in their lyrics and sounds. But he didn’t. He lived another 40 years and, through them, always kept the line with death open, whenever it was ready.
The heart of Blackstar and the most poignant connection to Bowie’s previous near-death experience, is its third track, “Lazarus.” The song was originally composed for an off-broadway musical of the same name. The other songs in the show are all from Bowie’s catalog, and the story of the musical is a continuation of Bowie’s character from The Man Who Fell to Earth – the alien who can’t die and must make sense of life on our planet. “Lazarus”, which opens the show, starts with the lyrics “Look up here, man, I’m in heaven.” Despite having written it for the musical, it’s equally at home on Blackstar. Bowie toes the line between this world and the next throughout, until the track winds to a triumphant end, full of blaring horns as Bowie sings out:
Oh, I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird
Oh, I’ll be free
Ain’t that just like me?
It was just like him, and it had been for a very long time.