Ten years ago, David Bowie released his final album. The record had been in the world for only two days when he died, and in the days that followed, the meaning fans had begun to attach to it shifted under their feet. Blackstar dropped on January 8, 2016, Bowie's sixty-ninth birthday. He died on January 10, with the news breaking publicly in the early hours of January 11. The album that had been received on Friday as a strange, exciting late-career swerve had become, by Monday morning, a goodbye letter.
There is a lot to say about Bowie, and a lot that has been said about this album. Today we want to focus on three things in particular. The space theme that runs through the record more openly than many listeners noticed at the time. The band Bowie chose to record it with, especially the saxophonist who became its lead voice. And the shape of its reception in those first days, which can be tracked in real time on a fan thread that captured the album rewriting itself in front of the same audience that had only just begun to evaluate it.
David Bowie, Blackstar (Album Cover)
A cosmic document
Bowie's career is bracketed by space at both ends. He arrived in 1969 with Space Oddity and Major Tom, the doomed astronaut drifting in his tin can. Forty-six years later, in the music video for the title track of Blackstar, Major Tom's skull sits on a desk as a relic. Whatever Bowie meant to do with this record, he was knowingly closing a long loop.
The artwork pushes the framing further than most listeners realised at the time. The cover star image is credited to NASA in the CD booklet. On the vinyl, the black paper backing the cut-out star reveals a hidden starfield when the foldout sleeve is held up to a light source. The lyrics for Girl Loves Me are laid out as a reproduction of the plaques NASA originally attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes in the 1970s, the engraved diagrams designed to greet any extraterrestrial intelligence that might intercept them. Other lyric pages mimic constellations and zodiac forms. The designer, Jonathan Barnbrook, has said the symbol on the cover came from a conversation with William S. Burroughs, and compared its function to Egyptian hieroglyphs and emojis, a self-contained image carrying its own freight.
The music continues the framing the artwork sets up. There is something ancient about the record in the way the band leans on drones, modal harmony, and melismatic vocal lines. There is also something futuristic about it, with the heavy vocal processing, the doubling and editing, and the long reverb tails that read as sheer vastness. It is a fantastic combination; reflective of a film set on a world that is older than ours, or has outlasted ours. Dune comes to mind, as does Tarkovsky's Solaris.
Saxophone moves through this world doing the work it has always done in Bowie's music. From Aladdin Sane through Jump They Say through Blackstar, Bowie used the saxophone for unease rather than swing, mystery as opposed to warmth. His own first instrument was the saxophone, picked up as a child after his older half-brother Terry Burns introduced him to Coltrane and Dolphy
McCaslin and the band
The saxophonist on Blackstar is Donny McCaslin. Bowie and Tony Visconti found him in 2014 at the (now defunct) 55 Bar in Greenwich Village, New York. McCaslin was playing with drummer Mark Guiliana, bassist Tim Lefebvre, and keyboardist Jason Lindner. They were a jazz group with rock instincts, and as Lefebvre later told Mojo, seeing that energy unfold closed the deal. "When David saw us, he heard how electric and aggressive we were, more than he anticipated, which really sold us to him."
The sessions ran in three week-long blocks between January and March of 2015 at The Magic Shop in New York, with guitarist Ben Monder added to the core band. McCaslin has described the creative environment as unusually open. Bowie's direction was simple. "I want you to go to wherever you're hearing. Don't worry about how this will be classified genre-wise: rock, jazz, whatever."
The saxophone on Tis a Pity She Was a Whore is rifling and aggressive. The saxophone on Dollar Days is restrained, vulnerable. On I Can't Give Everything Away it traces, quietly, the harmonica figure Bowie first used on A New Career In A New Town in 1977.
McCaslin has said that he did not spend the sessions analysing the lyrics for meaning. "Throughout that period of making Blackstar, I was reacting more to his emotional output when he was singing, the conviction, the passion. I was interacting with that more so than looking at the lyrics, analysing them, and trying to figure out what the meaning of the songs were."
The other thing McCaslin has been consistent about is that Blackstar was not conceived as a farewell. In an interview after the album's release, he said Bowie was still making plans. "He was planning on recording new music with us. The last time we talked it was on the phone and he said he was writing new music and wanted to go back to the studio in January with us. Blackstar, obviously, has such heavy themes of mortality and part of the narrative around the record was that it was his goodbye gift to everybody, and while I think that's true, it's one of those situations where multiple things are true. It's a great way to have left his mark as an artist, but at the same time he was still moving forward and we were going to record some new music."
McCaslin has carried the record forward in the decade since. He toured Blackstar Symphony in the United States, an orchestral reimagining of the album with a sixty-five-piece orchestra and Bowie collaborators including Tony Visconti and Maria Schneider. The project began when McCaslin worked with Jules Buckley and the Metropole Orkest on an orchestral version of Warszawa from 1977's Low and saw what the form could do.
Shift in real time
The most useful real-time record of how Blackstar was received in those first days is the open thread at Pushing Ahead of the Dame, the long-running Bowie criticism blog run by Chris O'Leary. The thread spans the entire week. Several hundred comments were posted between the album's release and the days following Bowie's death, by a mix of regulars and first-time posters. The thread captures something an album's meaning being publicly reshaped in days, in front of the same audience that had only just begun to evaluate it.
The first three days are given over to critical evaluation. Commenters rank the album against the catalog, with Outside, Scary Monsters, and Black Tie White Noise coming up most often as comparable peaks. They catalog the references they hear. They push back against the press framing of the record as avant-garde, with several arguing it is actually fairly accessible. Some real dissent exists, including one commenter, Jopasso, who scores the record 6.5 out of 10 and calls Girl Loves Me forgettable. The overall tone is forward-looking, with speculation about deluxe editions and future work with the McCaslin band.
The first message on January 11, 2016
After the news of Bowie's death breaks at around two in the morning on January 11, the mode of the conversation shifts. Lazarus, which had been a mid-tier preference for many earlier commenters, moves to the centre of the discussion. The button-eyed figure in the videos is reread as a self-portrait of Bowie's own awareness. Earlier lukewarm responses are often revised upward.
The ranking debates largely dissolve. Long-time lurkers introduce themselves and the thread takes on the function of shared mourning as much as discussion.
A counter-current also emerges in the thread, which is worth noting. One commenter, posting as Wirestone, writes on January 15 to push back against the consensus. "I would urge everyone when listening to this album to take a moment before saying this album is about death or dying. Because it is art, because it was created, it is necessarily about living." Others agree. The reception of Blackstar pulled hard in one direction over those first days, but it was not unanimous, and Bowie's closest collaborators have since said that the album was not built as a goodbye.
Ten years on, the cleanest way to listen to Blackstar may be to try to hear it as it stood on Saturday, January 8, 2016. An aging, restless, still-curious artist had gathered a jazz band from a small Greenwich Village club and pushed himself into a register he had not used before. The result was a record full of cosmic imagery, strange ritual, and saxophone playing that carried the album's mood from one end to the other. The meaning the world attached to it two days later was real, and the loss it became attached to was real. But the album itself was made by someone who was still making plans, and it is worth letting it sound like that.
