Blackstar (album)

Background and recording

Bowie recorded ★ while suffering from liver cancer; his illness was not made public until he died, two days after the album's release. Like Bowie's previous album The Next Day, recording took place in secret at the Magic Shop and Human Worldwide Studios in New York City. Bowie began writing and making demos for songs that appear on Blackstar as soon as sessions for The Next Day concluded. He recruited a local New York jazz combo led by Donny McCaslin as the backing band for the sessions.

Two songs that appear on Blackstar, "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" and "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore", had been previously released, but were rerecorded for Blackstar, including new saxophone parts played on the latter song by McCaslin (replacing parts Bowie played on the original release). The title of the latter derives from the title 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, a play by John Ford, an English dramatist of the 17th century. McCaslin and the rest of the jazz group recorded their parts in the studio over a period of about one week a month from January to March 2015, and were reportedly unaware of Bowie's declining health – according to McCaslin, the band worked with Bowie "essentially from 11 to 4 every day", while bassist Tim Lefebvre stated that "it never looked to us like he was sick". The song "Lazarus" was included in Bowie's Off-Broadway musical of the same name.

Composition and influences

According to producer Tony Visconti, he and Bowie deliberately attempted "to avoid rock'n’roll" while making the album, and they had been listening to rapper Kendrick Lamar's 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly during the recording sessions and cited it as an influence. Electronic duo Boards of Canada and experimental hip hop trio Death Grips have also been cited as influences. The music on Blackstar has been characterised as incorporating art rock, jazz, and experimental rock, as well as elements from industrial rock, folk-pop and hip hop. The saxophone was the first instrument Bowie learned, and he was an avid jazz listener in his youth. The album's title track incorporates jazztronica, while progressing through a drum and bass-style rhythm, an acid house-inspired portion of the instrumental, a saxophone solo, and a lower-tempo blues-like section. Andy Greene of Rolling Stone said that the re-recording of "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore" was "powered by a hip hop beat and free-form sax." "Dollar Days", the album's sixth track, was created without a preliminary demo being made for the song. McCaslin later stated that Bowie one day "just picked up a guitar ... he had this little idea, and we just learned it right there in the studio." In "I Can't Give Everything Away", the final track, Bowie plays a harmonica solo similar to one from his 1977 instrumental track "A New Career in a New Town" off his album Low (1977).

Billboard and CNN wrote that Bowie's lyrics seem to address his impending death, with CNN noting that the album "reveals a man who appears to be grappling with his own mortality". "Lazarus", the third track on the album, was notable for the lines "Look up here, I'm in heaven / I've got scars that can't be seen"; this specific part of the lyrics appeared in many publications following Bowie's death on 10 January. "I Can't Give Everything Away" contains the line "Seeing more and feeling less / Saying no but meaning yes / This is all I ever meant / That's the message that I sent", which led Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph to think of the song as a point where "Bowie sounds like he is grappling with his own mystery." "Girl Loves Me", the album's fifth track, was notable for its inclusion of Nadsat, a fictional language created by Anthony Burgess for his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, where it was used very often. It also included Polari, a type of slang used commonly in England by homosexual men during the mid-20th century.

Release and packaging

The title track was released as the album's lead single on 19 November 2015 and was used as the opening music for the television series The Last Panthers. "Lazarus" was released on 17 December 2015 as a digital download, and received its world premiere on BBC Radio 6 Music's Steve Lamacq Show the same day. The album was released on 8 January 2016, coinciding with Bowie's 69th birthday.

The artwork for Blackstar was designed by Jonathan Barnbrook, who had designed the artwork for Bowie's Heathen, Reality and The Next Day. The star image on the cover is credited to NASA in the cd booklet. The five star segments below the main star form the word BOWIE in stylised letters. The vinyl cover, in black, features the star as a cutout section, revealing the record (with an all-black picture label) beneath it. With the record removed, the black paper behind the cut-out star reveals a hidden picture of a starfield when the foldout sleeve is held up to a light source. It took more than four months before fans first discovered the effect. Designer claimed there were many other surprises hidden in the lp's artwork. Music journalists also noted that a "black star lesion," usually found inside a breast, suggests to medical practitioners evidence of certain types of cancer.

Blackstar sold 146,000 copies in its first week on sale in the United Kingdom (a week which saw four other Bowie albums in the top 10 and a further seven in the top 40, the latter equalling Elvis Presley's chart record). and more than 181,000 in the United States. Within days of the album's release, online retailer Amazon.com temporarily sold out of both the CD and LP editions of the album. In the week 11–17 January, Blackstar was the most downloaded album in 25 iTunes national charts.

Bowie was the biggest-selling vinyl artist of 2016 in the UK, with five albums in the vinyl Top 30, including Blackstar as the number one selling vinyl album of the year. It sold twice as many copies as the previous year's winner, Adele's 25.

Critical reception

Blackstar received widespread acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, the album received an average score of 87, which indicates "universal acclaim", based on 43 reviews. Rolling Stone critic David Fricke called Blackstar "a ricochet of textural eccentricity and pictorial-shrapnel writing". Andy Gill of The Independent regarded the record as "the most extreme album of [Bowie's] entire career", stating that "Blackstar is as far as he's strayed from pop." Jon Pareles of The New York Times described the album as "at once emotive and cryptic, structured and spontaneous and, above all, willful, refusing to cater to the expectations of radio stations or fans". The Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick hailed Blackstar as an "extraordinary" album which "suggests that, like a modern day Lazarus of pop, Bowie is well and truly back from beyond." In a favourable review for Exclaim!, Michael Rancic wrote that Blackstar is "a defining statement from someone who isn't interested in living in the past, but rather, for the first time in a while, waiting for everyone else to catch up".

Reviewing for Q magazine, Tom Doyle wrote, "Blackstar is a more concise statement than The Next Day and a far, far more intriguing one." NME critic Sam Richards stated that Bowie had maintained his "formidable record of reinventing himself" on a "busy, bewildering and occasionally beautiful record", adding that "one of the few certainties we can take from this restless, relentlessly intriguing album is that David Bowie is positively allergic to the idea of heritage rock." Chris Gerard of PopMatters called the album "singular in its unique sound and vibe," describing it as "trippy and majestic head-music spun from moonage daydreams and made for gliding in and out of life." Pitchfork's review of Blackstar, written by Ryan Dombal, was published on the day of the album's release, two days before Bowie's death, and concluded: "This tortured immortality is no gimmick: Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he's making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold." Writing for The A.V. Club, which chose it as the best album of 2016, Sean O'Neal described Blackstar as "a sonically adventurous album that proves Bowie was always one step ahead—where he'll now remain in perpetuity."

The album was nominated for the "Top Rock Album" award at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards, but lost out to Blurryface by Twenty One Pilots.

Accolades

At the end of 2016, Blackstar appeared on a number of critics' lists ranking the year's top albums. According to Metacritic, it was the most prominently ranked record of 2016. At the 59th Annual Grammy Awards in 2017, the album received nominations for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Recording Package, winning both.

Track listing

All tracks written by David Bowie, except where noted.

Personnel

Personnel adapted from Blackstar liner notes.

Commercial performance

Blackstar was already on course to debut at number one on the UK Albums Chart prior to the announcement of Bowie's death on 11 January 2016, according to the Official Charts Company. The album debuted at number one after selling 146,000 copies and became his tenth number one album in the UK. The album remained three weeks at number one, falling at number 2 behind another Bowie album, the compilation Best of Bowie (2002), which became the first ever album to get to number one in the UK because of streaming. As of February 2017 it has sold 421,665 copies there.

In the US, the album debuted at number one with 181,000 sales. It marked becoming Bowie's first number one in that country and best weekly sales figure. It was the 14th best-selling album in the US in 2016, with 448,000 copies sold that year.

The album also peaked at number one in 24 countries, number 2 in Greece, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan, number 4 in Hungary and 5 in Japan. As of 2017, the album has sold nearly 2 million copies.