Ten years ago today, David Bowie died, making the most dramatic exit of any rock star ever. He turned his farewell into a work of art. A couple of days earlier, on Jan. 8, a Friday morning, he dropped one of his most powerful albums, Blackstar, to celebrate his 69th birthday. For three days, fans around the world tried to wrap our heads around this complex, jazzy, challenging music. None of us knew that it was his goodbye — not until Sunday night, Jan. 10, when news came over that Bowie had died of liver cancer, 18 months after a secret diagnosis. This was Major Tom to Ground Control, sending one last transmission as he was stepping through the door. As his producer Tony Visconti said, “He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift.”
Bowie turned his goodnight bow into one of the strangest and most moving chapters in his story, with Blackstar as the ultimate farewell album. He knew he was facing the final curtain, but he didn’t give up — he just got back to work, determined to finish one more masterpiece while he still could. There’s no self-pity or bitterness in these songs — he didn’t have time for that. The Starman spent his final days taking a new kind of creative adventure, finding bleak inspiration in the end.
There’s no other musical testament like this one, which is why Blackstar still shines so bright after 10 years. In Visconti’s words, “His death was no different from his life — a work of art.” Everybody remembers where and when they heard the news about Bowie’s death — but that’s because Bowie turned it into such glorious music.
This was not an album rehashing his past glories — as always, Bowie was going somewhere new. His major inspirations were D’Angelo and Kendrick Lamar, in the wake of Black Messiah and To Pimp a Butterfly. He recruited new collaborators who could push him, working with jazzman Donnie McCaslin and his band. After 50 years in the game, Bowie still wasn’t finished learning. The grooves felt playfully warm, full-blooded even at their most somber and elegiac. As McCaslin told me after Blackstar came out, the first time Bowie jammed with the band, he said, “I haven’t had this much fun since my heart attack!”
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Bowie always enjoyed releasing his big personal-statement albums around his birthdays — Low came out in January 1977, a few days after he turned 30, just like Earthling arrived in February 1997 as he was turning 50. Blackstar dropped the day he turned 69 — when he already knew his 70th birthday would never come. The album kicked off a worldwide birthday celebration, all weekend long, with a photo where he stood beaming with a boyish grin, in a stylish suit and fedora. Nobody realized yet that this was a dead man walking — instead, it was simply an astounding new Bowie experiment.
That Friday night, I went to a Bowie birthday celebration show in New York, starring the tribute band Holy Holy, starring Visconti on bass, with original Spiders from Mars drummer Woody Woodmansey. They played the entirety of The Man Who Sold the World — they were the rhythm section on the 1970 original — plus another hour of 1970s classics, with Heaven 17 singer Glenn Gregory. Visconti’s daughter came out to sing “Lady Stardust.”
It was a bitterly cold night — only the most hardcore fans braved the January winds for this gig. Naturally, everyone was not-so-secretly hoping that the Thin White Duke himself might make an appearance. This did not happen. “David’s at his birthday party,” Visconti told us early on. “This isn’t it.” But he had us sing “Happy Birthday” into his phone so he could text it to the man — I was close enough to the stage to see the little blue cloud float up as he hit send.
It was a deliriously happy crowd full of Bowie freaks — everybody buzzing about this fantastic new album we’d all spent the day listening to. Total strangers kept raving to each other about our favorite songs on it. My wife and I spent the weekend listening to Blackstar obsessively. Friends around the world, from all different eras of my life, kept getting in touch to ask, “Hey, have you heard this thing?” What a gift this album was — Bowie going full blast, pushing his limits, still experimenting with new sounds, bristling with feverish emotion. On Saturday afternoon, my wife declared that it was an all-time top 10 Bowie album. That seemed like a bold statement — but true. By Sunday afternoon, we agreed it was one of his five best.
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And then came Sunday night. I was up late, writing about the Golden Globes, when I got a text from a friend at 1:43 a.m. East Coast time. “Did you see the news” — uh oh. I Googled “death” and couldn’t believe my eyes. I turned to the boombox next to my desk and hit play on the cassette that was already in there, a mixtape I made in Y2K called “Bowie Mix 2000.” I decided not to wake up my wife — I wanted to let her sleep for one more night under the Bowie stars. I stayed up all night writing and listening to Blackstar, which already sounded totally different. I went online to mourn with strangers — it felt like “Five Years,” where everybody gets the terrible news, then goes wandering through the crowd just to feel connected to other people. My wife woke up to the news. We listened to Bowie all day, until the evening when we switched to Sign o’ the Times — as she said, “At least we still have Prince.” (Little did we know.)
The public outpouring of emotion for Bowie that day, that week, over the next few months — it was unlike any other artist’s death I’ve witnessed. This was nothing like John Lennon or Kurt Cobain or Biggie, a star who dies young and tragically. This was an old man who’d used his time, determined to cram in one last album. But unlike some other artists who’ve made their goodbye albums, like Johnny Cash or Warren Zevon, he kept his terminal illness a secret, so we could absorb the music for a few days before we knew. He sings like a dying man at the end of a gaudy life, still wishing he had more time. He mourns for the people he’s leaving behind. In “Blackstar,” he sings the key line: “At the center of it all, at the center of it all, your eyes.”
No doubt he meant Iman and his children. But he probably also meant us. He was hoping for more time with everyone — he never thought he’d need so many people. Blackstar was a grief soundtrack to console the world he was leaving behind — Planet Earth was blue, with nothing he could do.
Bowie released the song “Blackstar” in November 2015, with no warning: out of nowhere, a brand new 10-minute space-rock suite, mixing up modal jazz and “Planet Rock” hip-hop beats. It was a wildly ambitious and challenging epic, demanding your full attention. “Blackstar” sounded like an artist on fire with excitement for the future. Nobody had any way of knowing that he was undergoing chemo. By November, he knew his illness was terminal; the cancer had spread all over his body. But he had plans for the music he wanted to make in the time he had left. Visconti didn’t know about his cancer until Bowie showed up on the first date at the recording studio in New York. “He just came fresh from a chemo session, and he had no eyebrows, and he had no hair on his head,” Visconti told Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt, “and there was no way he could keep it a secret from the band. But he told me privately, and I really got choked up when we sat face to face talking about it.”
Bowie kept the news private — he couldn’t give everything away. But Visconti could hear what these songs were saying. “You canny bastard,” he told his old friend. “You’re writing a farewell album.”
By Monday morning, on Jan. 11, Blackstar was no longer the new Bowie album — it was his goodbye album. “I Can’t Give Everything Away” was now his final word, an anthem as massive and emotional as “Heroes.” His opening line: “I know something is very wrong.” On the surface, it’s a song about guarding his secrets, but on a deeper level, it’s about how strange it feels to have so much emotion left in him. This guy emphatically doesn’t want to die yet. He’s asking how he can possibly sum things up when he’s still got love to give, family to embrace, genius to burn? And more harmonica solos to play? (If I’m not mistaken, this was the Dame’s first harmonica solo since “A New Career in a New Town,” from Low, nearly 40 years earlier.)
The entire Blackstar album is packed with ideas for future songs he won’t get to write, new directions he won’t live to pursue. In “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” he wants to pass it all on, to settle his account, to leave it on tape and make sure none of it goes to waste; he’s both shocked and amused by the fact that he can’t. So instead, he plays one last harmonica solo on his way offstage. There’s no bitterness in this song — just a dying man who chooses to spend his final days putting more music out there into the world he hates to leave behind. When I hear this song, 10 years later, David Bowie sounds both vibrantly alive and gone for good.
If Bowie had died at the age of 40, like his friend John Lennon, he’d be remembered totally differently today. He hit rock bottom in those years, a pitiful Eighties burnout. He’d reached his pop zenith with the brilliant MTV glam-gasm of Let’s Dance in 1983 — bigger than ever, still only 36. But for some reason, that’s when he decided to get serious about sucking, losing his touch overnight. As he’s quoted saying in the new U.K. documentary Bowie: The Final Act, “I didn’t want whatever it was I’d earned for myself with the success of Let’s Dance.”
Bowie later disparaged the Eighties as his Phil Collins era, but that’s not fair — Phil never made an album as depressing as Tonight or Never Let Me Down. He bailed on the actual music — as he admitted, “I was letting the guys arrange it, and I’d come in and do a vocal, and then I’d bugger off and pick up some bird.” He talked a good game with his heavily hyped band project, Tin Machine, but it sounded like a cynical attempt to play the edgy rock artiste without bothering to write worthwhile songs. For fans, it was sad to see our hero play the celebrity game and not even get that right. He also did a bizarre Pepsi ad with Tina Turner, changing the words of “Modern Love” to sell soda pop. (“Now I know the choice is miiiine!”)
But everything changed with his 1997 Earthling, even if nobody was paying attention. The album won him no acclaim, zero airplay or sales, marred by cheesy guitar glop and embarrassingly dated techno production. But these were surprisingly soulful songs, especially “Looking for Satellites,” his truest shot of the Nineties. You could hear his heart was really in it this time, and you could also hear why: his new bride, Iman. After marrying her in 1993, she revitalized his sense of purpose and passion. Heathen and Reality were Bowie at the top of his game, coming back strong in the early 2000s, with spiritual tunes like “Sunday” and “Slip Away.” The Cracked Actor finally had something real to sing about: marriage, the great theme of his golden years. Iman was the muse who got him to the church on time.
Sadly, this glorious renaissance ended too soon — in 2004, he suffered a near-fatal onstage heart attack. He dropped out of the rock-star hustle, deciding to stay home and savor family life. We all figured he’d found a graceful way to retire, yet nobody held it against him. He’d earned it, right? So it was a shock when he returned in January 2013, on his 66th birthday, to announce a new album, The Next Day, with the bittersweet midlife ballad “Where Are We Now?” The Next Day was rightly acclaimed at the time, though it’s underrated these days, in the shadow of its successor. But Blackstar was a whole new level of intensity.
He sounds forlorn and vulnerable, as if possessed by sinister secrets he couldn’t share with anyone else, which turned out to be true. It’s his deepest, darkest, loneliest music, facing the end, knowing that he was going to die with a lot left unsaid, a lot of music unmade, a lot of apologies unspoken. For Blackstar, he self-consciously went back to outer space, where it all began for him, updating his debut hit “Space Oddity.” “Lazarus” and “Blackstar” revisit the long-running saga of Major Tom, the astronaut lost in the cosmos. It was a story Bowie kept rewriting his whole career, but this time he really was floating in a most peculiar way, trusting that his spaceship knew which way to go. His message on Blackstar was the same one Major Tom sends to Ground Control, right before his signal goes dead: “Tell my wife I love her very much.” Or as he was singing now, “Look up here, I’m in heaven/I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.”
Bowie was working on another massive project at the end: the musical Lazarus. It had a limited run that winter, in a tiny NYC theater in the East Village. I got to see it in December 2015, with my Rolling Stone co-conspirators Andy Greene and Alison Weinflash. Tickets were long sold out, but we got in the box-office line in case there were any last-minute cancellations — we went on a Tuesday afternoon and got lucky. I sat right in front of Anna Wintour and Idris Elba. Lazarus retold the story of his most famous movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth — the Bowie spaceman is trapped on earth, a rich and decadent alcoholic, played by Dexter’s Michael C. Hall. But he meets an angel, a teenage girl, who becomes his daughter figure, renewing his desire to live. She helps him build a spaceship so he can return to his home planet. For the intensely moving finale, they sing “Heroes” together, changing the “because we’re lovers” line. Instead, they sing, “We’re free now, and that is a fact.” They spill milk on the floor, swim through the puddle like dolphins. And then he flies up to the sky, leaving her on the ground.
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Blackstar set the tone for the public mourning for Bowie — people felt grief but also gratitude and amazement. At the end, when he had plenty of other things to worry about, he chose to use his remaining time to create more art. Blackstar is the reason that his mystique has just kept booming over the past decade, as seen in the long-running museum exhibit David Bowie Is (which became a whole different phenomenon after his death) or documentaries like Brett Morgen’s 2022 Moonage Daydream. Blackstar’s legacy is inspiring — but also challenging, an artistic statement that declares, “Here’s what I’m making out of what I have left. What are you doing with today?”
“I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time on it,” Bowie said in the Seventies, around the time of Station to Station. “The white face, the baggy pants — they’re Pierrot, the eternal clown putting across the great sadness of 1976.” Blackstar hit home for people because it spoke to the great sadness of 2016 — not to mention 2026. But nobody’s ever faced the end of the line quite like this — talk about leaving on a high note. Bowie seized the chance to turn his exit into one more grand creative adventure. And that’s why Blackstar defines the legacy of David Bowie at his best.
