Blackstar – David Bowie

Blackstar is Bowie’s 25th and final studio album. While the word “final” may carry less weight in a time when a seemingly infinite number of bands that were thought to have broken up permanently are now reforming (ie Guns and Roses or LCD Soundsystem to point a finger at just two), the term carries weight for Bowie. He passed of liver cancer a mere two days after Blackstar was released. Bowie knew he was dying, and he knew how to use the short time he had left before reunited with the Spiders from Mars.

Don’t let the short track list of a mere 7 songs fool you: most songs clock in at around 5 minutes or more, with the opener itself stretching for nearly 10 minutes. Bold move, Mr. Stardust.

The majority of these songs creep along at a slow to mid tempo pace, dripping with synthesizers and saxophone. Elements of dance, goth, and especially experimental jazz are prevalent throughout the record. Bowie’s long time producer, Toni Visconti, stated that they had been listening to “a lot of Kendrick Lamar,” which would explain the elements of jazz throughout the album, as the rapper is known for using instrumentals of that genre in his songs.

One of the most notable songs on the album is Lazarus, which was released as a single late last year and was supported by a strikingly dark music video, which matched the song’s mood. It’s a slow, morose number about Bowie coming to terms with his fate. The drums shuffle along , and Donny McCaslin’s saxophone breathes a melancholy sigh as though it too has realized it’s about to pass. The guitar is relatively bare, and only peaks its head around the corner here and there to leave a solemn remark. Bowie’s voice grows in urgency, like it doesn’t have quite enough time to say what it needs.

Bowie’s final effort left the world with a serious case of hindsight bias. In retrospect, it seems so obvious that Blackstar was about his fight with cancer, as well as his fight with himself. He was pushing the boundaries of music quite literally until he laid upon his deathbed. The man wrote his own epitaph and chose all the right words.