“ooo Look Out You Rock and Rollers” The Meaning of David Bowie’s Blackstar Video
David Bowie’s video, Blackstar, rolls us through a remarkable, dense, hallucinatory trip. What’s going on in it? Metaphysical, sci-fi, conjure dreams: this is David Bowie making art to the end about death, planes of existence and giving up the ghost.
Blackstar opens on an otherworldly, rocky scene of a beautiful full eclipse of the sun viewed through a cave — literally a blackstar. In the story, this is either a different planet or the Earth has evolved. A woman with a tail finds the remains of an astronaut suit with a bejeweled (of course) skull inside. Our tattered, worn Major Tom died looking up at the stars.
Historically, eclipses were portents of a shift, a death or the fall of leaders. But through esoteric and shamanic traditions, eclipses are when new information is given, it’s death, but new beginnings, and new things can be seen, much like the night allows us to see stars. The woman takes the skull back to her home, the village of “Orman” (so much like “amen” or all men).
Sounds echo back on themselves: a modern saxophone combined with an anxious, rolling forward, chic elegant rhythm that is both wild and tight. The song draws map with the center being “your eyes” and a “solitary candle.” “At the center of it all, your eyes.” — is like a wave that washes back and forth during the song.
The dirge tells us about “the day of execution” and so death is an unnatural ending we would not have chosen but is imposed on us externally. During the course of Blackstar, death is described in different terms to match different Bowies existing on multiple planes.
The Bowie that is singing the dirge is the blind-folded, button-eyed man at door — death’s door as it were, outside the activities of the villagers.
“On the day of execution, only women kneel and smile” and here is a peculiar comment in the dirge we have to guess at. Perhaps women understand submission to the cycles of life or as gateways to life, women understand death deeply. In Christianity, women understood the metaphysical event of Jesus’s death first. In the village of “Ormen,” the women are the shamans.
The work-a-day people of Ormen exist in a structure, barn-like attics, with chinks of light shining through the spaces in the boards and small windows. The people twitch with the frenetic, useless movements in the barn, very restricted, but urgent. The movements are reminiscent of the Bowie Fashion video moves. They also are like a time-lapsed recording of any of us working at small desks; the small movements are odd and twitchy when spun up. What are they doing? Seems meaningless. Anxious. Sad. Limited.
As the button-eyed Bowie sings, the village women gather in the evening to perform a ritual in the dust.
Relief and clarity arrive with the Bowie Priest, high in dignity and peace with the book of his knowledge with a blackstar on the cover. The priest blows on the word and the brightness increases like a fire would. He blows sunlight and blue skies into view and uses the holy book to ward off darkness. The dismal room is gone. The village people take in the view with calm awe and face the light, with their backs to a wall of sky.
In Blackstar, Bowie shifts through the multiple planes of existence of a man. There are 5 Bowies in the video: the first, the button-eyed corpse at the threshold (death’s door); the second, the formal priest armed with order, calm, holding the book of knowledge to hold off the scary; the third, the warm autobiographical man/jokester who makes eye contact with us in the barn-attic. The fourth Bowie is the skeleton artifact left as archeology. Then later, the fifth, the hungry wandering ghost, primitive with no eyes just a mouth, the lowest scavenger, menacing, just pure hunger. The monster doesn’t look exactly like Asian hungry ghosts, who are human skeletal starving spirits, but conceptually, it’s a hungry ghost.
As the women perform their ritual, the hungry ghost roams a field gone to seed.
After a mystic rout, a declarative, autobiographical Bowie sings in the attic, filled with a cast-off dress form, worn desk furniture, and stacks of yellowed paper. The man makes a personal statement, takes control of the articulation, like the pattern of other heroic songs of Bowie. The music becomes melodic, and this Bowie addresses the audience, first in the third person “something happened on the day he died..” Then it shifts to the declaration of what he’s not and what he is “I’m a blackstar.” Ash. Star-stuff.
Warmth returns and the declarative Bowie makes eye contact with a woman’s eyes like a lover, seeing each other truly for a moment and sharing a wink at life’s joke. It is the center of it all, it’s being seen. The declarative Bowie has a sense of humor about the labels and stories told of his life– all of them ridiculous to the essential. He strikes a very Mick Jagger pose when declaring he’s not a rock star. He’s going to go where he’s going “I’ma take you home” and it’s Bowie that is flying off, the vehicle and the passenger. “Born the wrong way around,” he was going to rise.
The declarative man is the Blackstar –narrating the experience, the one that took on roles, “The great I am,” the source bit of Bowie. A part of the constellation, dust, but a part is the “great I am” that’s not the man at death’s door and not the skeleton nor even the man who put on various roles as rock star, gangster, etc. This is not the same as “god,” because he “can’t answer why…” which a true god would be able to. But he can describe his journey. He is what he is like he sings in another album track, Lazarus “Now ain’t that like me.” This is the essential Bowie before and after death.
During the declarative Bowie’s piece, we see the three scarecrows for the first time. They are staked to a broad field that has gone dry to seed and pollen. Scarecrows usually stand over fertile fields to scare picking crows, but here there are three chubby scarecrows, the last wards of purpose on the once fertile field. Mocking, laughing, and grooving their days undulating in the breeze: it’s Monty Pythonesque — scary but merry, the dark have their own society.
But as the women commence their ritual, the hungry spirit creeps up on the field. The women rack themselves in a circle, prostrate on the dust, connecting to it. When a woman receives the bejeweled skull at the top of her spine from the Priestess, it appears to be some sort of invocation or receiving of essence from it. As the ceremony occurs, the button eyed Bowie at death’s door and the wandering, hungry ghost become disturbed.
The skull makes a cameo appearance at Bowie’s desk in the Lazarus video along with the multiple Bowie planes of existence. In Lazarus, Bowie is struggling in his body as the button-eyed man at death’s door in a hospital bed, the man at a desk writing who fingers a pen like it’s a syringe for a drug, and the starman stepping in and out of an armoire which is kind of a coffin, and kind of a wardrobe for taking on different costumes. The hungry ghost there is of an accusatory woman under his bed.
In Buddhist tradition, the hungry ghost is a sort of split off id after death that wanders the earth in eternal hunger, but it can be put to rest by remembrance or offerings and honor from the living, particularly ancestors. In Blackstar, the hungry ghost wanders as death with claws, consumptive, hungry, restless — only a mouth with no eyes. The scarecrow's face the menacing spirit, as its scarab-like claw snatches at a scarecrow. The hungry ghost passes the scarecrows and continues in the field. But a transition is occurring in the distance. The button eyed Bowie at death’s door both evokes it and fears it. As the video ends, on the field, a brilliant specter of light is returning on the horizon.
The button-eyed corpse at death's door, the declarative fool on the journey (who is the essential Bowie), the skeleton artifact, the reassuring order of the word priest, the hungry ghost: the Blackstar video tours all the planes of the man at death. Likewise, the different facets of death: execution, gentle spirit rising and stepping aside, the source spirit taking you home, a restless journey that needs assistance, bones to be found, and a hungry ghost wandering. Life burning is the center of it all, all observation, eye contact with a friend and understanding.
The album Blackstar is revolutionary, not just because it’s great art. But it’s revolutionary that we recognize with a best seller an older person’s story as powerful. Most rock art is about a young man’s life and even older rockers so often write reflections of another time, not venturing into real time friction of making art to the end. When Bowie sang “Tis a pity she’s a whore,” it’s about juicy life he’s in love with: life’s flirtation with you, and then it smacks you and moves on. This is revolutionary in rock art, because he was 69, still relevant, and still processing his own real-time 69 life through art: Real adult stuff.
