{"id":8811,"date":"2016-12-19T14:45:05","date_gmt":"2016-12-19T18:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/takenote\/?p=8811"},"modified":"2025-11-19T11:31:37","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T16:31:37","slug":"reflections-david-bowies-blackstar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/reflections-david-bowies-blackstar\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on David Bowie’s Blackstar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Exploring How David Bowie Turned His Final Album, Blackstar<\/em>, into a Poetic Farewell<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Each December, audiophiles around the world take part in the annual tradition of meticulously crafting their year-end lists. However, this year I found it difficult to assemble my 2016 year in music as I really only focused on one artist, David Bowie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bowie died on January 10th. It\u2019s been almost a year, and it still feels just as heavy to accept. I completely immersed myself in Bowie\u2019s music after his death; it seemed no other artist carried the same importance. I am so grateful that Bowie gave us one final parting gift in the form of Blackstar<\/em>, an album that I consider to be his best release during my lifetime. I\u2019ve been decoding its Easter eggs (like the star fragments beneath the main star on the cover that symbolically spell out BOWIE!) ever since its January 8th release (two days before Bowie\u2019s death!). <\/p>\n\n\n

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As we say farewell to a truly weird year, let\u2019s revisit the collection of songs that allowed Bowie to say goodbye in a way that only he knew how. The sequence of events surrounding this record have all the best characteristics of the best unsolved mysteries. On Friday, January 8th, 2016, David Bowie celebrated his 69th birthday and released his 25th studio album. In the wee hours of January 11th, news broke that he had died. There was no public knowledge that Bowie was even ill. In the aftermath of his death, the world came to learn that the title may have been in reference to the type of cancer lesion that was quietly killing him. But how were we to know it was Bowie\u2019s star that was collapsing? In his own brilliantly complex manner, he tried to tell us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back, I can tell that the first hint was dropped a couple months prior to Bowie\u2019s passing. When he released the title track as the first single in November 2015, it was accompanied by a cryptic music video. The opening moments of the \u201cBlackstar\u201d video focused on an astronaut lying motionless. This is pure speculation, but in my opinion, this couldn\u2019t represent anyone other than the \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d protagonist, Major Tom. Bowie created characters like Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke to create different narratives within his artistic universe. Major Tom was the first. In my view, the symbolic death of Major Tom at the beginning of the \u201cBlackstar\u201d video was Bowie\u2019s way of letting the sand out of the hourglass. The beginning of the end, the end of the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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