My Month of Bowie, day 26: 'Blackstar' (2016)

Blackstar is part of this nutritious breakfast.

The album: Blackstar (ISO, 2016)

This is the end, my friends.

My thoughts: Charles Foster Kane left us with one mysterious word: "Rosebud." David Robert Jones left us with an entire farewell album. Is the latter more revealing than the former? That's debatable. After listening to Blackstar at least three times, I'm still honestly not sure what message (if any) David Bowie was trying to convey with his final batch of songs. Perhaps he was merely signaling to the people on his homeworld that he was ready to be beamed up. Or maybe he had a sled called "Blackstar" when he was a child.

David Bowie's 26th and final album was released on his 69th birthday on January 8, 2016. The man himself died just two days later. What could be more final than that? It reminds me of how cartoonist Charles Schulz (1922-2000) died the day before the final installment of Peanuts appeared in newspapers. 

Sometimes, an artist's final work—the last album, the last movie, the last novel—takes on an added significance because the creator's death was unforeseen. Take John Lennon's Double Fantasy (1980) as an example. Songs like "Just Like Starting Over" and "Watching the Wheels" meant something different to us when Lennon was shot. But Blackstar was consciously conceived as a finale. David knew he was dying when he made this. While Bowie's lyrics are often inscrutable, especially on the LP's elaborate, ten-minute title track, the overall mood of this record is one of calm, resolute acceptance. He doesn't sound sad or frightened but simply like a man who has reached the end of a long, somewhat wearying journey.

And, one last time, Bowie managed to defy my expectations. I genuinely thought Blackstar would be an album of dirges and that the instrumentation would be very sparse, leaving Bowie's voice exposed and vulnerable. (I guess I was thinking of Johnny Cash's late-career recordings.) In retrospect, my  assumptions about Blackstar were way off. Bowie never made that kind of album in his life. Why would he do that on the last one? It would have been out of character. So the only thing stark about this album is its minimalist cover art. And, while there's a ballad or two on this LP, it's not a mope-fest by any means.

As with their previous collaborations, David Bowie and producer Tony Visconti give this album a rich, fulfilling, multilayered sound. The biggest surprise here, at least to me, is the drumming. There is some absolutely furious percussion on Blackstar, as if the singer's pall bearers were attending a rave later that same day. Another surprise was a track called "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore." The title is inspired by a play from the 1620s, but the lyrics reminded me a lot of "She's Crafty" by The Beastie Boys. It's like the Beasties went to the finest finishing school in Europe and came out talking like proper English gentlemen.

Naturally, this album had me thinking about death, always a fun topic to ponder in the autumn as the leaves die all around us. Do you want your death to come as a complete surprise, so you don't spend weeks or months worrying about it in advance? Or do you want some time to prepare for it? I don't know. There's something to be said for both. 

Next: So what did I learn from all this?