page_title: Blackstar (album)
section_title: Composition and influences
hierarchical_section_title: Blackstar (album) / Composition and influences
caption_attribution_description: English: James Murphy performing as part of LCD Soundsystem at Q25 Jubileumsfesten (Kristiansand, Norway) on June 28, 2016.
context_page_description: Blackstar is the twenty-fifth and final studio album by English musician David Bowie. It was released worldwide on 8 January 2016, coinciding with Bowie's 69th birthday, through his ISO label, Columbia Records and Sony Music. The album was largely recorded in secret between the Magic Shop and Human Worldwide Studios in New York City with Bowie's longtime co-producer Tony Visconti and a group of local jazz musicians – comprising saxophonist Donny McCaslin, pianist Jason Lindner, bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Mark Guiliana; guitarist Ben Monder joined the ensemble for the final sessions. The album is more experimental than its predecessor The Next Day, combining art rock with different styles of jazz.
  For the album, Bowie took inspiration from electronic groups such as Boards of Canada and Death Grips as well as hip hop artists such as Kendrick Lamar. The album contains re-recorded versions of two songs, "Sue" and "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore", both of which were originally released in 2014. It was preceded by the singles "Blackstar" and "Lazarus", both of which were supported by music videos.
context_section_description: According to Visconti, he and Bowie deliberately attempted "to avoid rock'n’roll" while making the album, and they had been listening to rapper Kendrick Lamar's 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly during the recording sessions and cited it as an influence. Discussing the album, Visconti said "We wound up with nothing like that, but we loved the fact that Kendrick was so open-minded and he didn't do a straight-up hip-hop record. He threw everything on there, and that's exactly what we wanted to do." Electronic duo Boards of Canada and experimental hip hop trio Death Grips have also been cited as influences. According to Pegg, another album Bowie listened to during the sessions was D'Angelo's Black Messiah (2014), which featured a fusion of soul, jazz and funk that was reminiscent of Bowie's work on "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)".
  The music on Blackstar has been characterised as incorporating art rock, jazz, experimental jazz, free jazz, and experimental rock, as well as elements from industrial rock, folk-pop and hip hop. Bryan Wawzenek of Ultimate Classic Rock writes that it was his most experimental album in years. The saxophone was the first instrument Bowie learned; he was an avid jazz listener in his youth and had occasionally worked with jazz musicians in the past. The album's title track incorporates nu jazz, while progressing through a drum and bass-style rhythm, an acid house-inspired portion of the instrumental, a saxophone solo, and a lower-tempo blues-like section. Ten minutes in length, it originally began as two separate melodies, before being merged to one single piece. Andy Greene of Rolling Stone said that the re-recording of "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore" was "powered by a hip hop beat and free-form sax", unlike the original, which was described by Dalton as "a propulsive, roaring, heavily electronic wall of sound." "Lazarus" is described by Pegg as "an intense, brooding threnody". Although some critics felt the track begins to drag as it goes on, Pegg believes it's one of the album's "most luminous moments". Although the original version of "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" featured brass-heavy instrumentation and a bebop-jazz arrangement, Stephen Dalton of Louder writes that the re-recorded version "feels sharper, denser and heavier", with added funk rock guitar lines and "percussive shudders". "Girl Loves Me" features synthesisers, "acrobatic" drumming, strings and "bouncing" bass. "Dollar Days", the sixth track, contains a sax solo and an arrangement that Dalton considers reminiscient of Bowie's work on Young Americans (1975). Biographer Chris O'Leary believes "Dollar Days" has "the lushest arrangement" on the album. In the final track, "I Can't Give Everything Away", Bowie plays a harmonica solo similar to one from his instrumental track "A New Career in a New Town" off his 1977 album Low.
  Billboard and CNN wrote that Bowie's lyrics seem to address his impending death, with CNN noting that the album "reveals a man who appears to be grappling with his own mortality". The title track features the lyrics: "Something happened on the day he died / Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside / somebody else took his place, and bravely cried, 'I'm a blackstar, I'm a blackstar'"; Jesse Kinos-Goodin of CBC Music felt these lyrics represented Bowie reflecting on his life and impending death. "Lazarus" features the lines "Look up here, I'm in heaven / I've got scars that can't be seen", which appeared in many publications following Bowie's death on 10 January. "Girl Loves Me" was notable for its inclusion of Nadsat, a fictional language created by Anthony Burgess for his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, where it was used very often. It also included Polari, a type of slang used commonly in England by homosexual men during the mid-20th century. The refrain, the explicit "Where the fuck did Monday go?", was interpreted by Pegg as the kind of desperation from a man who knows his time is running out. "Dollar Days" contains the lyrics "don't believe for just one second I'm forgetting you — I'm trying to, I'm dying to/too", which 
caption: James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem played percussion on "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" and "Girl Loves Me".[25]
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