How David Bowie’s Blackstar Turned Death into Art

25:15 · 3,979 words of transcript · watch on YouTube

1. Blackstar was released on 8 January 2016, Bowie's 69th birthday, and he died two days later. It is the first Bowie album with no image of him on the cover.
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2. The record was built during an 18-month fight with liver cancer, and producer Tony Visconti's summary is the line the whole video rests on: his death was no different from his life, a work of art.
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3. The decade before it was near silence. A heart attack in 2004 pulled him out of public life until The Next Day in 2013, a record so secret that everyone involved signed NDAs and the label only learned of it in the final stages.
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4. The diagnosis landed in summer 2014, just after he won British male solo artist at the Brits and had started working with a jazz orchestra, which set the terms for everything that followed.
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5. Four readings of the title are weighed: Lovecraft's cosmic dread, an obscure Elvis Presley song called Black Star, a medical term for a cancer lesion, and a theoretical dying star that radiates faintly instead of collapsing. The medical reading is dismissed, since that term attaches to breast cancer and Bowie had liver cancer.
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6. The jazz turn came through composer Maria Schneider, who pushed him toward Donny McCaslin's quartet. Bowie went to see them at the 55 Bar, liked the chemistry, and hired the band.
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7. The sessions were run for improvisation and the improvisation survived. The players say everything they did is audible on the finished record, which is why it reads as a rock album transformed by jazz rather than a jazz album.
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8. Other hands and other sources: James Murphy added percussion and a rare suitcase synthesizer, while Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, Death Grips and Boards of Canada all fed the album's refusal to sit in one genre.
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9. The Lazarus video was filmed just as he learned the cancer was terminal, and the imagery reads as a passage rather than an ending: a wardrobe as the door between worlds, the two biblical Lazarus stories, and a bluebird borrowed from Bukowski standing for the private self he finally lets go.
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10. The afterlife of the record is its own story. It became his first ever US number one, went platinum in 12 countries, won all five Grammys it was nominated for, topped UK vinyl sales for 2016, and months later fans found a constellation hidden in the sleeve's star cutout when light passes through it.
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