{"id":2777,"date":"2016-01-11T11:00:29","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T16:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/?p=2777"},"modified":"2016-01-11T08:48:01","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T13:48:01","slug":"david-bowie-retrospectiveblackstar-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/2016\/01\/david-bowie-retrospectiveblackstar-album-review\/","title":{"rendered":"David Bowie Retrospective\/Blackstar Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think it would be self-indulgent to spend more than a paragraph or two writing about what David Bowie meant to me. I was just at a bar the other night talking about how he\u2019s my all-time favorite artist, and how I was disappointed that I\u2019d probably never get to see him perform live, although I always held out hope that he\u2019d return to headline a big festival like Coachella. Bowie was the first queer icon I latched onto, before I even really knew what queer was, and definitely before I felt comfortable with my own relationship to the term. There was something, at once both sexy and a little scary, about the worlds his music inhabited. I was the kind of kid who got lost in those worlds, the polished landscape covered in grime covered in a second layer of polish, to the point where I wrote a musical (in the vein of Jersey Boys<\/em> or Mamma Mia!<\/em>) about them when I was about 14. My short-lived junior high band (consisting of me on guitar and my friend on vocals) debuted by playing a cover of \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019m alone in having these kinds of stories, because I think you could ask all manner of artists, musicians, and general creative-types about David Bowie and get similar memories shared. He had that kind of broad influence, as a musician and actor, as a fashion icon and a queer one, as an artist who never felt dated or aged, even as he approached 70 years old. When he performed with Arcade Fire in 2005, he stood alongside the band not as a desperate hanger-on clinging to relevance, but as a kind, paternal figure using his own status to help lift others up. Even in his musical prime, the breakneck pace with which he shifted genres never felt disingenuous. Whether he was tackling soul music, German-inspired avant-garde, glam, folk, new wave, or pop, Bowie came across as someone with such limitless passion for so many things that it was a struggle to pick just one.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also easy to forget how prolific he was. From the release of his self-titled album in 1969 (not to be confused with his debut album, also self-titled, in 1967) to Scary Monsters<\/em> in 1980, Bowie released 12 studio albums of original material, as well as an album of covers. Moreover, there\u2019s not a bad album in that stretch. Lodger<\/em> might compare unfavorably to Low<\/em> and \u201cHeroes\u201d<\/em>, as Diamond Dogs<\/em> might to Ziggy Stardust <\/em>and Aladdin Sane<\/em>, but effectively all of Bowie\u2019s material during that period is great. He also released a handful of non-album singles, wrote songs for other artists, and performed on and produced albums by the likes of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed during the same period.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, he was no passive frontman, contributing heavily to the writing and arranging of his music and playing over a dozen instruments including most notably guitar, piano, harmonica, and saxophone. Even his covers feel uniquely his, whether he was covering old 50\u2019s and 60\u2019s standards, or his rock contemporaries. Compare the Johnny Mathis original cut of \u201cWild is the Wind\u201d (itself, a great track), with Bowie\u2019s sprawling, 6-minute epic, or compare Bruce Springsteen\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s Hard to Be a Saint in the City\u201d, a working class anthem (like all great Springsteen songs), with Bowie\u2019s glitzy, campy, danceable version. He even had the bold audacity to cover \u201cAcross the Universe\u201d only five years after the breakup of the Beatles, and with John Lennon himself in the studio.<\/p>\n

Bowie\u2019s passing has shifted the nature of this article from a review of his newest album, Blackstar<\/em>, to sort of a retrospective, but it should be noted that once he found his stride again in the mid 90\u2019s, Bowie never slowed down. Blackstar<\/em> is just the final chapter in the modern Bowie canon, and it\u2019s every bit as exceptional as Reality<\/em> or Heathen<\/em> before it. Conventional wisdom holds that Bowie\u2019s greatest strength has always been his ability to reinvent himself, but I think to boil his quality down to that is disingenuous. Yes, there are great differences between glam Bowie and soul Bowie, between folk Bowie and late 90\u2019s drum-n-bass Bowie, but there are similarities as well. There are subtle homages to older work, but never to the point where one gets the sense that Bowie\u2019s moved backwards.<\/p>\n

There are brief, fleeting instants during the title track, \u201cBlackstar\u201d, where the instrumentation sounds like it could be from Earthling<\/em>. The harmonica that echoes in the background of \u201cI Can\u2019t Give Everything Away\u201d is extremely reminiscent of \u201cA New Career In A New Town\u201d off of Low<\/em>. The 12-string guitar on \u201cDollar Days\u201d recalls a lot of tracks Bowie put out in the early 70\u2019s. Yet, Blackstar<\/em> never rests on these brief moments of homage. The moments of comfortable familiarity are just the opening act for what Blackstar<\/em> has to offer. Jazz dances throughout Blackstar<\/em>, paired with Bowie\u2019s avant-garde leanings and rock sensibilities into a dense, artsy declaration of purpose.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s haunting, too. Bowie hid his illness well, but after passing away only two days after Blackstar\u2019s <\/em>release, it\u2019s hard not to feel like he was just holding on until the album came out. Knowing this, lyrics like the opener from \u201cLazarus\u201d, which goes, \u201cLook up here, I\u2019m in heaven \/ I\u2019ve got scars that can\u2019t be seen \/ I\u2019ve got drama, can\u2019t be stolen \/ Everybody knows me now\u201d <\/em>or the first lines of \u201cI Can\u2019t Give Everything Away\u201d, \u201cI know something\u2019s very wrong \/ The pulse returns for prodigal sons \/ The blackout\u2019s heart with flowering news \/ With skull designs upon my shoes\u201d <\/em>take on a new meaning. Whether intentional or not, Blackstar<\/em> seems supernaturally imbued with a sense of finality, as if it were silly to ever think there could be anything else after it.<\/p>\n

There won\u2019t be anything after it. Depending on Bowie\u2019s last wishes and back catalogue, there might be some loose tracks that might come out, or perhaps archival footage or demos, obscure b-sides that were only released in Japan and then fell to obscurity, but in terms of a complete, fully-realized work, Blackstar <\/em>is the endpoint. If there had to be one, then at least it was something as sweepingly beautiful as Blackstar<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Embedded below is the music video for \u201cLazarus\u201d, the second single from Blackstar<\/em>. In addition, I\u2019ve taken the liberty of compiling a playlist of Bowie tracks spanning from his 1969 album to 2013\u2019s The Next Day,<\/em> in chronological order, that can be viewed here<\/a>. It\u2019s funny to call anything Bowie released a \u201cdeep cut\u201d given his legendary status, but these tracks were generally not singles, and are probably less popular than Bowie\u2019s most famous songs. If you\u2019ve never really listened to Bowie\u2019s work, or haven\u2019t in a while, this playlist might \u00a0give you an idea of the scope and diversity of his music.<\/p>\n

[youtube_sc url=”https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=y-JqH1M4Ya8″]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think it would be self-indulgent to spend more than a paragraph or two writing about what David Bowie meant to me. I was...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1556,"featured_media":2786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[78392,53708],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-album-reviews","category-representing-the-underrepresented"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/files\/2016\/01\/Blackstar_album_cover.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1556"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/wdcvfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}