English singer David Bowie’s Blackstar (stylized as ★), is his twenty-fifth and final studio album. It was released worldwide through Bowie’s ISO Records label on January 8, 2016, Bowie’s 69th birthday. Bowie died two days after its release. Co-producer Tony Visconti described the album as Bowie’s intended swan song and a “parting gift” for his fans before his death.
Blackstar was met with critical acclaim and commercial success, reaching the number one spot in a number of countries in the wake of Bowie’s death, and becoming Bowie’s first and only album to reach number one on the Billboard 200 album chart in the U.S. The album remained at the no. 1 position in the UK charts for three weeks before being replaced by one of Bowie’s compilation albums, Best of Bowie.
Bowie recorded the album in the midst of an ongoing battle with cancer. His illness was only known by those very close to him and that remained so until the news of his death became public, two days after the album’s release. It became apparent immediately after that many lyrics seem to come from a man who knows death is near. Like The Next Day, recording of this album took place in secret at The Magic Shop and Human Worldwide Studios in New York City. Bowie began writing and making demos for songs that appear on Blackstar as soon as sessions for The Next Day concluded. The two songs that appear on Blackstar that were previously released, “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” and “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore”, were re-recorded for Blackstar, including new saxophone parts played on the latter song by Donny McCaslin (replacing parts Bowie played on the original release). The title of the latter derives from the title ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, a play by John Ford, an English dramatist of the 17th century. McCaslin and the rest of the jazz group recorded their parts in the studio over a period of about one week a month from January to March 2015, and were unaware of Bowie’s declining health.The song “Lazarus” was included in Bowie’s Off-Broadway musical of the same name.
The music on Blackstar has been characterized as incorporating art rock, jazz, and experimental rock. According to producer Tony Visconti, they deliberately attempted “to avoid rock ’n roll” while making the album, and he and Bowie had been listening to rapper Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly during the recording sessions and cited it as an influence. Electronic duo Boards of Canada and experimental hip-hop trio Death Grips have also been cited as influences. Saxophone was the first instrument Bowie learned and he was a keen listener to jazz in his youth. Both Billboard and CNN noted that Bowie’s lyrics seem to revolve around his impending death, with CNN noting that the album “reveals a man who appears to be grappling with his own mortality.”
Blackstar received widespread acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, the album received an average score of 87, which indicates “universal acclaim”, based on 41 reviews. Rolling Stone critic David Fricke described the album as “a ricochet of textural eccentricity and pictorial-shrapnel writing.” Andy Gill of The Independent regarded the record as “the most extreme album of [Bowie’s] entire career”, stating that “Blackstar is as far as he’s strayed from pop.” Reviewing for Q magazine, Tom Doyle wrote, “Blackstar is a more concise statement than The Next Day and a far, far more intriguing one.” In a favorable review for Exclaim!, Michael Rancic wrote that Blackstar is “a defining statement from someone who isn’t interested in living in the past, but rather, for the first time in a while, waiting for everyone else to catch up”.
The New York Times described the album as “at once emotive and cryptic, structured and spontaneous and, above all, willful, refusing to cater to the expectations of radio stations or fans.” Pitchfork Media’s review of Blackstar was written on the day of the album’s release, two days before Bowie’s death, and concluded with the line “This tortured immortality is no gimmick: Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold.”
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On January 7th, 2022, the day before David’s birthday, TOY (TOY:BOX) will receive its long awaited official release, finally making the legendary previously unreleased album available in three CD / six 10” vinyl versions.
TOY was recorded following David’s triumphant Glastonbury 2000 performance. Bowie entered the studio with his band, Mark Plati, Sterling Campbell, Gail Ann Dorsey, Earl Slick, Mike Garson, Holly Palmer and Emm Gryner, to record new interpretations of songs he’d first recorded from 1964-1971. David planned to record the album ‘old school’ with the band playing live, choose the best takes and then release it as soon as humanly possible in a remarkably prescient manner. Unfortunately, in 2001 the concept of the ‘surprise drop’ album release and the technology to support it were still quite a few years off, making it impossible to release TOY, as the album was now named, out to fans as instantly as David wanted. In the interim, David did what he did best; he moved on to something new, which began with a handful of new songs from the same sessions and ultimately became the album HEATHEN, released in 2002 and now acknowledged as one of his finest moments.
Now twenty years after its originally planned release, David’s co-producer Mark Plati says, “Toy is like a moment in time captured in an amber of joy, fire and energy. It’s the sound of people happy to be playing music. David revisited and re-examined his work from decades prior through prisms of experience and fresh perspective – a parallel not lost on me as I now revisit it twenty years later. From time to time, he used to say ‘Mark, this is our album’ – I think because he knew I was so deeply in the trenches with him on that journey. I’m happy to finally be able to say it now belongs to all of us.”
Available in 3CD or 6×10” vinyl formats, TOY (TOY:BOX) is a special edition of the TOY album. The ‘capture the moment’ approach of the recording sessions are extended to the sleeve artwork designed by Bowie featuring a photo of him as a baby with a contemporary face. The package also contains a 16-page full-colour book featuring previously unseen photographs by Frank Ockenfels 3.
The seeds of TOY were first sown in 1999 during the making of an episode of VH-1 Storytellers. David wanted to perform something from his pre-‘Space Oddity’ career, so he reached back to 1966 and dusted off ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ for the first time in thirty years. The song remained in the setlist for the short promotional tour for the ‘hours…’ album, and in early 2000 David and producer Mark Plati compiled a list of some of Bowie’s earliest songs to re-record.
TOY finishes with a new song from which the album takes its title, ‘Toy (Your Turn To Drive)’ was constructed from a jam at the end of one of the live takes of ‘I Dig Everything’. The track is based around rearranged sections of Sterling Campbell’s drums, Gail Ann Dorsey’s bass and sections of Mike Garson’s piano were looped along with a guitar line of Earl Slick’s that was sampled, time stretched and used as a repeating figure. Lastly, some of Holly and Emm’s backing vocals from the body of ‘Dig Everything’ were cut up and reassembled. Producer Mark Plati “As it was culled from ‘I Dig Everything’ it makes sense to bookend the album with this track – it’s also a fitting postscript to the TOY era”.
Included in TOY:BOX is a second CD/set of 10”s of alternative mixes and versions including proposed B-Sides (versions of David’s debut single ‘Liza Jane’ and 1967’s ‘In The Heat Of The Morning’), later mixes by Tony Visconti and the ‘Tibet Version’ of ‘Silly Boy Blue’ recorded at The Looking Glass Studio time at the of the 2001 Tibet House show in New York featuring Philip Glass on piano and Moby on guitar.
The third CD/set of 10”s features ‘Unplugged & Somewhat Slightly Electric’ mixes of thirteen TOY tracks. Producer Mark Plati “While we were recording the basic tracks Earl Slick suggested that he and I overdub acoustic guitars on all the songs. He said this was a Keith Richards’ trick, sometimes these guitars would be a featured part of the track, and at other times they’d be more subliminal. Later while mixing, David heard one of the songs broken down to just vocals and acoustic guitars; this gave him the idea that we ought to do some stripped-down mixes like that and that maybe one day they’d be useful. Once we put a couple of other elements in the pot, it felt like it could be a completely different record. I was only too happy to finish that thought some two decades after the fact.”
Ref: Rhino
Discography
David Bowie (1967)
Space Oddity (1969)
The Man Who Sold The World (1970)
Hunky Dory (1971)
The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972)
Aladdin Sane (1973)
Pin Ups (1973)
Diamond Dogs (1974)
Young Americans (1975)
Station to Station (1976)
Low (1977)
Heroes (1977)
Lodger (1979)
Scary Monsters (1980)
Let’s Dance (1983)
Tonight (1984)
Never Let Me Down (1987)
Tin Machine (1989)
Tin Machine II (1991)
Black Tie White Noise (1993)
Outside (1995)
Earthling (1997)
Hours (1999)
Heathen ( 2002)
Reality (2003)
The Next Day (2013)
Blackstar (2016)
TOY (TOY:BOX)(2022)
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