David Bowie
Blackstar
While this review and acclaim was going to be written before the terrible news was announced, now it can be about nothing else.
David Bowie's career has spanned so many generations, so many genres, and touched so many on such a personal level, a near innumerable artists credit him with the very idea of their pursuing careers in music. That Blackstar, Bowie's parting gift to us, is his best album since 1983's Let's Dance, only makes it even more bittersweet.
Blackstar is a work of pure genius, a trait Bowie was very keen to show on virtually every album he produced. And while he had flitted and flirted with jazz in previous offerings like Heathen and Reality, the full immersion here is something to make even Coltrane blush with inadequacy.
From the nearly-10-minute opening title track, to the gorgeous arrangement of "Lazarus," a song that stings even more knowing the man singing it is no longer here, every note of Bowie's 25th proper studio album is starkly beautiful, like a long holding shot of the desert, like a flower encased in ice.
Even before it became obvious that this was meant to be his last offering, Blackstar was a powerful message about the wonderment of life itself, the philosophical questions that can never be answered, and how every moment spent on this planet, in this galaxy, in an infinite expanse of nothing should be regarded with sheer awe.
The hits that inspired so many of us to keep being ourselves still ring true to this day: "Changes," "Rebel, Rebel," "Heroes," "Ashes to Ashes." "Golden Years," my god, "Golden Years;" it may be the single greatest song in rock history. You could hear it 10,000 times in a row and it still wouldn't be enough.
Fourteen billion years ago, in the first 30 minutes of time, all the hydrogen and helium that exists in the universe was created. Fourteen billion years from now, radio-light beams will still be carrying "Space Oddity" across the endless void, to some starman waiting in the sky.
