Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Our first year without David Bowie

Where are we now, a year after David Bowie’s untimely death? No sooner had he succumbed to cancer than critics were rushing back to Blackstar, the album he had released two days earlier (on his 69th birthday), looking for hidden messages pertaining to his fate: “I’m dying to push their backs against the grain / And fool them all again and again,” he sang on Dollar Days. You could go deeper still: a blackstar is the name for a cancer lesion, and also gave its name to a rare song by Elvis Presley, one of Bowie’s great obsessions. In the wake of Bowie’s death, the impulse to treat Blackstar like a puzzle to be solved was understandable yet seemed to defeat the point of his luminous, liminal final statement. Twelve months on, however, his collaborators have revealed a wealth of tantalising new information about Bowie’s plans for the future, while his legacy has twisted into various fascinating shapes.
 Here’s what we’ve learned in our first year without Bowie.

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