David Bowie – ★ (Blackstar)

I own a CD copy of this album and the year printed on the disc surface is 2015, so my release is missing among the known ones.

Hello. I have the first, USA press on black vinyl, purchased the day it came out. Which one of these listings is that one?

i agree with one of the previous posts about the hard plastic sleeve , not cool !
besides that i find the title track to be pretty average once you read the lyrics "i'm a blackstar , i'm not a pornstar" and many other lines is hardly genius songwriting. i ,like everyone else was initially fooled by the incredible video that was made for it and the mixing of jazz/electro genres .
the next song sounds great , particularly that snare but again the lyrics fall flat and almost spoil this song for me ,it reminds me of some of zappa's mysoginistic crap like "crew slut" but devoid of any humour.
the rest of the songs i think are great with clever songwriting.
3/5 overall .

This is epic. An amazing creation. Every track is a player and then some. For me the physical presentation is just wow and gives me that "ahhhhh" moment on unwrapping it. A beautiful design and it does feel very special - a keeper. As a lifelong Bowie fan who was gutted at his passing, this amazing album blows my mind and moves me at the same time. A unique sound, fragile at times, frantic, dark and aggressive at others, it is just completely amazing and I love it. [Vinyl 8875173871]

Equal parts eulogy and memorialization, Rob Sheffield's succinct On Bowie covers the icon who passed away in early 2016. Sheffield originally wrote a eulogy for Rolling Stone, and then was asked to expand it into a book by an editor. The resulting work tells the story of the life of someone who constantly changed personas, and despite his immense popularity, somehow kept his life private enough that no one knew he was battling cancer until after he died. It is here that the book hits on emotional chords, as the narrative recalls the how quickly things changed: Sheffield discusses how Bowie's final album, Blackstar, was hailed by his fans and the critics alike for the first two days after its release on January 8th, 2015, only to then be completely reevaluated two days later when we all realized it was meant to be his swan song. But far from just striking a mournful tone, On Bowie does of course pay tribute to Bowie's greatness as an artist in both music and film, though it does not shy away from his failures either. Those moments help the narrative from becoming just another story heaping nothing but praise for a glorified rock star, as do the stories from Sheffield's own life which are entwined into the timeline. Simply put, I cannot imagine a Bowie fan would want to skip this book.

David Bowies Last album could be an episode of the fantastic TV-Series Black Mirror. How else can you explain the fact David Bowie predicted his death on the most accurate way in his music. The whole album bathes in a haunting beauty never-before heard in pop music! It’s just plain briiliant! Is it his best work No, will it allways be remembered YES IT WILL. David Bowie is a story teller and he kept doing that until his last seconds on earth.

Having heard Black Star prior to it’s public release, I felt that I should wait a respectable amount of time before sitting down and consciously attending to both my memories of David Bowie and his music, music that came out at a seminal period of my life. Needless to say, I’ve had an on again off again relationship with Bowie, feeling that nearly every album released by him has been a challenge, other than Ziggy Stardust, where he managed to pull one single thematic idea together, worked around it, and presented the world with an unshakable concept, and brilliant production of pure rock n’ roll at it’s very best.

Yet even on Ziggy Stardust, one becomes acutely aware that the nature of the album revolves around tragedy, and as on Black Star is delivered through the narrative by an almost disembodied voice, who may or may not have been the central character, or perhaps is simply a kindred spirit who was privy to the story as it was unfolding. Bowie’s music has always seemed to be filled with rather high contrast black & white imagery, he’s always seemed to be a man who’s constantly viewing himself, and having said that, he seems to be a man who’s always lied to his fans, merely relaying a suggestive undercurrent of whom he actually is, favoring instead to become the characters in his songs, even to the point where here on Black Star, one is left wondering if he’s actually writing about his own death, and the times in which his death will occur, or if he’s even here, created the personification of a caricature who’s standing in for him at this moment in time, connecting his past with his unsure future, while sampling images of the ill fated iconic characters he’s both developed and lived through.

Never does it seem that we have ever met the real man, say perhaps on Hunky Dory. We never met him as an actual DJ, nor was he really there as kisses were exchanged under a hail of bullets, he was rejecting fame in the song “Fame,” yet wrapping himself ever more deeply in the cloak of fame, becoming a famous person withdrawn from society and a normal walk to the corner store. There is an unshakable duality to Bowie, one that harkens back to his bicoloured eyes, which was not caused by heterochromia, but from a playground fight, with this duality becoming a central theme for all of his music. This duality cuts deeply into his albums, where after Ziggy Stardust his material became laced with more and deeper experimental concepts, nearly to the point that there was merely one or two pop songs that gained radio attention, as if to capture our imaginations, and once the door was open, we’re face to face with conceptualized music that most people didn’t listen to, preferring to purchase his ‘Hits’ albums. So in effect, this pop star icon was evoking more of a Robert Fripp response, or even the 1963 collaboration John Coltrane did with Johnny Hartman, where the protagonist occupies a private nocturnal world, one filled with his own fantasies of demons, devils and angels, one that he doesn’t seem to truly comprehend, leaving these sketches to his band to translate, then stepping in to tweak, stepping in to install a liner translation.

Yes, it’s impossible to consider Black Star without looking back and looking within, both at the man and at ourselves [as listeners]. With that in mind, and seeming for this reviewer, to be the central and insurmountable aspect to this last release, and I must tell you that I find it to be his most disturbing, most uncomfortable, and most unlistenable of albums. Of course I can accept the fact that this is just me not wanting to confront my own mortality, yet I’ve seriously confronted my mortality more times than I care to remember, having nearly died more than once. Black Star is filled with minor chord riffs, where Bowie gives actual weight to each word, while emphasizing both the music and the lyrics with snares of disdain, as if he is attempting to ignore the scratching at his door. Others have said that it was a shrewd move to keep his own company and his silence for so long, and then burst on the scene to deliver this his most scary and tragic outing of all time … because as he was writing he was dying from his own hand, knowing this, angry that he was hungry for more life and not ready to make peace with himself and his death, leaving him to be the proverbial cracked actor.

If you love this album then I am very happy for you. If you feel that Bowie is sticking pins in our eyes, then I’m with you, feeling that this is a man, who as in life, is cryptically and melodramatically doling out visions of his life and final days, rather than shedding his skin, celebrating his life, his fans and the wonder of his nature by delivering us a visionary rock n’ roll, even if it is of the unplugged sort, of this final frontier, one that far too few artists have been able to script into verse and song.

But then, in all honesty, not believing in heaven or hell, and hating the annoyance of cell phones, I could have, and should have, expected exactly what I found here on Black Star, an ambiguous album filled with scary monsters and no heroes, one that doesn’t see Bowie moving forward, but rather reaching the end of the line, a passenger who will never step off of the train, an album I find too uncomfortable to even keep in my collection.

Review by Jenell Kesler

I really miss him. Such a great artist. Great album.

This is without doubt a masterpiece album in its own right, however, the whole pomposity - or better, hysteria about it, is quite annoying - especially in the vinyl sales; for an album that's not produced in limited vinyl quantites, but so far repressed several times (be it on clear or regular vinyl), it's a disgrace how expensive it is - especially, taking under consideration that people do complain about the surface noise on brand new copies, which makes it a clumsy job from the pressing plant and some of these pressing editions rather unlistenable. So before you buy, beware and make sure you don't throw away the fortune if your copy suffered the same.

This is a music masterpiece, full of groove & emotions! This album is (..& will be) one of the 20 best albums of the decade. Remember it...