The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Bowie · produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti · ISO and Columbia · about 41 minutes
Mode
Art rock and late song set on a working jazz band, with drums that borrow from drum and bass
Mythos
A rite of death and replacement; a raised man speaking from heaven; the exile who will not see home; the farewell
Phase
Seven tracks; a long title track in three sections as the rite, two older songs at the centre, and a closing pair that runs together as one departure
Presentation
Album; seven tracks, about forty-one minutes, issued on its maker’s sixty-ninth birthday, two days before his death
Register
Saxophones and flute, keyboards, bass and fast broken drums, a guitar that enters late; a voice close, dry and composed, layered into a choir in the title track
Scale
One consciousness at its end, and the made self it has been
Governing Proposition
A singer of sixty-eight sets his last songs on a New York jazz quartet playing with restless freedom beneath a slow, composed voice, and builds from them a rite of his own death: a star that dies and the thing that takes its place, a dying man speaking from heaven, an exile, a farewell, and a mind that keeps performing to the end and names its withholding as the last truth it can tell.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens with its rite. Over skittering drums a dirge sets a candle in “the villa of Ormen” and a death beside it; then the song turns into a soft, major-leaning middle section in which the voice lifts toward a hymn and names itself (“I’m a blackstar”), and then the dirge returns. A spirit rises on “the day he died” and takes the dead man’s place, so that the star of the title is both the thing that dies and the thing that replaces it. The record’s form is here in small: a death, a rising, a return. Everything after it is heard as the rite’s sequel.
ISO Records released the album with Columbia on 8 January 2016, David Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday. He died two days later, on 10 January. It was produced by Bowie and Tony Visconti and recorded in New York in 2015, and the band is the quartet of the saxophonist Donny McCaslin: McCaslin on saxophones and flute, Jason Lindner on keyboards, Tim Lefebvre on bass and Mark Guiliana on drums, with Ben Monder on guitar. The sleeve title is a black five-pointed star. The title track and Lazarus were issued as singles before the album, and Lazarus shares its name with the stage musical that opened in New York the month before.
Seven tracks run in about forty-one minutes: Blackstar, ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore, Lazarus, Sue (Or in a Season of Crime), Girl Loves Me, Dollar Days and I Can’t Give Everything Away. The last two run into each other. One band plays every track, and there are no guests of weight. The method is set in the first minutes and held to the end: a slow, composed voice laid over a band that plays with restless invention, so that a mind’s arrangement and a body’s alarm are heard at once. Played by a rock band in time, these songs would be laments. Played this way, they are a man arranging his end while something underneath him will not keep still.
Movement II
The third track names the man who was raised, and lets a dying singer speak as one already past death (“I’m in heaven”), with scars that cannot be seen. It is slow because its speaker is past hurry. McCaslin’s saxophone rises through it, and a guitar breaks in heavy and late, grief held at height rather than released. The speaker imagines himself freed “like that bluebird”, an image the record will keep until its closing song lets the bird go. Of all the songs it is the plainest statement of the dying man, and it stands near the front so that everything after it is heard from beyond.
What the record discloses can be stated and it holds: a mind facing its death keeps performing, and the withholding is itself the last truth it can tell. Lazarus gives the speaker past the end; Dollar Days, later, gives the exile who will not see “the English evergreens”, an Englishman far from home. Sound carries the same meaning as fully as the words. The composed voice is the performance held; the drums beneath it are what the performance holds down. The record says that the mask does not slip, and it lets the listener hear what the mask costs.
What it does not hold is the death itself. The record was issued two days before its maker died, and that fact has lent its hearing a force no recording could contain. What the recording itself carries is the rite of the title track, the speaker of Lazarus and the joined farewell at the close. The rest arrives from outside. And within the record the text is riddling by design. Ormen is never opened, the star is never named, and part of what the words give is mood rather than meaning. The finding is exact, and it is one artist’s, at one end.
Movement III
At the centre of the record stand two songs it brought in from elsewhere. ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore and Sue had both appeared in other recordings in late 2014, the second with the Maria Schneider Orchestra; here they are given the band’s colours. ’Tis a Pity is a Jacobean brawl, loud and cluttered, the horns crowding the voice. Sue is a crime story set on a drum-and-bass pulse with squalling horns, a height of dread, its arrangement pulling against the song. Both are played at full force, and both carry the least of the record’s argument. They are the two songs it could lose with least lost, the only place where its parts are permitted rather than compelled.
The turn the record makes is clearest in them. The inheritance is Bowie’s own rock and art pop, and immediately The Next Day of 2013, a rock record in his established manner. Two years later he placed his songs on a working New York jazz quartet, chosen from a club, and let it play them with the improviser’s freedom. The drums borrow the patterns of drum and bass; the words borrow from Nadsat and Polari; the long two-part title track was both the opener and the first single. The stake was real: a last record handed to players the rock audience did not know.
It was a stake placed by a maker of forty-five years’ standing, and the path had been opened. Earthling, in 1997, had already brought drum and bass into his work; Scott Walker’s late records had shown an elder singer turning dark and unpopular; and jazz and rock had met for half a century. The swerves of his 1970s had cost more. What is new here is not the meeting but its use: a jazz band’s restlessness made the sound of a body that will not be still while the voice above it composes its end.
Movement IV
The fifth track is the strangest on the record and more required than it looks. It struts in invented slang, words drawn from Nadsat and from Polari, a language made for violence and for concealment, and in the middle of the swagger it loses a day (“did Monday go”). Time is slipping away from the speaker, and he says so in a language no one else speaks. It is the record’s refusal of plain speech at its most defiant, and it sits between the crime of Sue and the exile of Dollar Days as the last show of force before the farewell.
One law governs the whole record: a death met as a performance, the mask held to the last. Girl Loves Me and Lazarus, the two most distant songs on it, obey that law. One is swagger and one is grief, but both are the same man refusing to speak plainly before his end, and both lose time, the missing Monday and the life seen from heaven. Sue belongs to the same dark, a death and a note left behind. The same five players sound every track. The law strains where the mood narrows to one nocturnal colour, and at ’Tis a Pity, which obeys it by sound more than by sense.
The making carries it. Mark Guiliana’s drumming plays fast, broken patterns beneath slow songs and never clutters the voice; Tim Lefebvre’s bass holds the ground; McCaslin moves from counterline to squall; Jason Lindner’s keyboards colour without crowding. Visconti keeps a busy band legible under a voice placed close and dry, and Bowie at sixty-eight sings with control, layering himself in the title track into a choir. The faults are audible: the clutter of ’Tis a Pity, a voice that sometimes strains at the top, and an arrangement in Sue that works against its song.
Movement V
Dollar Days begins as a ballad and climbs to a repeated close, and before it ends it dissolves into the last song, so that the record’s final two tracks are one departure. I Can’t Give Everything Away is the warmest height on the record: a harmonica, a long synthesiser line, and Monder’s guitar solo carrying the last minutes out. Its title names what the record has done throughout. Its middle lines set the condition, a man who sees more and is left “feeling less”, who says no and means yes. The withholding is not a failure to disclose. It is what is disclosed.
The death reopened the record at once, and it has been read since for its riddles: what Ormen is, who the replaced star is, how far each song foretells, what the slang of Girl Loves Me says. The stage musical and later accounts by its players and producer have added to what is known of its making. It raised the standing of its players, McCaslin’s quartet above all, and it became the type of the farewell album, the record against which later last records are heard. It has been widely heard, more than any of its maker’s late work. In ten years it has redirected little in the method of rock or of jazz, and part of its presence is the presence of the death and the career.
What it holds is one consciousness at its end. Death and the sacred are held, as rite, as heaven, as a raised man; fame and the made self are held in a star that dies and is replaced; exile, crime, money and language itself enter, and one condition, the dying artist’s, joins them. The family, labour, the state and history are absent, and the natural order is a bluebird and an evergreen. Within that, the record is complete. It ends with a guitar playing out and a voice that has given what it will give, and kept the rest.
Act III · The Twelve
Seven tracks in about forty-one minutes, and the frame is lean. The title track must open: its rite sets the record’s terms, a death and a replacement, and its length is the rite’s. Lazarus must stand near the front, the plainest statement of the dying man. Dollar Days and I Can’t Give Everything Away must close, and they are joined, the one dissolving into the other. Girl Loves Me is required more than it looks: its slang swagger and its lost day (“did Monday go”) carry time slipping away in a language no one else speaks. The test bites only in the middle, where ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore and Sue, songs first recorded in 2014, restate the band’s force more than they turn the argument.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a mind facing its death keeps performing, and the withholding is itself the last truth it can tell. The closing song names it in its title, and its middle lines set the condition, a man who sees more and is left “feeling less”, who says no and means yes. Lazarus gives the dying man speaking from beyond (“I’m in heaven”), his scars unseen; Dollar Days gives the exile who will not see “the English evergreens”. Sound discloses as fully as words: the band’s restlessness under a slow, composed voice is a body alarmed beneath a mind arranged. Held from the top because the text is riddling by design, and part of what it gives is mood.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation comes often and is mostly dark. The title track is the first summit: a dirge over skittering drums turns into a soft, major-leaning middle section (“I’m a blackstar”) where the voice lifts toward a hymn before the dirge returns. Lazarus rises slowly on the saxophone and on a guitar that breaks in heavy and late, grief held at height. Dollar Days climbs from a ballad to its repeated close, and I Can’t Give Everything Away is the warmest height of the record, a harmonica, a long synthesiser line and a guitar solo carrying the last minutes out. Sue is a height of terror more than beauty. ’Tis a Pity and Girl Loves Me have force and menace but stay level, and every height is of one nocturnal kind.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth is built in the frame and carried by the sequence. The title track builds a rite: in “the villa of Ormen” a candle, a death, and on “the day he died” a spirit that rises and takes the dead man’s place, so that the star is both the thing that dies and the thing that replaces it. Lazarus names the raised man and lets a dying singer speak as one already in heaven, freed “like that bluebird”; the closing song lets the bird go. The pattern bears load from first track to last: a death foretold, a speaker beyond it, an exile from home, a farewell. The particular stays particular, New York, England, a man with scars, a lost Monday. Held off the top because Ormen is never opened and the middle songs carry no part of the pattern.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is Bowie’s own rock and art pop, and immediately The Next Day (2013), a rock record in his established manner. The turn is to a working New York jazz quartet, chosen from a club and given his songs to play with the improviser’s freedom; to drums that borrow the patterns of drum and bass; to a vocabulary of Nadsat and Polari; and to a long two-part title track as both opener and first single. The stake was real: a last record placed on players unknown to the rock audience. What holds it below the top is precedent. Earthling (1997) had already brought drum and bass in, Scott Walker’s late records had cleared the ground for the elder singer’s dark turn, and the meeting of jazz and rock is an old path.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. The method is a collision: a slow, composed vocal line set on a band playing with restless invention, so that the mind’s arrangement and the body’s alarm are heard at once; played by a rock band in time, these songs would be laments and no more. The title track’s three sections, dirge, hymn, dirge, are the rite’s shape, a death, a rising, a return. Lazarus is slow because its speaker is past hurry. The sequence is counted here, once: a death foretold, a speaker beyond it, an exile and a farewell, with Dollar Days dissolving into the closing song so that the last two are one departure. Held from the top by ’Tis a Pity and Sue, nearer containers than instruments.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over ten years. The record was reopened at once by its maker’s death, and has been read since for its riddles: what Ormen is, who the replaced star is, how far each song foretells, what the slang of Girl Loves Me says. The stage musical and later accounts by its players and its producer have added to what is known of its making. The recording yields on return as well: the drums and bass hold patterns that separate only on close listening, and the saxophone and keyboards answer the voice in ways a first hearing misses. What holds the figure: ten years forecast more than they show, much of the return has been mourning and decoding, and the riddles invite projection as much as they reward it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is the rock and art-pop album of the 2010s, and the record of an elder artist. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that a rock singer of the first rank could set his songs on a working jazz band given full freedom, and that a last record could be built as its maker’s own rite of death. It reorganised its maker’s possibilities more than the field’s; in ten years it has redirected little in the method of rock or of jazz, and part of its reach is the reach of the career it closed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it raised the standing of its players, McCaslin’s quartet above all, became the type of the farewell album against which later last records are heard, and was the most widely heard of its maker’s late work.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival is weighed over ten years and nine months, on what can be shown. The form is whole: the recording as released is still the record sold. Presence has been wide and continuous for a record of its age, in sale and broadcast, in the stage musical, and as the last statement of an artist whose earlier work is everywhere. The fabric carries little of its year: a jazz band recorded clean, without the production signatures of 2016, though the drum-and-bass patterns place it in a lineage. Charged: part of that presence is the presence of the death and of the career, which is not proof that the record will be kept for itself. A decade is a short span, and the figure sits far below anything that has lasted a century.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing. Mark Guiliana’s drumming carries the record, fast, broken patterns under slow songs that never clutter the voice; Tim Lefebvre’s bass holds the ground; Donny McCaslin’s saxophones and flute move from counterline to squall; Jason Lindner’s keyboards colour without crowding; Ben Monder’s guitar enters heavy and late in Lazarus and carries the end of the record. Visconti’s production keeps a busy band legible beneath a voice placed close and dry, and Bowie’s singing at sixty-eight is controlled, layered in the title track into a choir of himself. The faults are three: ’Tis a Pity is loud and cluttered, the voice sometimes strains at the top, and Sue sets its arrangement against the song.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs the record: a death met as a performance, the mask held to the last, sounded by one band playing against a composed voice. The two most distant elements obey it. Girl Loves Me, a strut in invented slang, and Lazarus, a slow elegy, are the same man refusing plain speech before his end, once as swagger and once as grief, and both lose time, the missing Monday and the life seen from heaven. Sue, a crime story on a pulse of drum and bass, belongs to the same dark: a death, a note left behind. The same five players sound every track. The law strains where the mood narrows to one nocturnal colour, and at ’Tis a Pity, which obeys it by sound more than by sense.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form beyond what the definition asks. Consciousness is held fully, and its last state is the subject; death and the sacred are held, as rite, as heaven, as resurrection. Fame and the self as a made thing are held in the star that dies and is replaced. Place enters as exile, New York and England; crime and violence in Sue and ’Tis a Pity; money in a title; language itself in the slang of Girl Loves Me. One condition joins them, the dying artist’s. What holds this lowest of the twelve: the family, labour, the state and history are absent, the natural order is a bluebird and an evergreen, and every order passes through one man facing one end.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Inner Law at 9.0, then The Unconcealment, The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form and The Made at 8.9. One law, a death met as performance, governing a strut in invented slang and a slow elegy alike; a disclosure that the mask holds to the end, named in the last song’s title; elevation on five of seven tracks; a rite built in the title track and carried through the sequence; a form in which a composed voice and a restless band are heard at once; and playing that carries the meaning.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, death, the sacred, fame, exile, crime and language are held through one dying artist, and the family, labour, the state and history are absent. Below the rest, The Imperishable at 7.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3: a decade of wide presence, part of it the presence of the death and the career, and a reach that raised its players and fixed the type of the farewell record but has redirected little in the method of rock or jazz.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 and The Imperishable at 7.9 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.7, stands below it as well.
Basis · the album as released by ISO Records with Columbia on 8 January 2016, seven tracks in sequence, about forty-one minutes; produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti and recorded in New York in 2015 with Donny McCaslin’s quartet and Ben Monder; judged from knowledge of the recording, its words and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand. The album is the unit, in its one edition of consequence; the 2014 recordings of Sue and of ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore, the singles and their videos, and the stage musical Lazarus are evidence, not the object. The death two days after release is stated as circumstance, not as evidence of what the record holds. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. Facts that could not be verified, among them the studio, the recording dates in detail, who played what beyond the quintet, the mixing credits, the track timings and the particulars of later accounts of the sessions, are not given.