Blackstar

"Blackstar" is ten minutes long and feels like several different songs occupying the same body, which is precisely the point. The opening section moves in a kind of ritual darkness — jazz-inflected, with brushed drums and a saxophone figure that spirals rather than resolves, beneath a Bowie vocal that has been treated and layered until it sounds like a transmission from somewhere uncertain. Then the song ruptures into a rock groove, abrupt and almost jarring, before folding back into its original atmosphere. The structure refuses to behave like a pop song, or even like a rock song — it behaves like a ceremony, with movements that serve a logic that isn't musical so much as symbolic. Bowie announced nothing publicly, but "Blackstar" reads in retrospect as a deliberate artistic will and testament: here are all the sounds I've worked with across five decades, reassembled into something that acknowledges an ending while refusing to perform grief conventionally. The jazz elements connect him to his heroes; the experimental production connects him to the artists he'd inspired; the ambiguity of the lyrics — full of biblical resonance, of sacrifice and succession — reads as a studied final communiqué. Producer Tony Visconti and the assembled jazz musicians give the song an organic tension that his more electronic work often traded away. "Blackstar" is an album opener and a career closer simultaneously, which is an almost impossible thing to pull off. You listen to it when you want to feel the full weight of what it means to build something, and then, eventually, to let it go.