He came, he met us, he blew our minds—Jan. 10, 2016 saw the passing of David Bowie, one of popular music’s great artists, shapeshifters, and innovators. Over the course of a career spanning nearly five decades, Bowie’s music was as subversive as his constantly shifting personae. He was a misfit in the brightest possible spotlight, and he made it okay to not be boxed in by the demands of rock music culture and to be however the hell weird you wanted to be.
With a slew of characters ranging from the androgynous, serpentine Ziggy Stardust (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Aladdin Sane), to the cryptic, emaciated Thin White Duke (Station to Station), Bowie was a man of many faces, fashions, faults, and inspirations, each reflected in every record he made and each performance he did.
In reality, the world mourns not just one Bowie, but a whole cast of characters, curated and enacted by him. For Bowie, life was performance, and vice versa. Granted, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Little Richard started rock and roll swagger well before Bowie was even an idea, but with artists like Bowie, the world saw a full-fledged character integrated into rock music. Rock had never been performed that way before—in the truest sense of performativity—and he changed the way it would be performed for years onward.
Bowie passed away at the age of 69, two days after his birthday and the release of his 25th and final recording, the jazz and Krautrock inflected Blackstar. Upon his passing on Sunday, Jan. 10, long-time collaborator and producer Tony Visconti, who oversaw the production of Blackstar and many of his best works, revealed that the album was indeed intended as a final farewell to Bowie’s fans—a carefully crafted finale to a life full of theatrics, personae, and grand ideas.
In light of Bowie’s passing, let’s talk about Blackstar for a moment. The record is not only hands-down Bowie’s best since 1995’s Outside, but it acts as a literal swan song to his entire career. Never one to shy away from pushing forward and breaking down artistic boundaries, Blackstar is the final masterstroke of a great artist, featuring electronic soundscapes harkening to his Outside album, the German Krautrock influence felt on Low and Heroes, and an all-star jazz group effortlessly complementing Bowie’s cryptic lyric work (in which, like Low almost forty years before it, veers on the edge of surrealism). Within the context of his death, the record will surely necessitate further listens and dissections—is his death performance? Is he okay with dying? With Bowie as enigmatic as he’s ever been, if not more so, who knows for sure?
Like every stage of his life and work, his death itself was a kind of work of art. Having kept his cancer under wraps for the past 18 months of his suffering, he offered us all a final, challenging record to enjoy and digest. The eponymous vocal refrain on the last track of Blackstar, “I can’t give everything away,” reveals the anxieties of an artist who has given us so much in just about every way. For a man who has changed fashion, music, and performance the way he has, what could that possibly mean? Does he negate his influence, or does he self-consciously celebrate it? If Bowie was indeed from another planet, his death suggests our mortality and humanity aren’t simply terrestrial or worldly issues. Our faults aren’t, either. His faults, which, I’ll remind you, are not absolved by his passing because they were numerous, they are exclusively human, and they are important to discuss in light of this.
Nonetheless, I will end with a quote from my friend Andrea Pahteviri’s lovely write-up for CFRU on the day of his passing—“Mars is gonna be visible tonight, an hour or two after midnight. Let’s all give it a wave.”
So long, Starman.