Album Review: David Bowie - Blackstar
What is the point, or artistic statement/value/merit/et. al
of a David Bowie album, released in 2016?
That is the question proposed when one sits down to listen
to Bowie’s latest release, Blackstar,
stylized as a gigantic black star—a seven-song, self contained cycle that aims
to bridge classic bowie (Station to
Station) with modern Bowie (2013’s The Next Day) with a little bit of weird Bowie (Outside, Earthling)
thrown in for good measure.
The Next Day came
as a complete surprise when it ended Bowie’s decade of silence, following his
late 90s, early 2000s run of albums. Only veering into “weird” territory near
the end, overall the album was marginally listenable, if only slightly
forgettable in the time that has elapsed since the dark ages of 2013.
Therein lies the problem with a classic, long running
artist releasing new music—Bowie’s canon (specifically in the 1970s) is pretty
much unfuckwithable. It’s timeless music that is still enjoyable, and relevant
today. So what happens when an artist of that caliber continues their output
into today’s very modern times? Is latter day Bowie like Earthling ever going to be considered classic or seminal? Probably
not.
Bowie obviously felt he had something to say, musically
speaking, with The Next Day. And with
Blackstar, it’s a conversation that
he felt was left unfinished.
Opening with the sprawling, ten-minute title track, the
album reveals its avant-garde influences right out of the gate, a feeling that
runs throughout the album, and occasionally ripples to the surface, like on
“Sue (or In A Season of Crime),” a song that appears here in a truncated
version after originally being included in a singles collection released in
2014.
That is another puzzling thing about Blackstar is that it is not all “new” music—“’Tis a Pity She Was a
Whore” served as the b-side to “Sue” when it was released as a single, and
“Lazarus,” is a song that has been included in Bowie’s off-Broadway musical of
the same name, starring “Dexter”’s Michael C. Hall.
I was initially confused by the release of the album’s title
track as the single—mostly because of its terrifying video, but also because
throughout the song’s two movements (it’s split into two pretty distinct
portions) I couldn’t quite get a grasp on what, exactly, the point of the song
was. Some kind of “story song,” it recalls the tale of someone who is a black
star, and who isn’t a lot of other things (pop star, white star, et. al); and I
guess when you release a song this
weird as the first single from your forthcoming album, one assumes the rest of
the album, like, ties into this song—making some kind of concept album
narrative.
That is, however, not exactly the case with Blackstar. For something that is so
cohesive in its marketing and packaging efforts to make it seem like it works
as a whole, the album itself—the content—is still rather disjointed, only
strung together very loosely, if it at all.
From a production standpoint, the album at least has a
cohesive quality to it, thanks to Bowie’s long time collaborator Tony Visconti,
who again handles production duties on Blackstar—the
drums sound crisp and precise, and the horn arrangements (unfortunately not by
Bowie) are mysterious and distended sounding. However, noticeably missing from
the fold of Bowie’s band is guitarist Gerry Leonard, who lent his atmospheric
playing to a number of Bowie’s latter day material.
As weird and disorienting as the album is (and maybe that’s
the whole point) when it works, it really does work, and in 2016, it’s still refreshing
to hear new music from an artist of Bowie’s distinction—the emotional “Lazarus”
is moody in its slithering execution, and the same can be said for the noir-esq
“Dollar Days,” another one of the more successful tracks on the record.
However not every song is as successful, and part of that
has to do with the lack of cohesion when it comes to the music, but another
part of it has to with Bowie’s hit and miss lyricism. “She punched me like a dude,” Bowie croons at the beginning of “Tis
a Pity She Was a Whore,” then later, on “Girl Loves Me,” Bowie asks the
surprisingly blunt question, “Who the
fuck’s gonna mess with me?”
Who indeed.
When talking about latter day Bowie, you can look at the
immediacy and accessibility of an album like The Next Day; Blackstar has
neither of those qualities.
However, despite its frustrating exterior, and as much as I
hate to say it, it is a slow burning “grower” or an album. Even a song like the
title track eventually gets stuck in your head—specifically the “I’m not a ______, I’m a black star,”
portion.
Blackstar, in the
end, leaves us with more questions than answers—questions like why a new David
Bowie album in 2016? What, as an artist, is he trying to say with a record as
disjointed, yet slightly connected, as this? Is there a point to all the
weirdness found within, or is it just weirdness for the sake of being weird and
shocking—sub-question, is this what it takes to get the attention of listeners
in 2016?
Bowie is not doing any interviews w/r/t the album, and I
think it goes without saying that he’s not touring in support of it. So it is
simply an artistic statement he felt needed to be made, but not clarified if
there were questions, thus leaving all seven tracks of Blackstar very open ended, and a little unsatisfying because of
that fact.
Bowie won’t lose any longtime fans over this, but he’s not
out to gain any new fans either—most people past a certain age probably don’t
even know who David Bowie is, let alone the influence he’s had on popular music
today. It’s not a late career misstep, but it’s also not a redefining moment in
his canon. It simply exists, for some reason, and it’s not providing any real
answers as to why.
Blackstar is out on Friday via Columbia.
Blackstar is out on Friday via Columbia.
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