Blackstar Theory

The Last Works of David Bowie

Leah Kardos

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501365393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

Blackstar Theory takes a close look at David Bowie's ambitious last works: his surprise 'comeback' project The Next Day (2013), the off-Broadway musical Lazarus (2015) and the album that preceded the artist's death in 2016 by two days, Blackstar. The book explores the swirl of themes that orbit and entangle these projects from a starting point in musical analysis and features new interviews with key collaborators from the period: producer Tony Visconti, graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, musical director Henry Hey, saxophonist Donny McCaslin and assistant sound engineer Erin Tonkon. These works tackle the biggest of ideas: identity, creativity, chaos, transience and immortality. They enact a process of individuation for the Bowie meta-persona and invite us to consider what happens when a star dies. In our universe, dying stars do not disappear - they transform into new stellar objects, remnants and gravitational forces. The radical potential of the Blackstar is demonstrated in the rock star supernova that creates a singularity resulting in cultural iconicity. It is how a man approaching his own death can create art that illuminates the immortal potential of all matter in the known universe.

PART ONE

Last act

1

Lateness

Lateness, late style and late-period work are terms associated with a concept originally articulated by twentieth-century theorist Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69), describing the characteristics of the work made by composers, writers and artists who are approaching the end of their lives. Adorno, who coined the term ‘late style’, explored the idea in a series of essays about Beethoven’s last works (1964, and the posthumously published Essays on Music, 2002). He found that the music held a disruptive ‘catastrophic’ essence that agitates against prevailing aesthetics and foreshadows something new; in the case of Beethoven, hinting towards the atonal modernism of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. Adorno’s ideas about late style suggested that, as time runs out, the mortal limits of life create special conditions that can allow art to reach its fullest potentials.

This concept was further developed by Palestinian writer Edward Said (1935–2003) in his final publication On Late Style (2006), written while he himself was dying of leukaemia and published posthumously. Said considered the last works of a range of ‘great’ artists, not only composers (Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Bach) but also performers (Glenn Gould) and writers (Jean Genet, Thomas Mann), and uncovered the conflicts and complexities that distinguished these outputs in contrast to what was popular at the time, revealing them as forerunners of what was to come in each artist’s discipline. Both Adorno and Said point out that late-period work can often be characterized by a complex, contrary and questioning spirit, more agitated and restless than serene or reconciliatory, going against what one might expect from artists of advancing age.

There is also a sense in these writings that an awareness of diminishing time can lead an artist to shed any concerns about being liked or necessarily understood. This idea was echoed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003, 24), when she described the ‘senile sublime’ quality of the work of ‘old brilliant people, whether artists, scientists, or intellectuals where the bare outlines of a creative idiom seem to emerge from what had been the obscuring puppy fat of personableness, timeliness or … coherent sense.’ A feeling that the difficult, knotty quality of late Shakespeare, Beethoven, the irascible final writings of an Alzheimer’s-suffering Iris Murdoch, somehow possess an uncanny brilliance, finally free of self-consciousness.

Yet lateness is a quality ascribed retrospectively, usually only to the oeuvres of ‘exceptional’, renowned individuals. More often than not an artist isn’t aware that their final work will indeed be their last, so the concept cannot be applied universally. Wrapped up with this idea is the post-mortem reappraisal of something that might have been missed and under-appreciated in its time; for example, it was only after Picasso’s death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, that art critics came to see his last works as prefiguring neo-expressionism. It is only after Bowie’s death that the mainstream music press rewrites its appraisals of those 1990s outputs that they once scoffed at.¹ The discovery and designation of ‘late greatness’ allow cultural commentators to engage in historical revisionism.

There is a danger that the romance surrounding these ideas of lateness and greatness taints our discourse with undue reverence, constructing fantasies that perpetuate cultural bias. ‘Genius’ is a descriptor that can be lazily applied to artistic works and creative processes. It blesses entire oeuvres with specialness and implies preternatural ability, erasing an individual’s hard-won achievements and the gradual refinement of one’s process by way of struggles, failures and breakthroughs. It is also worth noting that the retrospective labelling of the ‘great’ and ‘genius’ artists is determined by collective assumptions and biases, which can lead to a more grievous kind of erasure: history’s ‘greatest’ and most venerated geniuses are overwhelmingly white and male. It is easy to say an artist is good and their work is special, especially when the artist is popularly loved. It is unhelpful if one of the reasons we cite something as being ‘great art’ is simply because the artist was at the end of their life and the piece was complex or ‘difficult’.

Despite these tensions, and acknowledging the dangers of romanticizing art and the artistic process, identifying the material attributes of lateness within the catalogue of outputs from a long career remains a useful exercise. It need not predict the future trajectory of an art form; it can simply be the arrival at a state of artistic being. It might be marked by an apparent detachment from contemporary concerns with trends, scenes, peer groups, audiences or industries. We may observe shifts in the texture and syntax of a creative language – sounds and musical devices, lyrics, voices, images and references. The nature, quality and rhythm of late-life creativity could be influenced by tangible late-life circumstances such as citizenship, family, financial pressures, access to collaborators, technologies and ways of working, bouts of illness, periods of treatment and convalescence. For Bowie, lateness can be observed in his arrival at a stable and autonomous creative process; his compositional practices that consciously reach back into the past to connect it with the present, using his catalogue and star image as lexicon. Bowie’s lateness is evident in the finessing of those details that complicate, encapsulate and complete the long-running themes of his oeuvre.

A taxonomy of Bowie’s late style

Up until the end of the twentieth century, Bowie’s pop career was characterized by frequent surface reinventions exploring different music styles, looks, lyrical perspectives and ways of working. He would restlessly seek creative reinvigoration through change and became known for this mercurial energy. Changes in the sound and style of Bowie’s music were often (though not always) brought about by the arrival of new musical collaborators or producers, sometimes a radical geographical relocation (London, Switzerland, France, Germany, America), and were quite often announced with a new look. Some of these reinventions took form around the construction of a new ‘Bowie’ persona – a character in costume associated with a specific album from which listeners could perceive the lyrics and ideas as being from that persona’s point of view (Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke). Sometimes Bowie’s performance personas became linked to a time and place (Beckenham Arts Lab, Berlin) or associated with a particular manner of public engagement (blond, tanned, mainstream-ready in the early 1980s; paint-splattered art-polymath in the mid-1990s). Towards the very end of the twentieth century Bowie would change his costume one final time – seemingly retreating from the frontiers of the new and away from restless reinvention, he ‘made himself more ordinary than ever before’ (O’Leary 2019, 451), performing a public version of himself that seemed in closer alignment with the ‘real’ David Jones. Roughly coinciding with the new millennium and the birth of his daughter, Alexandria (Lexi), Bowie’s late style begins with his reunion with producer Tony Visconti, marking the start of the final period where we can observe his songwriting perspectives and compositional processes stabilizing into a consistent approach.

Tony Visconti and ISO

When Visconti reunited with Bowie for the 1998 one-off track ‘Safe’ (co-written by Reeves Gabrels for The Rugrats Movie (1998), of all things, and not released publicly until 2016), they hadn’t worked together in fifteen years. Before this, the last Visconti production credit had been on 1982’s soundtrack EP to Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, which accompanied a televised version of the play for the BBC and starred Bowie in the title role. Baal became Bowie’s final release of new material for RCA Records, freeing him from his unhappy contract with them; the following year he signed with EMI and released Let’s Dance, unceremoniously ditching Visconti in favour of hiring Chic guitar legend Nile Rodgers as his co-producer.

Up until that point, Visconti and Bowie had enjoyed a long-standing and successful creative relationship. Beginning back in the late 1960s with production and arrangement on early Bowie single ‘In the Heat of the Morning’/‘London Bye Ta Ta’ (1968) and producing his breakthrough second album Space Oddity in 1969 (title track aside), Visconti would be Bowie’s bandmate in glam outfit The Hype, produce and play on The Man Who Sold the World (1970) and collaborate on 1974’s Diamond Dogs. From there, Visconti co-produced an impressive run of legendary releases with Bowie, from 1975’s Young Americans, the ‘Berlin Trilogy’ (Low and "Heroes", both 1977, and Lodger in 1979) and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980 – the album commonly held up by rock critics as a high point in Bowie’s career, his ‘last great album’ against which every subsequent release would be compared.

After ‘Safe’, Bowie released Hours… in 1999, his final collaboration with guitarist and co-writer/co-producer Reeves Gabrels, with whom he had been working consistently since the late 1980s (with the exception of 1993’s The Buddha of Suburbia). It was around 2000/2001 when Visconti was called on again to create string parts and help finish the ill-fated Toy album project – a mixture of new and re-recorded old songs from Bowie’s pre-fame years, produced by Mark Plati, planned for 2001 but never released. Their professional relationship now rekindled, Visconti went on to co-produce 2002’s Heathen (widely praised as a return to form upon its release), in the process salvaging what could be saved from Toy, with a few tracks refashioned and revised (‘Slip Away’, ‘Afraid’) and others relegated to B-sides and extras.

From here on Visconti remained in the co-producer’s chair on every release until the end of Bowie’s life, bringing his uniquely intuitive sense of musicianship and the weight and wealth of their shared history and proven working methods to the table. The sound of Bowie and Visconti in the 1970s was dramatic and boldly coloured, often with a sharp, weird edge. By contrast, their sound in the late period is more expansive, filled from top to bottom, highly detailed and atmospheric. Visconti’s gilded string arrangements and characterful, hard-hitting drum production became a permanent feature throughout the period, along with richly detailed reverbs and large-scale ambience, the velvet backdrop behind everything. The Visconti reunion created opportunities for Bowie’s songwriting to reference and converse with the past through the reprisal of signature sounds (Stylophones, recorders, vintage synths, Low drum effects, varispeed vocals, Hansa-era mic techniques), a trend that was echoed sometimes in lyrical references (‘Slip Away’, ‘Bring Me the Disco King’, ‘Like a Rocket Man’, ‘Where Are We Now?’).

Perhaps most importantly of all, Visconti could still reliably coax winning vocal performances from Bowie – the kind of takes that came close to matching the dramatic range and intensity of previous pinnacles: "Heroes", Lodger and Scary Monsters. At all times the production choices are in service of the songwriting, not the other way around and, for the first time since The Buddha of Suburbia, the new material was primarily written by Bowie alone. That trend would continue throughout the late period. Returning to, and building upon, a signature Bowie/Visconti sound became a source of inspiration:

[Reality] would be identifiably kind of a Bowie/Visconti production, and it would just have that special thing that we have when we work together. I can’t really articulate it, but when we work together, we do seem to produce really good quality stuff that has a sense of integrity and is interesting. It’s just right, and it’s very exciting.

– Bowie (Orshoski 2003)

The timeliness of this reconnection found the two musicians particularly compatible – both being of the same generation and, handily, living quite near to each other in Manhattan. Common interests that bonded them in the late 1960s were still present: an eclectic appreciation of music, fondness for British-style humour, continued interests in Tibetan Buddhism and newfound sobriety – both men were/are card-carrying members of Alcoholics Anonymous. In fact, Bowie had quit all his vices, even smoking, by 2001. That same year he set up his own record label, ISO (departing from EMI/Virgin after they shelved Toy). The ISO/Columbia agreement would be in place until his death, eliminating unwanted contractual obligations and granting Bowie the freedom to make and release music whenever and however he liked. This meant he could design an album with a world tour in mind (Reality 2003) or time a surprise release to occur on his birthday (‘Where Are We Now?’ 2013), retaining complete autonomy in all matters of creative control and public engagement.

Sound engineer Erin Tonkon was hired to assist Visconti’s sessions from 2013 and subsequently spent a lot of time working in close quarters with the co-producers. I asked her what it was like seeing Bowie and Visconti working together:

There were a lot of inside jokes, a lot of references to obscure British comedy shows. They had their own little secret language as well … You know it’s that thing when you have an old friend and you can just pick up where you left off? They really did that creatively and musically.

– Tonkon (interview with the author, 2020)

New ways of working and new musicians

The late 1990s/early 2000s was a time when digital recording became standard practice in professional studios and, for the first time, was an affordable option for home recording setups too. Writing more on his own, Bowie’s home-studio work and early demoing sessions with Visconti became integral to the creative process during this period. Bowie prepared song demos that contained sketch performances of top-line melodies and ‘scratch’ (placeholder) keyboard, bass and guitar parts. The demo would be built upon, with some parts replaced and more layers added to construct a final, complete arrangement. Sometimes they decided to keep elements of Bowie’s rough demos in the final productions because they had the right energy and attitude:

A lot of it [on Reality] we didn’t replace … And I left my own guitars on most of the tracks. Most of the rhythm tracks, I’m plunking away in there. So it has a quasi-demo feel to a lot of the tracks, which is really good – a demo energy.

– Bowie (Orshoski 2003)

Rather than bury Bowie’s playing in the mix, Visconti more often spotlighted it; he can be heard on lead and rhythm guitars, keyboards and synths, saxophone, harmonica, drums and percussion – the kind of diverse instrumental playing that had been prevalent in projects like Diamond Dogs (1974) and the ‘Berlin Trilogy’ (1977–9). Bowie’s self-described ‘pretty basic home setup’ (Buskin 2003) was built around a Korg Trinity synthesizer workstation, a Korg Pandora effects unit and a vintage ARP Odyssey, alongside a collection of guitars and small amps. The unique sound of the Korg Trinity, in particular, became a recognizable signature of late-period albums; its tones are present on Hours… (1999) (and the Omikron: The Nomad Soul game soundtrack of the same year) and Reality, and appear again on The Next Day and ★. The co-producers worked together to design interesting and original sounds, Bowie exploring the range of tones available with the synthesizer’s tools and Visconti processing the resulting sounds:

He loved that [Korg] keyboard. He’d tweak the sounds and then I’d process them with t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of musical figures
• List of track analyses
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part 1: Last act
• Part 2: Per ardua ad astra
• Part 3: ★
• Epilogue: Legacies and voids
• References
• Index
• Imprint