Just for one day

HOW DAVID BOWIE’S FINAL ALBUM PROVES HE COULD BE YOUR HERO WITHOUT BEING YOUR FRIEND

Since the news of David Bowie’s passing early Monday morning, fans and critics have been treating his last album, Blackstar — released just three days before — as a coded farewell. Indeed, a lyric such as “Look up here, I’m in heaven,” from Lazarus, seems particularly poignant now, and the album’s many references to death can easily be understood as a reflection on his own mortality. When Bowie sings “I can’t give everything away” on the album’s final track, is he referring to the cancer that he kept a secret even from his friends, until the end?

Maybe so, but when was Bowie ever that personal? As a teen growing up in unglamorous Brixton, he changed his name from Davy Jones, and from there, he based his long and singular career on both a wide-ranging talent and a devotion to artifice. As soon as fans believed they had come to terms with one of his personae, he moved on to the next. Clearly he wasn’t literally an alien, but from the time he announced himself as Ziggy Stardust, he seemed to operate outside Earth- bound reality. In interviews, he was coy — until he stopped giving them altogether, after a heart attack onstage in 2004 curtailed his touring career.

Social media changed the expectations we have of our stars, and Bowie retreated into an existence so reclusive, people assumed he was mortally ill. But it was only in the past 18 months, apparently, that he battled the cancer that would claim him. At a time when our idols were all of a sudden supposed to be “relatable,” interacting with their fans and tweeting their breakfasts, he kept to himself. His star didn’t diminish: Bowie could be your hero without ever trying to be your friend.

Some figured he was saying goodbye with The Next Day, released three years ago on his 66th birthday: It sounded like a career summation, crafted with familiar musicians and shot through with references to his earlier work. A retrospective exhibition of his costumes and keepsakes (which came to the Art Gallery of Ontario later that year) showed he was taking stock and looking back.

But Blackstar is a resolutely different beast. Bowie hired New York saxman Donny McCaslin’s quartet to help him deliver music that sounds only fleetingly like anything he’d done before. It’s a challenging work, but intermittently melodic, swaying wildly between opposites, often in the space of one song. It can be both poetic and crass, from “Black struck the kiss” to “Man, she punched me like a dude.” Its textures are acoustic and electronic — or somewhere in between, as when formidable drummer Mark Guiliana alters the sound of his drum kit. It can be jagged, arty rock and hymnal too, uplifting and disquieting.

But most of all, Blackstar is a work of tremendous vitality. On ’ Tis Pity She Was a Whore, when the band whips itself up into a galvanizing frenzy, Bowie unleashes whoops of seemingly unbridled joy. Throughout, he sings his heart out, sounding not a whit diminished. It’s not as if he was waving goodbye to his work: Apparently, even after his diagnosis, he had made plans with longtime collabor- ator Brian Eno to revisit their 1995 album, 1. Outside, perhaps to devise a long-planned sequel. He had also agreed to appear as himself in Band on the Run, a film by English screenwriter Dean Cavanagh.

Not that Bowie’s cancer wouldn’t have been on his mind: On the last track, I Can’t Give Everything Away, he sings, “I know something is very wrong …. The blackout hearts, the flowered news / With skull designs upon my shoes.” But Bowie needn’t be both the singer and the literal protagonist. The key, maybe, is there in his refusal to “give everything away,” of himself or of his art.

The best music is multilayered, revealing new facets over time. It opens itself up and rewards what you put into it. Already on the site Genius. com, fans are having a field day annotating Blackstar’s lyrics, some finding clues in his death, others making references as wideranging as the protean artist’s own catholic tastes. Is “Blackstar” a reference to “Mesoamerican and occult mythology,” “Kabalarian philosophy,” or “a British amplifier company”? Or to all of these, or to ISIS, as Bowie himself is supposed to have told McCaslin when they were recording?

Bowie was never going to tell his listeners; likely the work had multiple meanings for him, too, and in opening it up to improvising musicians, he trusted others to make his music their own. Also on I Can’t Give Everything Away, he sings, “Seeing more and feeling less / Saying no but meaning yes / This is all I ever meant / That’s the message that I sent.” If it’s a message, it’s a cryptic one, or one about the value of always leaving yourself room to change your mind.

In the end, it’s human to be self- contradictory — maybe Bowie wasn’t as alien as we believed.

HE WASN’T AN ALIEN BUT HE LIVED OUTSIDE EARTHBOUND REALITY.