Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie: 2 (Ex:Centrics)
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Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie: 2 (Ex:Centrics)
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However he also struggled with his confidence. I asked Tony about The Next Day: why did it take so long? He said it was his confidence. CO: It’s still unclear to me, after all this time, whether Bowie, when he was putting out all of this stuff in his last years, had something like a complete design in mind. I guess I always saw him as someone who’d more draft extensive plans that would never come to fruition, as he’d abandon them to move onto something more interesting. But there’s a narrative logic to the 2013-2016 period, even if unintended. Do you think so, too? Do you see an overarching pattern? Kardos, L. (2018). Making Room for 21st Century Musicianship in Higher Education. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education,17(1), 33-47. Someone recently said there will never be a definitive book on Bowie and I would probably have agreed. But now that I’ve read this book I’m not so sure. This is as good as it gets. Kardos elegantly sidesteps speculation about Bowie’s personal life in his final years, focusing instead on the work, taking in nods to Morrissey, Elvis Presley, Peaky Blinders and “the lust for life against the finality of everything”.
CO: The idea of him doing a show with the McCaslin quartet [as McCaslin said he and Bowie discussed in 2015] is…just incredible. CO: We’ve talked before about his love of the Korg. 4 How best to describe how odd his affection for this keyboard was—while it’s not a kid’s keyboard, it’s no state of the art synthesizer either. CO: I have wondered what a full album of Bowie/Schneider would have been like, but I wonder if it was best as this one-off thing. Love is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy for the DFA – Edit)’ 2013. Directed David Bowie.
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CO: Yes, all a bit Da Vinci Code. I do still love the Villa of Ormen Tumblr. 1 I love the unsolved mystery of that. That could have been him: it’s not out of speculation. CO: The recurrence of stars is another one. Towards the end, he’s playing with the idea of a star aging, or dying, like a red giant . After filming, Bowie had a hard time shaking Newton from his system. His next two albums, Station to Station (1976) and Low (1977), explore themes of emotional detachment, psychic isolation, and personal distress, while the cover art for both albums are stills from the film, picturing Bowie in character as Newton. These too are the records most associated with Bowie’s personal battles with drug addiction and poor mental health in the 1970s. When explaining the genesis of the Lazarus script, co-writer Enda Walsh told the Financial Times that the pair ‘began to talk about death … about morphine. How the brain would wrestle with itself or what it would see in the moments before death. [Bowie said:] “Can we structure something about that?”.’ They talked about the psychotherapeutic noir of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective and Bob Fosse’s cinematic ode to mortality All That Jazz (1979). ‘We discussed drugs and the drunken state a lot. How to construct something and place it behind the eyes of someone who is totally out of it. The film [Roeg’s adaptation] does it so brilliantly. We thought, we can do that on stage, too’. CO: It’s amazing how much of a through line Newton is for Bowie. I heard “Looking For Water” playing a while ago and thought “that’s another Newton song.” Is it strange how much he identified with the character?
Cold Lazarus, episode 4 ‘Finale’ (1996) is available to watch on YouTube. The whole series of Cold Lazarus is available to stream on Channel 4 (online). LK: It’s beautiful, isn’t it—slipping off the mask a bit, a vulnerable moment. A song about being English and missing England and being okay with it. What I particularly love about that song is Bowie’s thoughtful use of harmony and structure to dramatize the lyric. He’s really mindful of the chords he’s using and the relationships between them, he’s playing with tension.
Leah Kardos and ‘Blackstar Theory’: The Interview
The latter is almost like a combination of the first two in some ways. Fragmented lyrics pushed forward by propulsive rhythms, jazzy textures, and a minimalist kind of feel.
One of Potter’s masterpieces, The Singing Detective (BBC, 1986) has Michael Gambon as a writer, Philip Marlow, recovering from a vicious bout of psoriatic arthritis in a hospital ward. The second episode is entitled “Heat.” Kardos’ book lists a number of fascinating parallels between Singing Detective and Bowie’s last works. Pierrot in Turquoise or The Looking Glass Murders 1970. Directed by Brian Mahoney. Scottish Television David Bowie in Lindsay Kemp’s production of Pierrot in Turquoise. Photograph: Scottish TelevisionDr. Kardos’ point about Bowie camouflaging his compositional adventurousness with claims of non-musicianship is encapsulated by one anecdote Bowie related in, I think, the 1987 cover interview in Stone where he recounts suggesting a chord-structure for “Never Let Me Down” to Carlos Alomar and Alomar politely modifying it from something Bowie good-naturedly jokes would otherwise have been “ponderous and funereal,” his natural reflex. I think of “Dancing Out in Space” as an example of the ponderous-and-funereal tendencies in a pop love song fully unfurled, and I find it both catchy *and* haunting.
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