David Bowie
Lazarus cast album

One cannot ask for more from an artist who brimmed with an extraordinary and irreplaceable musical imagination. One cannot ask for more from that great man named David Robert Jones, for that existential limit was forever surpassed by him. David Bowie completed his stunning requiem ★ (Blackstar) by creatively battling the cursed cancer that ultimately claimed his life. However, David Bowie managed to honor his life in such an unthinkable, astonishing way, demonstrating courage and a spirit of exemplary strength that left everyone frozen on that bloody Monday, January 11th, upon hearing of his death (which occurred the previous evening, January 10th, 2016 Anno Domini, just two days after the release of ★). In Hunky Dory, he declared himself a mortal with the powers of a superman, and the concrete, coherent realization of his "beyond" was lived from beginning to end, with the relentless rigor of his visionary spirit. Yet another demonstration of what we mean here by the term spirit is the posthumous Lazarus cast album.

In the last year of his life, Bowie was not only working on the Opus maius ★ but divided his time between studio rehearsals and the theatrical project of the musical Lazarus directed by Ivo van Hove, co-written with Irish playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh, and produced by Robert Fox. The theatrical project, inspired by Walter Tevis' text The Man Who Fell to Earth (the same novel where we find the character Thomas Jerome Newton, the humanoid played by Bowie in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 film), was the realization of a dream Bowie had since the days of Diamond Dogs, to produce and direct a musical of his own. And so it was: a musical where Bowie's voice is absent but interpreted by other voices, showcasing his forty-year catalog, alternating immortal classics with tracks never performed live during his career, such as It’s No Game, Dirty Boy, Valentine’s Day, Love Is Lost, Where Are We Now, all naturally enriched with completely new pieces. The Lazarus cast album is a double CD (a triple in vinyl version), with the first CD containing the recording from the cast on January 11th, 2016, deeply intense and moving, though it will be appreciated only by those who enjoy musicals (not me, for example); while the second CD, which you should start listening to, contains the unpublished sessions of ★: “No Plan”, “Killing A Little Time”, and “When I Met You” that together with “Lazarus” form 18 minutes of overwhelming and intense Bowie composition. The wonderful “When I Met You” sounds like it's played with Sonic Youth, “No Plan” transports us to a space without gravity where there is no more music, no regret for one's life, while “Killing A Little Time” is the furious countdown of one's existential time, the progressive loss of self, the dimming of one's light: “I’m falling, man, I’m choking, man, I’m fading, man, just killing a little time”. Given the value of the second CD, the Lazarus cast album is to be purchased without hesitation and with eyes closed.

It is obvious that “No Plan”, “Killing A Little Time”, and “When I Met You” are by no means the last three studio tracks of the Duke. We know from Donny McCaslin's statement to Rolling Stone (January 14th) that there are 16 tracks in total recorded from the sessions of ★, such as “Wistful”, “Somewhere”, “When Things Go Bad”, “Blaze” ready for the EXTRA version of ★; while according to Tony Visconti (and even Brian Eno), after the recordings of ★, David Bowie had another album planned, following the lines of Outside, with five new pieces already prepared. However, these things will make sense when we gradually have all of Bowie's legacy in our hands, which promises annual releases (as with The Gouster album from '74 that only came out this year), albums of rarities, extra tracks, unreleased pieces, covers, live recordings, and more from the various eras of his fifty-year musical career. But let's return to today and the Lazarus cast album.

Always a pioneer of other human spaces, Bowie knew how to transcend and shatter the cultural boundaries of our minds, confronting us with one of the strongest taboos to conceive in our times, the taboo of illness and death. Even for the first time in history, the Rock artist's death was commemorated by the Holy See. In Lazarus, he declares that he is in Heaven. The name Lazarus means "God helps," and Bowie transcended himself, appealing to the Christian hope of the resurrection of God's children. The children of the resurrection, equal to angels, are eternal and can no longer die. And just as Jesus wept for the death of his friend Lazarus, so we Bowie fans cried deeply for the death of this imaginary friend-hero who, with his sound and vision, gave us space. Thank you once more, great Duke, for this space, everything we felt was true. Thank you again for ★ for bringing us so close to an experience we will never forget, in emotional contact with our earthly mortality and the beyond of the afterlife.