Blackstar falling

The iconic rock star David Bowie died in January from a cancer that he’d been privately battling for 18 months. He was 69. In the days following his death, he was eulogized and analyzed from numerous angles.

Such a reaction was to be expected. His multifaceted career made him one of the closest things to a Renaissance Man that pop culture has yet to produce.

Bowie became most famous for anticipating and mastering nearly every pop-music fashion of the 1970s and at least one from the 1980s: MTV. He became second-most-famous for his ever-shifting variety of theatrical guises and personae, the self-destructively sybaritic nature of which sometimes reflected his actual life.

He also acted, most notably in the Broadway production of The Elephant Man (in which he starred) and in the films The Man Who Fell to Earth, Labyrinth, The Last Temptation of Christ (as Pontius Pilate), Basquiat (as Andy Warhol), and The Prestige (as Nikola Tesla). In 2006 he executive-produced and appeared briefly in 30 Century Man, a documentary tracing the career of his musical hero Scott Walker. In 1978, at the height of his fame, he narrated a recording of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

What was given shorter analytical shrift in Bowie’s eulogies was the precipitous fall from public favor that he underwent after singing a duet with Mick Jagger on a cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” in 1985. Indeed, beginning with 1987’s Never Let Me Down, nothing that he did—and he did a lot—clicked stateside until 2013, when his album The Next Day earned widespread acclaim as a long-overdue return to rock ’n’ roll form.

Perhaps the simplest explanation for his 30-year commercial drought is that after decades of playing literal and figurative aliens, his decision finally to play himself was not all that interesting.

His most obvious attempt at being a regular guy was Tin Machine, a quartet of which he was the lead singer but into which he otherwise sought to recede. None of the group’s albums (two studio, one live) found an audience, and by 1993, Bowie was back to his solo-artist ways. Sober and recently married to his second wife, the supermodel Iman Abdulmajid, he released Black Tie White Noise, an unusually autobiographical album bookended by songs called “The Wedding” (an instrumental) and “The Wedding Song” respectively.

Its sales were initially high, but they tailed off quickly, a fate that also befell its successors Outside (1995), Earthling (1997), ‘Hours …’ (1999), Heathen (2002), and Reality (2003). Each was musically earnest. But each also made clear that after decades of anticipating musical trends, Bowie was playing catch-up, reaching for a relevance that was once at his Midas-like beck and call.

Had they contained a major single or two, they might have assumed respectable places alongside Lodger (1979) and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980) in the lower regions of the Bowie solid-album canon.

But they didn’t contain major singles. And, chances are, had Bowie not died just two days after its release, even his latest album, Blackstar (ISO/RCA/Columbia/Sony) might have faded into the background.

Bowie knew that Blackstar might be his last musical will and testament. So he rounded up a group of jazz musicians, bore down hard on the lyrics, and delivered eerie, mortality-haunted performances of songs with titles such as “I Can’t Give Everything Away” and “Lazarus” that would forever contradict any notion that he was going gentle into that good night.

For once, playing himself proved challenge enough.