David Bowie
Blackstar

LA RECENSIONE

★.

D.B. was one of the greatest artists in the history of pop culture (music is just a small part of the whole); he achieved the miracle of making his own death a work of art, accessible on several levels to anyone, turning the rock song into an initiatory path.
He used the ephemeral format of the album release as a vinyl stele on which to engrave, within a macro-systemic mosaic including images for commercial promotion (photos and videos, clothing details, palette options, visual environment, graphic chromatics, hyperlinks to others'), autobiographical references, self-citations, relationships with the media, market and advertising, perception of his own iconographic presence in the public's imagination—an imposing and superficial fresco (deliberately superficial as suggested) that became the final legacy, the first cry, of human consciousness in the age of technical reproducibility.

"Black Star", the “Stella Nera”, this is the title of his last album released on January the eighth, twenty sixteen, two days before his death (January the tenth, twenty sixteen).

Seven tracks. ★.

1. "Blackstar"
2. "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore".
3. "Lazarus".
4. "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)"
5. "Girl Loves Me".
6. "Dollar Days".
7. "I Can't Give Everything Away".

7: 4 (7/6/5/4 - Progression in Earthly Immanence) + 3 (3/2/1 - Eschatological Transcendence).
In alchemy, the union of four, 4 ( - - - -) Matter, 3 ( - - - ) Spirit: 7 of Completeness, the Cosmos, the Totality.

7. and/or 1.; 1. and/or 7.

The tracklist is two-faced, it unfolds in numerical progression and/or semantically in its opposite: the last track, 7. and/or 1., ("I Can't Give Everything Away") first and last stage of the will to communicate, simulation, in the playful pretending of the pop song, addressed to the listener about to embark on the journey that has just concluded; the first, 1. or 7., ("Blackstar") the final transformation in which the human form is transfigured in its generative fulfillment, the Sol Niger, end/beginning of the opposition of opposites.

6. and/or 2.; 2. and/or 6.

Moving forward (backward) to the sixth track "Dollar Days", i.e. "I Saldi" in Anglo-Saxon culture; 6. The imperfection of the human form in equilibrium, another awareness, the second degree, of the Man-Artist: "I’m dying to / Push their backs against the grain / And fool them all again and again", a Buddhist parable of fertilizing provocation. The communicative entity in the composition proclaims its own death in action.

5. and/or 3.; 3. and/or 5.

In the fifth step, 5. and/or 3., 3. and/or 5., "Girl Loves Me", his cultural experience is retraced. The sound recalls the last chapter of the Berlin Trilogy ("Lodger", 1979). The language of the lyrics draws from the literature of Anthony Burgess ("Hunky Dory", 1971), George Orwell ("Diamond Dogs", 1974), from criminal slang ("The Man Who Sold the World", 1970). The blurring and merging of sexual poles, the journey of criminal life, themes that often found space in his songbook. "Devotchka watch her garbles / Spatchko at the rozz-shop / Split a ded from his deng deng". ("La giovane donna guarda i propri testicoli / Dorme alla stazione di polizia / Ruba i soldi di un vecchio").

4.

Fourth, 4., is "Sue", a woman murdered by her lover. Sue is mother, lover, victim. Sue gives birth as a virgin, the proclamation of her virginity is a tombstone: "Sue, you said you wanted writ "Sue the virgin" on your stone / For your grave". ("Sue, hai detto che vuoi che sia scritto / “Sue, la vergine” sulla lapide della tua tomba"). Again "Why, too dark to speak the words? / For I know that you have a son / Oh, folly, Sue". ("Perché quelle parole sono così difficili da pronunciare? / Perché so che hai un figlio / Oh, follia, Sue!"). The music turns into electronic layering ("Black Tie White Noise", 1993; "1. Outside", 1995; "Earthling", 1997) in a parallel world, recalling the earthly identity of which the pronouncer is an extraneous medium: "Sue, I pushed you down beneath the weeds / Endless faith in hopeless deeds". ("Sue, ti ho spinta giù sotto le erbacce / Fede infinita in azioni disperate").

3. and/or 5.; 5. and/or 3.

"Lazarus". Lazarus, in the Christian tradition he who is resurrected, experiencing the transience from being to non-being, once again forwards or in reverse: the last verse is the wish of a human being invoking liberation from the earthly form, aware of their finite individuality, "Oh, I’ll be free / Ain’t that just like me?" ("Io sarò libero / Non è una cosa da me?"), the first stanza, and so the final one in an ouroboros perspective of the continuous beginning of the end, announces how the work of ascension of death in life has already been accomplished, symbolically using the Christian myth of the kingdom of heaven: "Look up here, I'm in Heaven" ("Guarda quassù, sono in paradiso"). In between, the verse that ritually mirrors the other two, the second stanza between the two inverse extremes, marks the passage through pain: "Look up here, man, I’m in danger" ("Guardami quassù, sono in pericolo").
Lazarus is already reborn, is already dying, is already dead.

2. and/or 6.; 6. and/or 2.

The track that precedes, 2. and/or 6., 6. and/or 2., the end (the beginning), the appearance of the Black Star, is a joke within the (non)drama of abandonment-birth. A parenthesis of humor that reiterates the playful value of the aesthetic and experiential outcome the artist is offering us. An earthly memory from a consciousness already elsewhere, a sarcastic grin at the memory of a disappointment ended by material reality, which in the eyes of the officiant no longer has the value it once had for a human being. Quoting an ancient drama by John Ford, about a crime of passion as is/will be on the album the story of Sue in the Season of Crime. "'Tis my fate, I suppose / That was patrol / 'Tis a pity she was a whore" ("E’ il mio destino, suppongo / Era solo un pattugliamento / Peccato che fosse una puttana").

1. and/or 7.; 7. and/or 1.

The edges of the Black Star are drawn, its shape can be tested by the senses, at its center the immanent hint of the initiatory secret has become a pop music record; the journey just concluded may finally begin.

★.