David Bowie's Blackstar

On grief, hindsight, and the day everything changed.

I woke up at seven, same as always. The house was quiet—my grandparents were in bed, and everyone else was going to work. I padded downstairs, made coffee, and came back up to my room to start my day. When I opened my laptop at 07:08, he was dead.

There was no warning, no slow drip of rumours, just the blunt announcement on Twitter, sitting there like it had always been true: David Bowie dead at sixty-nine. I remember staring at the words, waiting for them to turn into something else—a prank, a hoax, an early morning glitch. They didn’t. The steam rose from my cup, and I sat there, numb, scrolling through news feeds as people posted tributes that multiplied by the minute—black stars, lightning bolts, and photographs from every era of his face. I barely left my room that day, wondering where the fuck Monday had gone.

Two days earlier, I’d been running through Up Holland with Blackstar in my headphones, laughing at the line ‘’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore’. The album had only just come out, and I’d been playing it for days—its fractured rhythms and jazz spirals felt strange and thrilling, like he’d found a new way forward. I thought it was another reinvention, another phase unfolding. None of us knew it was a goodbye.

The first thing that struck me was how alien it sounded. It opens like a transmission from elsewhere—ten minutes of dread and beauty, Bowie half-chanting through synth fog as Donny McCaslin’s saxophone writhes around him. It’s jazz stripped of comfort, rhythm as ritual, the sound of someone testing how far the body can go before it dissolves. Bowie had hired New York jazz musicians for Blackstar, and you could hear it—the looseness, the risk, the sense that anything could veer off course and still land somewhere precise. There were horns squawking against time signatures that barely settled, drums that felt like they were collapsing, then rebuilding mid-bar. His voice was weathered but alive inside it all, stretched to breaking point. He wasn’t fading. He was directing, sculpting, and orchestrating his own disappearance. It sounded like someone daring himself to keep going.

When Ryan Dombal’s review appeared on Pitchfork, it opened with a line that’s never left me: “David Bowie has died many deaths yet he is still with us.” I read it as a metaphor then—Bowie the survivor, the man who could turn himself into anything and live again. Forty-eight hours later, it read like prophecy. At first, I remember thinking it was impossible for David Bowie to die. He’d always felt permanent to me.

And once we knew, everything changed. Every line, every gesture was suddenly illuminated. “Look up here, I’m in heaven”; “Something happened on the day he died.” We thought we were hearing reinvention, but we were hearing a biopsy. Blackstar became a code to crack, a record that contained its own obituary in plain sight. The videos were impossible to watch in the same way again—the bandaged eyes, the hospital bed, the floating figure disappearing into darkness. It was as if he were teaching us how to carry on, how to turn death into art, how to leave. He turned dying into a choreography. Each image felt deliberate—not vanity, but authorship. Bowie had always been his own creation; Blackstar proved he could direct even the ending.

Other artists have confronted mortality and death through sound—Leonard Cohen with You Want It Darker, Nick Cave with Skeleton Tree—each turning them into austere, devotional works. Cohen’s voice was already half in the grave, murmuring confessions from a darkened chapel; Cave’s was raw, stumbling through tragedy in real time. Bowie’s approach was different. He staged his as performance art, building an entire album to die inside, then slipping out the trapdoor before anyone could see him go. Even now, when I play it, the same mix of awe and sadness runs through me. It still sounds too alive to have come from someone about to leave.

The days that followed were unreal. It was one of the first major deaths of the social-media age—everyone posting lyrics and that photo of him in the charcoal suit and hat, laughing in front of a shutter. Grief became a feed, a rolling exhibition of loss I couldn’t stop scrolling through. I was alone in my house, but it didn’t feel like it. It was the first time I realised collective mourning could exist through pixels, strangers grieving together in real time. A loss like that seemed to belong to all of us at once. Every refresh brought another eulogy, another version of who he’d been. You couldn’t open a screen without seeing him, even as he was gone. My timeline was filled with anecdotes, murals, and candlelight vigils. In Brixton and Berlin, people queued outside venues, crying to songs released decades before they were born. Even those who’d never lived through his prime spoke as if they’d lost something personal. That was Bowie’s trick: he made distance feel like intimacy. You could never meet him, but he’d already been part of your life for years—through a record sleeve, a late-night film, a song that somehow described you before you even knew who you were.

For me, it was like losing a constant. My Nana Doris loved him—The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was one of her favourites—and she’d died two months before he did. I remember thinking how strange it was that the two of them had gone so close together, both leaving behind these collections of songs and stories that felt endless.

Bowie’s last gift wasn’t closure but continuity. He folded himself into his work. Blackstar was a message from the other side, an artist dying in mid-transmission. He’d already gone, but he’d left a map. He never explained it, and he didn’t need to. Everything was there. Nearly ten years on, Blackstar still feels unfinished—like he’s mid-sentence, waiting for us to catch up.

Years earlier, he’d said in an interview, “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.” It sounded glib then, a wink from an artist who’d already been everywhere. After Blackstar, it reads like an instruction—a line on the map he’d drawn for us.

A few days later, I went running again—same route, same decline past the war memorial, the same song in my head, the same hill, the same joke of a lyric, but it no longer felt like a joke. The saxophones flared in my headphones as I passed the memorial, the sky rinsed pale blue. It sounded less like mourning than motion. ‘’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore.’ The sun was out, and the air was cold. Nothing in the world had changed, except everything.

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