Bowie’s ’Blackstar’… okay, I’m coming a little late to this one. But its very existence is heartening to me. It may have taken someone who hailed from the days from when ‘LPs’ were ‘released’ (instead of ‘items’ being added to ‘feeds’) to rekindle the feeling of an LP being released, but let’s just focus on the fact we got there.
And for me it’s extra sweet. Before the end of the Eighties I’d finally got over my fervent youthful denunciations of his “selling out” and simply stopped thinking about him. Then, slowly and surely, it became the musical equivalent of people’s paths diverging only to come back together later in life. As if he’d become bored of attending award shows and glitzy parties, and decided he was really one of us outsider types after all. Culminating in an album that genuinely bears comparison to his Seventies stuff.
So it seems gloriously old-fashioned the way so many people devoted so much webspace to raking over every utterance and studying the cover for “clues”, even if there was little of quality analysis amid that width. They roved from Norwegian villages to computer code, hoping to overturn so many stones that surely something useful will be stumbled upon. But however absurd the exercise it does hearken back to the days when an album being released was an event, like a monolith being found on the moon, around which the rest of life would have to reorient itself.
And I wonder if, with the title track in particular, it wasn’t preloaded for that response, to both provoke and stymie it. With any piece of music, you’ll hear the sound of the voice before you take in any words, which will inevitably colour the lyrics. And there’s two distinct vocal lines in this song, even if both are provided by Bowie himself. The ceremonial voice which opens the track is like the musical equivalent of a Greek chorus, describing things, setting the scene.
The other voice, sounding more like a regular Bowie vocal, slips between first and second person. But both are concerned with the actions of a character. It behaves like a lead vocal, the ceremonial voice slipping into backing vocals when it’s around. In other words, the first vocal frames the second, both in form (the song being palindromic in structure) and in content. As if the track has its own inbuilt audience. In the video he ‘plays’ the two voices as different characters.
“At the centre of it all” is nothing that radiates but a blackstar, defined as a set of absences (“I’m not a filmstar… a popstar… a marvel star” and so on.) A corpse in a spacesuit. Bowie often demonstrated a Dylanish disdain for pinning songs to ‘meanings’, and here the compound word title brings together ‘centre of attention’ and ‘blank slate’. Maybe his last words to us all were “you try making some sense of this stuff if you want. Me, I have somewhere I need to be…” While at the same time saying, in Lennon’s teasing words, “here’s another clue for you all”. And, to quote him from another track on the same album, “ain’t that just like me?”
So why do that? Bowie had a wry sense of humour. But that’s not the whole of it. Scanning songs for ‘clues’, like they’re puzzle games or detective stories, is clearly not the right way to respond to them. It borders on category error. But in its klunking, gormless way it clutches at something important. Art is not a work email or a note left out for the milkman. It’s not a switchboard for conveying straightforward information. The artist only launches the artwork, lets it loose in the world. From thereon in, it’s up to you, the listener, to make your own sense of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment