Blackstar
- Zone: Twilight (level 3 of 5)
- Genre: Rock, Art rock, Jazz
- Mood: ominous, mournful, restless
- Sound: free jazz saxophone, shifting time signatures, electronic beats, long songs, dark atmosphere
Blackstar was made with a New York jazz quartet led by saxophonist Donny McCaslin, whom Bowie found at a Greenwich Village club, and it mixes free jazz and art rock with industrial rock, folk-pop and hip-hop rhythms. Producer Tony Visconti said they set out to avoid rock ’n’ roll, and named Kendrick Lamar, D’Angelo, Boards of Canada and Death Grips as reference points. The title track runs nearly ten minutes and stitches together two separate melodies, with a drum and bass-style groove, an acid house-inspired instrumental section, a sax solo and a slower blues-like passage. “Girl Loves Me” is sung largely in the invented slang of Nadsat and Polari, and the vocals and rhythm tracks were mostly recorded in one or two takes. Its jazz-meets-electronics sound carried into McCaslin’s own later records and an orchestral version, the Blackstar Symphony, in 2022.
Track list
- Blackstar
- ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore
- Lazarus
- Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)
- Girl Loves Me
- Dollar Days
- I Can’t Give Everything Away