"Look up here, I'm in Heaven / I've got scars that can't be seen / I've got drama, can't be stolen / Everybody knows me now"
i'm finding it hard to talk about Blackstar. the first song on the album—which i'm going to call Black Star to differentiate it from the album—is a very weird introduction to the album. it lays out what the album is about very plainly, though: the album came out just two days before Bowie died, and while writing and performing it he was terminally ill with liver cancer. Black Star is chock full of lyrics about death and execution. it's almost like a dirge or an elegy, mixed with a weirdly jazzy tune that makes me want to break out into a trance-like dance. there's obvious influences from the great acts that came before him, namely King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King. listen to that flute, man. the entire album has that kind of jazzy, swingy sound that kinda just wants to make me move my body around whichever way.
this musical sound is all compounded by the vocal work, a lot of which has reverb and echo sounds that all add to this trance-like, almost psychedelic experience. Girl Loves Me has a lot of heavy british slang and influences from A Clockwork Orange, one of Bowie's favorite books and one i have yet to read myself, and another influence that i definitely noticed was the impact that Kendrick Lamar and Death Grips—my top two hip-hop acts of all time, probably—had on the album, especially lyrically. the cymbals, and generally the percussion as a whole, also have some clear Death Grips influence in their rhythm and how they meld with Bowie's lyrics. the entire album is a really eclectic mix of both modern and classic influences: for every lyric or instrumental rhythm that sounds like it could be from the 60s you've got more that sound like they could be from the 2010s.
i think the best way to put it is that the whole album sounds like a sendoff. it's a bittersweet goodbye to those classic bands, songs, albums, and times, and poetically passing the torch to the new generation of artists: King Crimson, Queen, and to a lesser extent Elvis Presley are sharing impact on Blackstar with Death Grips, Kendrick Lamar, and D'Angelo, and as weird as a mix that sounds they all work together to influence the album nearly flawlessly. this is as much a testament to Bowie's impact as it is to his understanding of music and what goes into both analyzing and understanding it. i've loved David Bowie for a long time, but i've never really sat down and listened through one of his albums in full until this one.
i wasn't sure how to feel about Blackstar going in and i'm still not sure how to feel about it coming out. it's an incredibly strange and eclectic album, and i love that—but as a result it means that sometimes its instrumentation and sound is rather sloppy, which i guess is to be expected from experimental albums. on the whole, though, the album mixes together pretty well: there's not a song that feels out of place or unwelcome, even if they all kinda just fit into themselves without really adding to a larger picture from time to time. i think, on the whole, i don't think i'll be listening to Blackstar again. at least, not for a while. i appreciate its artistic value and i think it's a fantastic sendoff album, but i can't really imagine myself casually listening to most of the songs on it. it's not a repeat album, for sure.
