The Peculiar Soulfulness of David Bowie's Electronic Experiments

On January 8th 2016, I woke up with a sense of purpose, having slept off a pesky cold. It was David Bowie's 69th birthday, and he was releasing a new record. I'd probably watched the haunting video for the title track, "Blackstar," at least 100 times. With its disjointed drum machine rhythm and echoing Bowie vocal, the song felt like an ominous hymn. In the clip, we see a blindfolded Bowie, gesticulating in front of a candle; later, he's holding up a book with a star on its front cover, his eyes wide and exposed. A young girl with a lion's tail recovers a bejeweled skull from the long-deserted corpse of an astronaut on a faraway planet, then takes it to a circle of women, who jump in unison and gyrate on all fours. With its lyrical references to the demise of a mysterious personage from way up in the sky, the video feels partly like a ritual conjuring of Bowie's rich mythology. Might that skull be from the body of Major Tom?

On Friday January 8th, I headed to Rough Trade in Brooklyn and picked up a fresh 180-gram vinyl copy of Blackstar. Because I'm a millennial, I promptly posted a selfie on Instagram, gripping the album to my chest and grinning widely. That optimism was quite genuine. I had just released the feature film that I'd been working on for years, and Bowie was releasing an album that seemed like his most inspired work since 1980's Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). When the news of his death came in during the wee hours of Monday morning, his offering took on a whole new meaning: even as it pushed Bowie's sound into fresh new sonic territory (robotic vocal manipulations, frenetic jazz elements), Blackstar was the work of a man carefully setting the stage for his own demise.

In some ways, Bowie had been preparing us for his earthly departure his whole career. As a soft-bodied musical theater loving twelve year old, I first saw the music video for his 1969 single space "Space Oddity" on VH1, and felt like I'd found something I'd always been looking for. His sheer presence seemed to contradict the rigid social norms that middle schoolers too often perpetuate among themselves. Bowie's soulful music, gender-bending image, and fascination with other worlds provided an alternate model for what life could be—one that dismantled the boundaries between male and female, black and white, human and alien, ancient and modern. Over his nearly 50-year career, Bowie's drive for innovation played out in his penchant for incarnating characters that weren't entirely himself; even "David Bowie" is an adopted identity of David Jones. Bowie, and his many incarnations, served as the guide through many chapters of my youthful explorations: the gender-bending alien Ziggy Stardust; the zoomorphic freak-show act Halloween Jack; the glamorous Thin White Duke, whose sadness and debauchery provided a mirror as I tried to party through the low points of my 20s.

In some ways, Bowie's knack for reinvention ran parallel with the forward march of technology, with all the beauty and anxiety that comes along with it. In his early work, this came through in the guise of a fascination with space travel. Released in conjunction with the first moon landing, "Space Oddity"—which, after debuting as a single, would later appear on his eponymous debut album—tells the story of the astronaut Major Tom, who travels into the far reaches of space, loses contact with ground control, and leaves listeners to wonder whether his fate will be triumphant or tragic.

Major Tom—or someone like him—would reappear at various moments in Bowie's career. On the 1972 concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, Bowie styles himself as a rock & roll alien who comes to Earth and becomes a huge star, only to self-destruct through fame and hedonism. Later, in Nicholas Roeg's 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bowie would play Thomas Jerome Newton, an immortal alien who comes to Earth with the hope of bringing water back to his drought-stricken planet, establishes himself as a wealthy businessman, then descends into a deep loneliness as his earthly connections either die or drift away from him. Finally, on "Ashes to Ashes," a track from 1980's Scary Monsters, Major Tom returns for brief cameo under his own name—this time, in the form of a junkie, "strung out in heaven's high, and hitting an all time low." In Bowie's multi-planetary universe, visiting unknown worlds can be a double-edged sword: on one hand, it can be a path to personal expansion; on the other, it can be a road to isolation and annihilation.

Just as fans were at the height of fervor over his latest incarnation, Bowie would abruptly flip the switch, leaving the audience to choose between abandoning ship or following him into the unknown. Up until this month, the most stark example of this had been the moment when he swiftly lay waste to the Ziggy Stardust persona. It's a scene documented in D.A. Pennebaker's 1973 concert documentary Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. Bowie and his band play to a house packed full of screaming youths, their faces running with tears of excitement. It is to this crowd that he announces that tonight's performance will be the last show Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars ever play. What he fails to clarify that this was merely the last show for the Spiders From Mars, his backing band, as opposed to the last show for David Bowie. I wouldn't be surprised if this omission were intentional.

These moments were doubtless jarring for his fans, though Bowie was no stranger to embracing discomfort in his own life. In 1975, despite his professed dislike for the city, he moved to Los Angeles to record Station to Station, an experience he would later detail in a 1979 television interview with Mavis Nicholson: "I went to Los Angeles and I lived there for a couple of years, which is a city I really detest, amongst people that I didn't like very much, to see what would happen to my writing," he said. While this period would result in what I consider to be one of his best records, 1975 was also the year when Bowie's drug use would reach an all-time peak; legend has it that he subsisted on a daily diet of cocaine, milk, and one red pepper. Looking back on those years, he would later tell a live studio audience that his years in LA were "singularly the darkest days" of his life.

After Los Angeles, Bowie decamped to Cold War Berlin, and embarked on what would turn out to be one of the most sonically innovative periods of his career. There, he was joined by ambient pioneer Brian Eno and proto-punk star Iggy Pop, as well as long-time producer and friend Tony Visconti. Between 1976 and 1978, Bowie would produce Pop's albums The Idiot and Lust For Life. Eno—who was currently in the midst of transitioning from a rock and pop songwriter to an ambient music pioneer—helped conceptualize and contributed instrumentals to Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy," a trio of albums blending the emotionally impactful songwriting Bowie had become known for with electronic experimentation, inspired in part by German groups like Kraftwerk.

During this time, Bowie was recovering from cocaine addiction, and Pop was recovering from a heroin habit. In the early days in Berlin, this duo got into some trouble. Famously, Bowie drove a car at 70mph in a parking lot with Pop in the passenger seat, giggling and screaming, "I want to end it all!" It is possible that this scenario inspired the song "Always Crashing in the Same Car," which appears on side one of Low—the first album in the the Berlin trilogy. Low's songs were originally intended for the soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth, although director Nicholas Roeg ended up opting for more conventional pop, composed by John Phillips.

Between the stripped-down picture on the album's cover—a still from from The Man Who Fell to Earth featuring a pale, black-clad Bowie against a dramatic orange sky—and the sounds inside, Low feels like yet another new beginning for Bowie. Instead of his usual grand poetic narratives, the songs on side one feel like short, nihilistic vignettes, full of sharp repetitive guitar riffs, robotic bleeps, abrasive cymbal bangs, and simple keyboard playing. These stories Bowie tells feel like the missives of a mind circling through a depressive loop: breaking things in a lover's bedroom, romancing a woman who can't love, and sitting in a dark room with the blinds drawn, hoping for a spark of inspiration.

Following "Always Crashing in the Same Car," with its nod to being trapped inside an inescapable destructive pattern, side two kicks off with "A New Career in a New Town," suggesting an optimistic transition. It's got a boisterous melody to boot, with a persistent drum machine beat and upbeat synthesized flutes. "Warszawa", the following track, is an ominous synthesizer dirge—possibly inspired by the desolation he saw on a trip to Warsaw, Poland—and the subsequent tracks follow a similar model, all moody, spacious sound landscapes with bits of synthesizer, saxophone, drum machine sprinkled in. Bowie's singing voice, which is arguably his greatest instrument, makes appearances in the ambient section of "Low," but it manifests as a ghostly force, wailing in incoherent languages. The overall impact is that of a move from frenetic anxiety to peace and perspective.

For a masterful lyricist like Bowie to move away from writing songs with words is a big deal. Up until Low, much of his output had the quality of musical performance art, allowing him to play characters and create fictional worlds. With Low—recorded at a time when he was recovering from depression and addiction—he sounds like a man who is using technology to explore the raw material of his soul. If his previous work had suggested that moving on to something new was as simple as removing a mask, then replacing it with a new one, here, at one of the most trying periods of his life, he abandons this pattern for the first time. The result is probably the most genuinely futuristic-sounding album in discography, and his most vulnerable.

Like many fans, I watched the Lazarus video on repeat the day after he died, with the new knowledge that what I was seeing was a reflection of an end that he knew was coming. In the video, we see Bowie in a hospital bed, clutching his blanket and wearing yet another mask—the same blindfold we see him wearing in the "Blackstar" clip. The camera trains on signs of aging on his body, from his graying veiny hands to the loose skin on his neck. In another scene, we see Bowie seated at a desk, a look of panic spreading over his face, frantically trying to write something—a new song, perhaps, or plans for another work of art. His eyes are popped wide open, in a way that is reminiscent of the exaggerated eyes of Butoh performers. The distress and urgency they convey are that of a man who has a lot left to express, but whose time may run out at any moment.

Blackstar did turn out to be his last work—and coincidentally, another very future-gazing work. Indeed, there are some crucial similarities between Low and Blackstar: both records use jazz saxophone and low-humming synth drones to create a moody ambiance, and the album's opening, with its low string tones and gentle keyboard taps, has the ominous atmosphere of many of Low's more ambient tracks. And while Low could be described as a record made by someone coming down from their Saturn return—the astrological phenomenon where a person is on the brink of turning 30 and faces a period of turmoil in their personal and professional life—Blackstar finds Bowie on the cusp of another, even more momentous transition. One critical difference between the two records is that Bowie is using his full lyrical prowess on Blackstar, carving out a symbolic world with themes of mortality and transcendence.

The song "Lazarus" is bleak and downbeat, crescendoing into a wall of wailing jazz horns after a tense build up. "Look up here, I'm in Heaven," Bowie sings with fragility, adding that he will soon be free "just like that blue bird." At the video's close, Bowie continues to face forward, while retreating into a shadowy armoire. It's a devastating moment, especially when viewed in light of Bowie's real-life demise. Though the outfit he's wearing seems to be yet another homage to The Man Who Fell to Earth—pretty much the same black shirt-and-pants set with diagonal white stripes he wore in promotional images for that film—this is Bowie at his least alien, and most human.

In a 1976 interview with Dinah Shore, Bowie revealed that part of his motivation for making bold art was that in having to defend it, he would be forced to confront his fears. The man we see in "Lazarus" is a man facing man's most primal fear—the realness of his own mortality—just like any of us will when our own time comes. Where the Bowie of the Spiders from Mars era came across as a confident master of ceremonies, eager to build up our anticipation for his next trick, this grandest reveal of all shows that underneath his artistic rigor, drive for innovation, and god-like status, he is more like us than we'd have ever known.

And maybe if we share his fears, we also share his potential. In truth, it's possible to read "Blackstar" as offering us a way of processing Bowie's passing. "Something happened on the day he died," Bowie sings. "Spirit rose a meter, and stepped aside. Somebody else took his place and bravely cried, 'I'm a Blackstar.'" In the video, several youthful characters are seen mouthing the words "I'm a Blackstar"—will one of them be the next to step into his shoes? Perhaps more than any single song or video or other-worldy incarnation, one of music's most uncompromising futurists has left us with the gift of seizing the future for ourselves. I hope we use it wisely.