“His best since Scary Monsters” is an essay series by John Wohlmacher discussing David Bowie’s albums that followed on after 1980 – taking its name from the recurring conclusion that any newly released Bowie record was “his best since Scary Monsters”. Exploring the individual albums, the series hopes to provide newfound insight of David Bowie’s most misunderstood phases.
Maybe it’s best to start at the end… or yet, elsewhere: on a beach, where a knight plays chess against death.
In its simplistic splendor, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal has become emblematic of European cinema. Referenced by high and low brow culture, it developed an existence beyond its own form – you can know the movie without ever having seen it. In 1969, the American Scott Engel – who had shedded his stage name “Walker” – chose the iconic chess game as subject of the opener to what would be his first entirely self-written album: Scott 4. Scott, or Walker, was at the height of his power at this point, leaving his band, The Walker Brothers (who, at times, were more popular than The Rolling Stones) for three blockbuster solo albums of baroque pop and select cover tracks, and releasing it under his birth name was intended to further his standing in the contemporary music landscape.
Elsewhere, across the pond and in the same month, a young British musician would release his second full length album – but coming off a string of unsuccessful ventures: short lived bands, throwaway novelty singles and a whimsical debut album crafted in the image of the popular Scott Walker. The album wasn’t widely anticipated to do well, and only released in relatively small numbers in comparison. But it opened with a standout single: “Space Oddity”. That November, Scott Engel’s decision to drop his alias would mark the beginning of his commercial downturn, drifting away from the front ranks of pop cultural awareness and into obscurity, whereas the British artist would slowly rise into the sky: a new star – David Bowie.
Many years later, at the end of this story, and at the height of his popularity, it was to be Bowie that would return to Engel’s beach: playing chess with death.
★
Tony Visconti had very much become the curator of David Bowie’s public profile after his “disappearance” from the media. It makes a lot of sense, considering how cryptic Bowie could be if he wanted to. A versatile and gifted communicator, Bowie had perfected appearing to media representatives – multiple writers deemed him the “easiest to approach” olympian rockstar, as Bowie would be open to be interviewed by anybody, and rarely refusing any particular topic of question. He was well spoken, warm and often cracking jokes. He would at times ask questions to his interviewers, provoking deeper engagement on political or philosophical topics.
But this iteration of David Bowie was a facade, still – his son Duncan Jones would later pinpoint a 2002 TV interview that marked the only one that had his father slip the mask down. Bowie’s closest ally over the years, his assistant Coco Schwab, remains entirely shrouded in mystery, refusing interview requests. Musical collaborators often contradict each other – more on that later – and biographers are invited to wade through a vast swamp of generously curated personal memorabilia and mementos. Later, even Geoffrey Marsh, one of the co-curators during one of the “David Bowie Is…” exhibitions, remarked he felt Bowie ultimately succeeded in cultivating the character, like the wizard of Oz, for the showcase, protecting the man behind the artist from Marsh.
Bowie retained the mime he portrayed in a short film at the beginning of his career throughout it all. When he steeped himself into silence, he needed a communicator that wasn’t the cultivated character to uphold the distance. Visconti was the perfect choice: not related directly, but family nonetheless, having worked with him since they released a single (“In the Heat of the Morning” / “London Bye Ta-Ta”) in 1968 and returning after a two-decade long break (from 1981 to 2001) to produce Heathen. Bowie knew Tony, and they could trust each other. Visconti shouldn’t be degraded to the role of a PR guy, but he had the authority and elegance to step up to the press and represent his friend.
We now know of the fateful meeting, when Bowie invited Visconti to his office, sitting behind the desk, cap on head. When Bowie noted he had to make a confession, removed his cap to reveal his head bald from chemo therapy, it had an echo to Bowie’s fascination of drag performance: the queen, in the last moment of the show, smearing the lipstick, and taking off the wig. He knew of the power of that action, as Visconti hugged him, tearfully comforting his friend that they would make it through. Visconti had become Bowie’s voice, but now he had to be the keeper of this terrible secret. For the world, he stayed strong, but in private, he was beyond devastated – it’s impossible to fault him for that. Somewhere, at a local gathering, he took somebody aside: Bowie is very sick.
I heard it, in 2015. And I didn’t want to believe it.
★
David Bowie’s history, for all its immense achievements, is one of missed opportunities and unrealised dreams. An album adapting Orwell’s 1984 that ended up discarded, multiple unrealised film scripts, a third Tin Machine record, a “faux” fourth Berlin record that married leftovers to new vocals and overdubs, sequels and sibling-records to Outside – the list is infinite. But one particular passion was to write, design and orchestrate a stage musical. Possibly getting the closest to realisation was an adaptation of Ziggy Stardust, which entered and exited Bowie’s periphery recurrently over the decades, but there were many pitches, notes, scripts, drawings. The musical got away, again and again. Now, that things looked bleak, Bowie’s bucket list became a definite “have-to-do”.
Blackstar can’t exist without Lazarus, the stage production that saw Bowie revisit Thomas Jerome Newton, the immortal alien he played in The Man Who Fell To Earth. It divided critics upon release, who couldn’t quite untangle the play’s aesthetics and message, all while people missed that its strange imagery was already peppered with meta-commentary by referencing scenes from Scott Walker’s 2008 Barbican stage production. Drifting and Tilting was, likewise, an avant-garde pop star stepping into the shadows to have other people claim his voice. But where Walker observed a bleak cabaret of singing corpses and gutted pigs, Bowie retained the camp of his career trajectory, possibly even including a veiled nod to Fire Walk With Me.
It’s a strange story, but ultimately a veiled struggle between the ailing man, David Robert Jones, with his immortal mask, David Bowie. Newton is a stand in for Bowie, the lone and lost character, who’s anxious and troubled as reality fades from him, existing locked in within a studio loft. It’s a dream, within a dream – and a spell as well. The biblical Lazarus dies, just to come back to life at Jesus’ command. Had Bowie – so well versed in the occult and religious text – played chess too brazenly?
So let’s talk about “Lazarus”, the song. A sombre post-punk elegy, its central guitar riff seemingly referencing Bernard Sumner’s distant, metallic tone on Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, the track closes Blackstar‘s A-side with sinister, painful pathos. Bowie slowly works himself upwards, his voice quivering, rising an octave, then on volume, finally diving into a sinister howl: “This way or no way, you know I’ll be free / Just like that bluebird now, ain’t that just like me? / Oh, I’ll be free, just like that bluebird / Oh, I’ll be free, ain’t that just like me?” It’s unvarnished, besides a quiet echo after each line that rings into the beyond, with nuances of his pronunciation and mouth movement retained. Over the instrumental outro, electronic sounds whistle quietly in the background, as if icy wind was calling through the window.
That Bowie was wrestling with his mortality was clearly communicated enough: “Look up here, I’m in heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen”. Brutal. Lines that make me tear up, stop to write, even now. “I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen” – I wonder what moment he was thinking of here: if it was revealing himself to Visconti, or if he was quietly smiling, aware of the impact all this masquerade would have on his fans and former allies – yes, he was right: “Everybody knows me now”!
What’s interesting, and masterful, about “Lazarus” is how Bowie ties the imagery of spirituality – an afterlife or heaven with contemporary, even vulgar imagery. “I’m so high, it makes my brain whirl / Dropped my cell phone down below / Ain’t that just like me?” – “By the time I got to New York / I was living like a king / There I used up all my money / I was looking for your ass”. There’s a strange image here, of an ailing Joker, performing, cap on head, in front of an audience blind to his real pain: the image of the dying artist, who performs in full force, staggering, recovering, rising – the ending of The Wrestler comes to mind. Yet between the cellphones and asses, there’s also a singular cryptic image: that of the blue bird. It still evades people: is it referencing the Twitter logo, the Paul McCartney’s song, the Bukowski poem?
There’s the Qingniao from chinese mythology, a blue bird that is a messenger to the mother goddess Xi Wangmu, while Native American folklore believed the Mountain bluebird to be a sun-spirit and french folklore refers to the “blue bird of happiness”, which would later become a winged term in poetry, literature and pop-culture (the germans adapted this literary image as “blaue Blume” – a blue flower – becoming a common trope in poetry classes). Considering Bowie, it’s likely all of these crossed his mind, but in light of his interest, I personally find these quite compelling: a line in “Candy Says”, about Warhol muse Candy Darling, sung by his friend Lou Reed (“I’m gonna watch the bluebirds fly / Over my shoulder / I’m going to watch them pass me by / Maybe when I’m older”) – the opening lines from “Somewhere over the Rainbow”, which reconnect with the Wizard of Oz theme – a line from Bob Dylan’s cut Blood on the Tracks song “Up to Me”: “Everything went from bad to worse, money never changed a thing / Death kept followin’, trackin’ us down, at least I heard your bluebird sing”.
Bowie surely enjoyed the idea of his fans grappling with interpretation for an, ultimately, simple nod to a classic poetic symbol. For the video to “Lazarus” – a harrowing and gothic nightmare – Bowie made things even clearer, presenting two versions of himself: one draped in the very outfit he had created for a photoshoot for Station to Station, the other ill, broken and frightened, lying in a bed, hovering into the air, his eyes substituted with buttons on a bandage. It goes like this: a woman, pale and dressed in white, exits from a wardrobe and hides under the patient’s bed, like some figure from a Bergman movie, while the camera hovers around the sick man – all in claustrophobic aspect ratio: the walls are closing in.
Then it cuts to the other Bowie’s face in close up, as he sings and dances, like Elvis – but jagged, uneven. My girlfriend at the time would remark in grief: it’s like he’s trying to be the Bowie we know and love, but he’s broken, stuttering, struggling, falling apart. A manic mime. Finally, that Bowie sits down, pen in hand, anxiously glaring as he writes, only to finally achieve a burst of revelation and maniacally scribble down on the page, over the edges, on the table.
Director Johan Renck later said the struggle was to find an ending, and he suggested to Bowie: why don’t you go back and vanish into the wardrobe. Bowie, according to one account, said something akin to “That’ll make them think”, and laughed – in another, he giggled and said “Look, David Bowie has come back into the closet! Fuck Yeah!”
★
Renck had reached out to Bowie, as he hoped the icon could supply music for his upcoming series The Last Panthers. While that show has (sadly?) become a footnote, their video collaborations are stellar! For the first, Bowie suggested “Blackstar”, a dense piece that clocks in just under 10 minutes. Its imagery is arcane and obtuse, the music monochrome jazz with an aura of middle eastern aesthetics – a work that could exist in the world of Oxford Town from Outside: “In the Villa of Ormen / Stands a solitary candle / At the centre of it all / Your eyes”. As each stage of the song slowly leads to the next, things become just harder to figure out, the focus seems to blur, even when the middle section makes way for an apocalyptic preacher to expand a narrative: “Something happened on the day he died / Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside / Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried / “I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar”.
It’s a riddle cloaked inside a puzzle. Where is the Villa of Ormen? Internet Sleuths found a now lost Tumblr page with the title, cramped with occult and gothic imagery. What is the song about? Saxophonist Donny McCaslin revealed in an interview Bowie had told him it was about ISIS – this also reflects off the middle eastern seeming music, and some choice lyrics: “Just go with me (I’m not a filmstar) / I’ma take you home (I’m a blackstar) / Take your passport and shoes (I’m not a popstar) / And your sedatives, boo (I’m a blackstar)”. McCaslin seems the only person Bowie related this to, and Visconti claims it was tied to mortality. Ormen, which means snake, suggests a satanic bent – the devil has come to collect his soul. But Ormen was originally “Allmen”, as notes revealed. And who is that here on the bottom of the lyrics, is that… Speaking of notes, Bowie edited Sunni and Shia out, just like “Christstar” and “Jewstar”, further exaggerating the religious motif of the lyrics.
By the time Renck came in, his concepts for a video exploded into a fever dream: Major Tom’s skeleton in a space suit, the Smilie-Face button familiar from Watchmen (which Bowie approached Darren Aronofsky about, which led the latter to abandon the job of director), an eclipse, a woman with tail. The girl picks up the bejewelled skull, carrying it through an ancient city, to include it in a ritual. Then: a white and black man – one the living shadow of the other – and the lady from the wardrobe, shivering and striking the air – and Bowie, with the button for eyes, a blind ceremonial master. Later, another Bowie, his eyes unbound, raising a blackstar-bible. It is a strange, deeply occult video – as Johan Renck admits. And it can’t be easily pinpointed: “[Bowie’s] depth of references is a chasm. He knows everything, he’s stumbled upon everything.”
★
Besides these two magnum opus singles, Blackstar is a deep well of those references. “’Tis a pity she was a whore” takes the name from the 17th century play by English writer John Ford, and “Sue (In a Season of Crime)” is often interpreted as a nod to the same text. These two had been released prior to Blackstar, in alternate versions, with the latter arranged by the American jazz composer Maria Schneider. Bowie offered her the full album collaboration, but Schneider (sensing a divergence in their artistry) declined. “Sue” is a strange, trippy series of personal messages to the titular character – but a response is absent. “Sue, I got the job”. “Sue, the clinic called, the X-Ray’s fine.” “You’ll need to rest”. Sue demands the writing of her grave stone. “Sue, I’ve pushed you down beneath the weeds.” “I kissed your face, I touched your face. Sue, goodbye”! Jungle drums!
In the end, Sue leaves a note, and runs off with a clown. But parallel, Sue is being buried – the tone suggests murder, illness, deception on all sides. Sue runs off with a clown. Is it death, or a shadowy antagonist? “’Tis a pity she was a whore” could be from the perspective of that character, a haughty and strange fellow, who speaks like a 17th century character would: “Black struck the kiss, she kept my cock / Smote the mistress, drifting on”. As Bowie contrasts these two characters on the single, it could work. While these early versions have a lot of charm and atmosphere, the Blackstar counterparts are manic, darker, more elaborate and modern, with “’Tis a pity…” opening on Bowie’s breathing, preparing his lungs for the delivery of the lines – another artefact of living.
But then comes a curious cut on the album. “Girl Loves Me” has a mysterious, uncanny tone to it, as Bowie sings in Nadsat, the language used by Anthony Burgess in Clockwork Orange – a recurring inspiration for Bowie. The character seems to have gone mad, as his Nadsat barely makes sense (you can read the translation for them, if you dare shatter the mystery). But most curious are the lines in plain English: “Where the fuck did Monday go? / I’m cold to this pig and pug show / I’m sitting in the chestnut tree / Who the fuck’s gonna mess with me?”
A narrative starts to form: “Blackstar” seems focus on the revelation that our worldly existence is finite, circling a process where one is isolated from his belongings and transforming into a collapsing star. “’Tis a pity…” is a mad rave of manic euphoria. “Lazarus” is all anxiety, fear and pain. “Sue” is the one-sided dialogue with an absent female saviour who leaves with a shadowy stranger, possibly into a death-like existence in limbo – has Bowie ever played Silent Hill 2? And “Girl Loves Me” is about a man losing his mental capacities. Monday is the start of a new week, the routine of the daily grind Bowie sang about on “Thru’ These Architects Eyes” – all stability is gone!
Blackstar becomes more at that point than just a record about individual mortality or the concept of death. The record is a manifestation of David Bowie articulating seven stages of his grief for his passing. After “Blackstar”, which at least provides a dialogue with the stranger that comes to collect you from your old life, the album is mostly written in one-sided monologue, a journey of a narrator who is more isolated. He fights with those closest to him, acting like a bar drunkard from the past to alienate them (“Man, she punched me like a dude / Hold your mad hands, I cried / ‘Tis a pity she was a whore / ‘Tis my curse, I suppose”), a dying patient frightened out of his mind, frustrated nobody notices his pain (“Look up here, man, I’m in danger / I’ve got nothing left to lose”), a man whose love is reduced to images and memories – could it be his own drag persona? (“Sue, you said you want it writ / Sue, the virgin on your stone / For your grave / Why, too dark to speak the words?”), a man who has completely lost his mind, biting and barking mad nonsense at anyone approaching (“Devotchka watch her garbles / Spatchko at the rozz-shop / Split a ded from his deng, deng / Viddy, viddy at the cheena”). The riddle slowly unfolds as the puzzle pieces lock into each other, but I want to make this clear: the man who, all his life, has put on acts, masks, characters, uses costumes to communicate the incommunicable suffering of dying.
Until the sky clears.
★
I woke up the morning of the 11th of January 2016. I tapped on my phone to find a message from my father, like when “Where Are We Now” surprise released. “Bowie is dead.” I burst into tears. I woke up my girlfriend at the time. “What?” “Bowie is dead.” “No.” She burst into tears. We both, cried. A message from my best friend below: “I’m sitting in front of the TV, crying.” I got up, I showered. I took a silver ribbon and bound it around my arm – black did not seem fitting for the Star Man. Where the fuck did Monday go?
In the evening, we went to his apartment in Schöneberg, to place flowers, to light candles. A local news reporter approached me, if I could make a statement to the camera on live TV. I said yes. Somewhere, there is this recording, of me, responding to the question what David Bowie meant to me, and to Berlin.
There was just nakedness and rawness in this moment. Disbelief. It is hard to articulate what Bowie meant to people, because his impact on our lives is, maybe more than that of any other musician, tied to our experiences of self. I know people who saw Bowie live in London for Aladdin Sane, and realised they were gay. I know girls who discovered sexuality through Bowie’s acting in Labyrinth. I know people who became artists because of Bowie. I know people who met Bowie at 4am on the Berlin subway. My own father met Bowie, who complimented his DJing and bought him a drink.
Bowie is more than his costume: he is an inspiration that transcends the iconic status of rockstars who simply lauded the RnR lifestyle. Maybe that’s why so many of us felt so protective of him. When I first heard Blackstar, which leaked on Christmas – was it a present to us or to him, to see us gush all over the web how much we loved this music – my reaction was overwhelmingly positive, but I also said this: “This is fantastic! But: his next one will be better!” As I said, somewhere up there: I knew. And I didn’t want to know. Even then. Blackstar lacks the one thing Bowie had always been best at: triumphant euphoria. There is no triumph here, and euphoria stays manic. It’s all too transparent. I couldn’t accept it. I wasn’t that strong. But somebody else was.
★
“Dollar Days” is an exceptional song of an exceptional discography! I will brazenly declare that it is the best on Blackstar. Here, maybe for the only time, Bowie lowers his mask fully. There is no more character, no more act. The curtain has fallen. And made way for Bowie’s most heartfelt composition, where the instruments themselves found a pure, emotional language – all of the musicians here are transcendental. And Bowie, audibly moving pages, delivers the most meaningful lyrics of his entire career: “I’m dying to push their backs against the grain / And fool them all again and again / I’m trying to”. Another moment on this record that has me burst out in tears.
Bowie was playing chess with death: he had booked studio time, he recorded demos, he made notes, he wrote Brian Eno and Mike Garson to offer them a sequel to Outside, finally, after all those years. If he would lose the game, this was his last record and final statement – if he won the game, it would simply be a masterful heist for his soul: Lazarus, he’s done it again! But the quest, as Scott Walker narrated, was pointless. The puzzle pieces also came together for Bowie: “If I’ll never see the English evergreens, I’m running to / It’s nothing to me / It’s nothing to see”. The sentiment echoes on throughout the end of the song, drifting into the distance, echoing, concluding: “I’m trying to / I’m dying to”.
The song is so rife with great moments. “Dollar days, survival sex” gives an especially grim insight into his quest for life, for the ability to feel through the fear. We do know how much he loved Iman, whom he considered his soulmate – somebody relayed to me that she did save his life. Without her, he would have likely remained stuck with alcohol and rotating lovers, all bad habits and likely bad people. Unlike any of his other song, this one seems meant for her only. And then there’s the second chorus, which comes after the expressive solo, and has Bowie’s voice burst with desperation, breaking of “I’m falling down”, only to return with immense gravity and sincerity for the blow: “Don’t believe for just one that second I’m forgetting you / I’m trying to / I’m dying to”. The song, with January 11, became an unbearably emotionally intense statement. Maybe it is unmatched. Period.
And then, as the guitar climaxes on a high note, a soft beat enters.
“I Can’t Give Everything Away” is interesting for many reasons. It opens with the harmonica line from “A New Career In a New Town”, emphasising the notions of departure and arrival, the closing of a chapter and beginning of another. Bowie is back to riddles: “I know something’s very wrong / The pulse returns the prodigal sons / The blackout hearts, the flowered news / With skull designs upon my shoes”. In hindsight, again, it’s all too clear. The symbols might possibly occur because the character, the mask is gone, and he requires cryptic language to recount what’s important to us: “Seeing more and feeling less / Saying no but meaning yes / This is all I ever meant / That’s the message that I sent”. Bowie leaves early, and the music continues on without him. And then, it ends on a high, open note as the instruments climb up. No closure: no ending.
“I Can’t Give Everything Away” is filled with sadness, but also acceptance and comfort. Bowie used masks to protect himself, to retain the human behind it. There is many stories over the years of his kindness, recollections of how hard he tried to be better and a force for good. When discussing his set at “Live Aid”, Bob Geldof showed him and producer Harvey Goldsmith a video of starving children. Bowie, in tears, suggested to drop one song of his to announce and screen the video – to the shock of Goldsmith, who figured the BBC would take them off air. But he insisted, and according to Geldof, that moment broke the phone lines. The stories are many: behind the facade of the slick, entrepreneurial cosmopolitan was a sensitive, incredibly caring man. The masks, the characters, insisted on protection. Bowie indeed could not give everything away, and maybe that pained him.
Or maybe this was his moment of confession: the game is lost, but I am not ready to go. Garson once recollected that during the Outside tour, Bowie told him on the tour bus that, in the 70s, a fortune teller told him he would die at 69 or 70, and that he felt he needed to do as much as he could until then. It’s possible Bowie was joking, but Garson related Bowie said this with grave intensity, deeply believing in the recollection. In an interview after the birth of his daughter Lexi, he stated he was not so much afraid of death, but that the painful part would be to worry that he would have to leave his young daughter behind, that he couldn’t be there for her.
“I Can’t Give Everything Away” is, in a way, for all of us. And maybe that’s why, most of all, it’s for Bowie himself: a new career, in a new town.
★
There is an epilogue to Blackstar. The No Plan EP delivers three songs from the Lazarus musical. There’s the dark and muscular “Killing a Little Time”, which returns to the slightly Middle Eastern musical influencers – a bombastic and sinister film noir track, fit for Nathan Adler. It’s amazing and quite underrated – with its somewhat nihilistic bent, maybe it’s clear why it was omitted from Blackstar. “When I Met You” is an icy return to glam rock, disguised as cyberpunk flirt with a great bass line. It’s a much more arranged song than most of Blackstar, with the refrain providing a choir of Bowie’s voice that harmonises with him. It’s compelling to argue that it’s a love letter to Iman, once more unvarnished and naked, delivering the triumphant euphoria the album lacked. And then there is the crown jewel: “No Plan”.
“Here, there’s no music here / I’m lost in streams of sound / Here, am I nowhere now? / No plan / Wherever I may go / Just where, just there / I am”. Bowie wrote his own elegy, and released it late, as message for us, just as we accepted his passing and decoded the “hidden messages” of the Blackstar artwork. It’s quite ingenious to make such a move, after the chess game is lost, to suddenly yell “checkmate!” and laugh. Everybody knows, this is nowhere. Who could outwit the greatest player…
In the final months of his life, Bowie’s mind seemed to burst wide open, ideas flowing out: a play called The Spectator, a sequel to Outside, Never Let Me Down re-recorded, and yet more! Dollar Days, Survival Sex! Black squares, white squares, trying to, dying too… “No Plan” shows the calmness, of infinity. “All the things that are my life / My moods, my beliefs / My desires, me alone / Nothing to regret / This is no place, but here I am / This is not quite yet”.
And then, there still is more. There is no clear consensus on how much, but the musicians behind Blackstar as well as Visconti have, at multiple points, spoken of many tracks yet to be released. Visconti spoke of music Bowie had sent him for future recordings, too, which exist in a strange limbo. All the while, Bowie’s canon continues to touch new generations, who read his discography very differently and much more openly than prior ones – instead of an up-and-down of singular moments, it has become one ingenious totality.
One piece of literature I found quite moving in the months of 2016 was a piece by a person who helps terminally ill patients to go through their final months. Sort things out, open up, untangle things. In it, the writer recounts one person, still quite young, who was a big Bowie fan, and their dialogue about Blackstar. How, in a way, the record allowed her catharsis for many things, allowing her to understand this journey. The album isn’t so much ending Bowie’s work, as it opened it up for greater emotional understanding, reconnecting puzzle pieces to the whole, all while leaving a myriad of new approaches that uncover hidden secrets.
It’s not wrong to say that it is David Bowie’s best record, and if you would tell me it could be the best record ever made, I would say: that’s not a lie! Because it’s more than just a record. It’s an art piece, the very best.
★
A day or two after we had been to Haupstraße, I stood at my station, waiting for the train to come. I was still grieving and not quite sure how to fully approach these emotions. Across from me, I suddenly spotted an advertisement for Blackstar, a white poster with the now iconic logo. I stopped and decided to miss the train to take a closer look.
Around the star, many people had written messages. “Thank you”s. “I love you”s. I smiled and teared up a little. I was not alone.
The poster stayed for weeks, even when the ones surrounding it had been taken down.
