David Bowie passed away with a parting present with his album Blackstar on 10th. January, 2016. The album was something that changed a shape of a thing (remember his cover shape of things?) that we all will be experiencing: death.
Like Freddie Mercury’s Innuendo, the last Queen album before Freddie’s death, the terminal phase of an illness stigmatizes the whole recording sessions and the production process. The first thing that a creative artist tries to do is to live as much as possible to make something to remain after the physical absence. Both Bowie and Mercury were concentrated for a death that is irresistible and tried to make out a masterpiece inspired from death or maybe to make death art itself.
Mercury’s Innuendo was an innuendo that tells what goes on inside humans when one is sure of the coming of death and scrutinizing after life and the Creator, God.
“If there’s a God or any kind of justice under the sky
If there’s a point, if there’s a reason to live or die
If there’s an answer to the questions we feel bound to ask
Show yourself destroy our fears release your mask
Oh, yes we’ll keep on trying”
No matter in which category of philosophy or religion you place yourself, it’s for sure that death and after life issues force people to do something to compete with it. If you are Freddie Mercury and you live a completely rockn’roll life (sex, drugs and rockn’roll trinity), after learning that you’re diagnosed with AIDS, it is easier to write a song like “Party’” (From the Queen album Miracle in1989) as a post AIDS declaration:
“We had a good night jamming away,
There was a full moon showing,
And we started to play,
But in the cold light of day next morning
Party was over,
The party was over.
We got love and we got style,
And we got sex and I know we got what it takes oh, oh,
Why don’t you come back and play,
Come back and play, come back and play,
We got all night all day,
Everybody’s gone away…”
When Mercury was in the terminal phase of the illness, while discussing the judging Creator in Innuendo, he also tried to do something to remain alive with his artistic works. This declaration was announced with “Show Must Go On” and the show went on with the demo recordings of Mercury accompanied by only a drum machine. The extra recordings he made gave the band an opportunity to make a last album of Queen with Freddie’s compositions and vocals in 1995. The songs that Freddie recorded in the post Innuendo period were “A Winter’s Tale”, “Mother Love” and “You Don’t Fool Me”. After a painstaking session between 1993-1995 by the remaining Queen members, the album was finished with the additional tracks derived from other unreleased material that contains Freddie’s vocals.
In Mother Love, Freddie’s seeking of a protective and a merciful figure:
“My body’s aching, but I can’t sleep
My dreams are all the company I keep
Got such a feeling as the sun goes down
I’m coming home to my sweet
Mother love”.
In A Winter’s Tale, the obscurity of the after life transforms into a heaven like dreamy sequence in the view of Freddie Mercury, as he could no longer bear obscurity, as he was about to die:
“It’s winter-fall
Red skies are gleaming oh
Sea gulls are flying over
Swans are floatin’ by
Smoking chimney-tops
Am I dreaming
Am I dreaming …? “
In Bowie’s case, as far as we know, there is an already released material and some more additional recordings according to Tony Visconti, Bowie’s producer. Visconti tells The Rolling Stone Magazine that Bowie actually planned to make one more album. In the last few weeks of his life, he wrote and recorded demo versions of five new songs, and just a week before his death, he called Visconti via FaceTime to discuss recording a new LP.
“At that late stage, he was planning the follow-up to Blackstar, and I was thrilled,” Visconti says. “And I thought, and he thought, that he’d have a few months, at least. Obviously, if he’s excited about doing his next album, he must’ve thought he had a few more months. So the end must’ve been very rapid. I’m not privy to it. I don’t know exactly, but he must’ve taken ill very quickly after that phone call.”
Like Mercury, Bowie also tried to push his luck to compose more material to reach a kind of immortality. While making a masterpiece of death as “His death was no different from his life: a work of art”, he tried to calculate his time left and transform the remaining months, days or hours to a work of art as well.
To this extent, we just have his released works with us which lead us to our death as well like he narrates :
”On the day of execution, on the day of execution
Only women kneel and smile, ah-ah, ah-ah
At the centre of it all, at the centre of it all
Your eyes, your eyes”.
While with these words he denotes ISIS (according to Donny McCaslin his sax player during the sessions) in a metaphor of an execution of humanity, he also denotes his cancer lesion which is called Black Star.(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/news/was-david-bowies-blackstar-named-after-a-cancer-lesion/).
The song named Lazarus, by using the Biblical figure who rose from his grave, Bowie notes his terminal phase with these lyrics:
“Look up here, I’m in heaven
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen
I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen
Everybody knows me now.”
The latter lyrics speak of a after- death phase Bowie imagines just like the opposite of Mercury, who seems more agnostic. This is something that is not as agnostic as Bowie stated before, because a description of an eternal life is provided in the song:
“You know, I’ll be free
Just like the bluebird
Ain’t that just like me?”
Sometimes I think Bowie makes an approach of some kind of a spiritualism (Shaman?) that life continues without boundaries with the loss of body and with the secrets of the songs people involve even to make their life and the death a precious asset.
We may conclude that death is something that brings threats and advantages to a person when he is face to face with it. The time is limited and you have to do, say, play something that you have never made to keep your life eternal. At least one tries so that his solo doomsday will not occur before the Doomsday of the earthly life. In this phase Mercury, Bowie and Zappa, who we didn’t mention but who is no less important with his Civilization Phase III album. He could hardly complete it before his death. They all tried to make the most concentrated, most serious music in order not to be underestimated in the remaining days of the world that they won’t be participating in.
