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Mon 26 May 2025 12:00, UK
In 1960, Elvis Presley released ‘Black Star’. Over a sprightly, swinging rockabilly backing, the song sees The King intone in that unmistakable, trembling croon, “When a man sees his black Star / He knows his time / his time has come”. Some 55 years later, a man who once looked to Elvis as a guiding light released a similarly titled song, one that also reckoned with mortality in a much more personal manner than Presley had. Because David Bowie had seen his ‘Blackstar’.
Unbeknownst to the entire world outside of David Bowie and his closest circle of friends, family and collaborators, the great man was dying. The nigh on impossible act of reckoning with his entire legacy was spread over his swansong album Blackstar, and the title track was, as it is for most albums, the very heart of that theme. This runs through the very heart of the track, beginning with its sound.
After 2013s The Next Day concerned itself with harkening back to Bowie’s glam rock years, ‘Blackstar’ is a song that, nearly a decade after its release, still sounds thrillingly futuristic and quite unlike anything that’s come before or since. Over a jazzy, post-rock backing with a wrong-footing rhythm and powered by droning, melancholic choirs of saxaphone, Bowie has never sounded more haunting as he sings of a villa in Ormen. Of a solitary candle. Of smiling women on the day of execution.
However Bowie, ever the chameleon, sees no reason to stay in one style. The backing drops out and over one of the most gorgeous melodies he ever spun, he sings lyrics that still leave me a little misty-eyed over a decade after his passing. “Something happened on the day he died / Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside / Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried / ‘I’m a blackstar.’”
Then Bowie swipes our legs out from under us once more by launching into a funky strut that could have come straight out Young Americans. I don’t think it’s an accident that shortly after the beat switches, Bowie literally thumbs his nose at the audience in the track’s impeccable music video. Over lyrics saying “You’re a flash in the pan / I’m the Great I Am” no less.
What can we learn from the lyrics of ‘Blackstar’ by David Bowie?
This speaks to the real lyrical hook I see in this song. While this is, in context, a deeply sad song, I don’t think Bowie wanted it to be. At the very most, I think he wanted it to be a part of the song. After all, it’s David Bowie we’re talking about, he hasn’t made a song that could be summed up with a single word since the 1960s. Lyrically, I think this song is no navel-gazing “oh woe is me” piece, if anything I think it’s just as lyrically mischevous as it is musically.
This is a man who may have accepted his fate, but is still challenging those who understand him to match his musical impact. He’s telling the millions of people who’ve been inspired by his work “I can’t answer why / Just go with me / I’ma take you home”. After all, they can relate to each other since “we were born upside down / born the wrong way ’round.”
To be clear, I don’t feel like I’ve cracked the code on this whole song. There are layers to this song miles deep and were he around to talk about it, Bowie would be the first to say that there isn’t one accurate interpretation or reading of the song. I haven’t even breached just how many references touch on Bowie’s lifelong fascination with the occult there are in this song.
However, just as the whole album is a meditation on mortality and legacy, I think that the title track is David Bowie throwing down the gauntlet to the next generation. A sign from The Starman that when he had to leave us, he did so with the belief that people who truly got him could match him and perhaps go even further. One hopes that one day we can repay his faith in us.
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