“In the centre of it all, Your eyes...”
Ten years ago today, following the video premiere the day before, the ★ Blackstar digital single was released.
Jason Draper has written an in-depth piece regarding the recording and release of the track: ★ (‘Blackstar’): Behind The Cryptic Song That Announced Bowie’s Stellar Final Phase
As usual with Jason’s work, it’s a very well researched piece, keep reading for the full thing.
Watch Johan Renck’s remarkable video here:
#BowieBlackstar #Blackstar10thAnniversary
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★ (‘Blackstar’): Behind The Cryptic Song That Announced Bowie’s Stellar Final Phase
The title track to David Bowie’s final album, ★ (‘Blackstar’) demanded attention yet evaded all attempts at scrutiny…
By Jason Draper
When ★ (pronounced “Blackstar”) lit up an otherwise uneventful autumn day in 2015, it served notice of another bold new direction for David Bowie. Running just shy of ten minutes, it was Bowie’s second-longest song, after ‘Station To Station’, and it contained more than enough invention to tide fans over until the release of its parent album, scheduled to hit the shelves a little under two months later. Also picked as the opening song and title track of what would become Bowie’s final record, ★ shouldered a great responsibility – one which Bowie knew it could carry with ease.
“The one thing I think is important is to not go into any second guessing or analysing what these images mean, because they’re between you and me,” Bowie told Johan Renck, the director of the ★ video. “People are going to go head over heels to try to break it down and figure it down across the spectrum, and there’s no point in even engaging that.”
And yet, in wrapping knowing references to his past within a jazz-infused sound that found him exploring new territory, Bowie all but challenged fans to seek meaning in the song. “You make of it whatever the fuck you want,” Renck told CBC Music. “I’m not going to push any of my ideas onto you.”
The recording: “It might even have been the first take”
The ★ album sessions had been underway for two months before Bowie tackled the record’s title track. Working incognito at New York City’s The Magic Shop studio with saxophonist Donny McCaslin and his acclaimed jazz ensemble, which included keyboardist Jason Lindner, bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Mark Guiliana, plus auxiliary guitarist Ben Monder, Bowie and his longtime producer Tony Visconti laid down the song’s backing track in a single day, 20 March 2015.
“We recorded it pretty quickly – it might even have been the first take,” McCaslin told this author, in an interview for ‘Record Collector Presents: Bowie: Blackstar: 1981-2016’. Having received Bowie’s home demo recordings in advance, the musicians arrived at the studio prepared to lay down a song that featured two disparate sections: one characterised by propulsive drumming and funereal saxophone, the other by elegiac synths and spectral guitar. They were also ready to meet the challenge of connecting the two by coming up with an experimental segue that Bowie trusted them to devise on the spot.
“We had all learned our parts,” McCaslin confirmed in his ‘Record Collector’ interview. “We’d gotten together and rehearsed once, and we all knew what we were going to do.” Indeed, when it came to the improvised passage, the group members were so in tune with each other that they nailed it in one take.
“I would describe the band at that time as exploring the intersection between improvisation, drum’n’bass and ambient electronica music as we understand it,” McCaslin said. “And that last [session], in March, was when Ben came in. He was killing it, adding that atmospheric stuff in the middle.”
“Somehow we did that dissolution perfectly on the first attempt, and that’s what you’re hearing on the album – no punching-in or anything,” Monder told ‘Premier Guitar’. “We did the middle section separately, but the way it all dissolves into it was totally improvised.”
With overdubs – including strings, guitar and McCaslin’s flute parts – being added at a later date, and Bowie recording his vocals at Human Worldwide Studios across a handful of days in April and May, the song had a depth and scope that demanded careful attention at the mixing stage. Impressed by the work of engineer Tom Elmhirst, who’d mixed Kendrick Lamar’s similarly dense and expansive ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ album, Bowie and Visconti took the ★ recordings to Elmhirst’s facilities at Electric Lady Studios and enlisted him to help with the record’s final mix.
Despite telling Grammy.com that the process was “quite painless… because it was recorded and produced so well”, Elmhirst was forced out of his comfort zone by the title track. “It took a couple of days, which for me is quite long,” he admitted. “Obviously, not a lot of people put out ten-minute singles. So you have to approach it slightly differently. You can’t give it all away too early. You have to allow the natural dynamics to come through.”
Recalling the first time that he heard the finished recording, which morphed through skittish drum’n’bass, louche balladeering and doomy free jazz while maintaining an improbable cohesion, McCaslin “felt a range of emotions”, he told ‘Record Collector’. “There were definitely tears of joy, of: this sounds fucking great. And also the recognition that it really is what we played together in the studio… I could really hear the layers. There’s a lot in there.”
The release: “Putting it out as a single – that’s pretty ballsy”
Although the recording originally ran past the 11-minute mark, Bowie trimmed the finished track to nine minutes and 58 seconds, in adherence with iTunes’ guidelines – what Visconti would describe as a “bullshit” rule that limited a single’s running time to ten minutes. “But David was adamant it be the single,” Visconti told ‘Rolling Stone’, “and he didn’t want both an album version and a single version, since that gets confusing.”
In the event, listeners found track length to be the least puzzling thing about ★ when its video premiered on 19 November 2015, the day before the single’s release and six weeks ahead of the album with which it shared its name. To ‘The Telegraph’ it was an “avant jazz sci-fi torch song” deserving of a full five marks out of five, while ‘Pitchfork’ piled on the descriptors when they praised it as a “wonderfully odd and expansive… ten minutes of interstellar art-rock and ritualistic chanting and melodramatic balladry and even some playful funk”.
Speaking to ‘Mojo’ magazine, bassist Tim Lefebvre was rather more succinct: “Putting it out as a single – that’s pretty ballsy.”
With its structural complexity and genre-defying shifts in style, not only was ★’s music a challenge to the pop single format, but its lyrics, too, demanded more than average engagement from a listener. True to Bowie’s prediction that fans would scrutinise the song for meaning, the internet was soon flooded with attempts to decode everything from its title on down to Bowie’s nod to his own shape-shifting past (“I’m not a gangstar/… I’m not a flam star”), with each new theory spawning multiple alternatives. As ‘Pitchfork’’s Ryan Dombal noted in his review of the ★ album, such labour only played into Bowie’s cheerful “poking fun at our need to explain the inexplicable while remaining as perplexing and powerful as ever”.
Among the countless hypotheses were those that traced links to Bowie’s sci-fi interests (Black Star was an ancient Judaeic name for Saturn and an alternate term for a black hole) and to Elvis Presley, with whom Bowie shared a birthday and whose 1960 song ‘Black Star’ mused on mortality (“Every man has a black star/A black star over his shoulder/And when a man sees his black star/He knows his time, his time has come” the ‘King Of Rock’n’Roll’ sings). Meanwhile, “the villa of Ormen” – originally rendered “all men” in Bowie’s handwritten lyrics – was found to be rife with allusions – to a Norwegian village, a Viking longship and the Swedish word for “serpent” – and further lyrical references to birth, execution and the swapping of spirits spurred a hunt for clues as to Bowie’s feelings about his own death, particularly when fans heard that he had passed on 10 January 2016, just two days after the ★ album’s release.
As if anticipating the scrutiny, Bowie left signposts to his past, repeating the lyric “At the centre of it all” in ★’s opening verses, doubtless in the knowledge that fans would recognise the phrase from its use in the similarly portentous song ‘Slow Burn’, from his 2002 album, ‘Heathen’. ★’s promo video would contain similar Easter eggs, even as its visuals compounded complications for the would-be sleuth.
The video: “His ideas are deep and founded and interesting”
Opening with shots of a dead astronaut on an unnamed planet experiencing a solar eclipse, the ★ promo was directed by Johan Renck, the Swedish filmmaker who had already made dramatic use of the song when a bespoke edit played over the opening credits of Renck’s TV crime drama The Last Panthers. To Renck, the dead astronaut – whose skull is encrusted with jewels and salvaged for use in a mysterious ceremony – was “100 per cent Major Tom”, while dancers in the video also briefly mimicked gestures made by club-goers in an altogether different Bowie promo, the David Mallet-helmed ‘Fashion’.
The dancers’ ritualistic movements, choreographed by Kira Alker and Elke Luyten of the dance company Zus Performance, were inspired by an unlikely source: a quirky animation trick employed in vintage ‘Popeye’ cartoons, in which stationary characters appeared to vibrate. Bowie’s own drawings also provided guidance for the promo, which, as well as cutting between enactment of the ceremony and shots of writhing scarecrows affixed to crosses, found Bowie playing the roles of three distinct characters, one for each section of the song.
There was, Renck told ‘Vice’, Button Eyes, who, wearing bandages over his face, with two black buttons where his eyes would be, is “introverted, a sort of tormented blind guy”. Then there was “a flamboyant trickster in the middle of it, selling us the message in the other part of the song”, and also “the priest guy” who appears silently brandishing a time-worn book embossed with a black star, as a trio of dancers look on in awe – or perhaps entrancement.
For Renck, the visuals can be interpreted in “a million different ways”. Yet, true to Bowie’s own stance – “I can’t answer why/But I can tell you how” he sings towards the song’s end – the director gave little away, allowing only that the tail on the woman who retrieves the astronaut’s skull was included at the behest of Bowie, who found it “kind of sexual”, and that Bowie was “the least pretentious guy I’ve ever met, but at the same time his ideas are deep and founded and interesting”.
“I’ve worked with a lot of artists, a lot of actors, a lot of people,” Renck asserted. “But very few are that true.”
The legacy: “It affirmed the values I’d always held dear”
Opening its namesake album and commanding almost a quarter of that record’s running time, ★ was the perfect scene-setter for a work in which Bowie took some of his most fearless creative risks. “The whole experience was so transformative for me as a musician and as a person,” Donny McCaslin told this writer. “It affirmed the values I’d always held dear as an artist. And then seeing the power with which he inhabited those values and articulated them, and his generosity of spirit and all that stuff – it was such a landmark experience in my life.”
Now leading the Blackstar Symphony – among many other pursuits – McCaslin has taken the ★ music into a new realm. Performing it live with a 65-piece orchestra, often including the musicians that recorded the album, plus longtime Bowie collaborators such as Gail Ann Dorsey, McCaslin has reimagined the song – and those it shares space with – as “a new piece of art”.
“Seeing that music presented live, seeing it grow, seeing the legacy of what I think is [David’s] creative vision – the courage, looking for the unexpected, not being afraid to take chances. All of those things are part of the aesthetic of the Blackstar Symphony,” McCaslin told ‘Record Collector’.
★ may have dealt with mortality and uncertainty – themes which have only become more pronounced since Bowie’s death – but, more than anything, it remains a testament to its creator’s determination to ask life’s biggest questions and to continue to push himself into new places as he did so. “When we were in the music, we were just in it and playing off each other,” McCaslin said. “He was always present and in it and ready to go.”
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Buy the ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002-2016) box set here.
