![]() It’s an extremely dark album.” Something warmer to finish, though: the smiley-face badge on the astronaut’s jacket in the Blackstar video is the face of Gerty, the robot companion in Bowie’s son Duncan Jones’ film, Moon, a lovely last message from father to son. “I’ve never read a review that really sussed it. “The Station to Station track itself … is the nearest album to a magick treatise that I’ve written,” Bowie said, again to Q, in 1997. Also, the black and silver outfit Bowie wears in the Lazarus video is like one he wears on the sleeve of Station to Station, in which he is drawing a Crowley-inspired Tree of Life. This isn’t as spurious as it sounds: in Blackstar, the lyric “at the centre of it all”, reflects a famous line in a Crowley ritual called the Star Sapphire. Ormen also means serpent in Norwegian, a creature mentioned in the writings of the occultist Aleister Crowley, with whom Bowie was obsessed in the 1970s. Others think Bowie is playing with language: one Reddit poster says “in the villa of Ormen” sounds like “the revealer of all men”, ie death. Bowie wore a T-shirt bearing the film’s name in the video to 2013’s similarly reflective Where We Are Now?. ![]() Ormen is also a village in Norway, the country where Bowie’s old girlfriend, Hermione Farthingale, went in 1969 to appear in the film Song of Norway about the composer Edvard Grieg – and from the musical play by someone going by the name Milton Lazarus. This timescale suggests that it could have been created by fans, were it not for some posts that hint towards images from the Lazarus video, released six weeks later: a woman emerging from the right-hand side of a wardrobe (Bowie ends the Lazarus video going back into it on the left, like he’s entering a coffin), plus a skull on a desk. This is also the name of a tumblr set up on 20 November 2015, a day after the song’s video was released, which last featured a post on 10 December. The song Blackstar begins in “the villa of Ormen”. Watch the video for Lazarus 3 The lyrics and videos for Blackstar and Lazarus The Unicode black star character ★ is U+2605. The graphic alphabet on the bottom of the cover is also rumoured to be a cipher alphabet, spelling Bowie, while on Twitter has an even wilder theory: “Bowie’s final album’s name isn’t just an Elvis reference. Furthermore, the vinyl release’s black star is die-cut – ie it features his absence. On, a reader says Bowie paraphrased a well-known line from Batty’s final monologue on a note sent to the funeral of his schizophrenic half-brother, Terry Burns: “All these moments will be lost, like tears washed away by the rain.” (Mentions of porn stars and wandering stars in the title track also reflect the film’s characters.)īlackstar was the first Bowie album not to feature his image on the cover, perhaps because he knew he would die soon. ![]() Yes, Bowie shared his birthday with Presley, but 8 January 2016 was also the inception date of the replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner – and Bowie was a huge fan of the film. Watch the video for Blackstar 2 Blackstar’s release date, and cover art And I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something.” Which leads us on to … “When a man sees his black star,” Presley sings, “he knows his time … has come.” Bowie was a known Presley nut, telling Q in 1997 that “he was a major hero of mine. Maybe Bowie was also winking at his good friend, Mos Def, who had a collective with the same name, plus Black Star is the name of a little-known Elvis song that has being doing the rounds. As well as being the name of a “hidden planet” that the apocalyptically inclined think will crash into the Earth (“Guys! He knew it was coming!”) and another name for Saturn (“He won a Saturn acting award once!”), it’s also the term for the transitional state between a collapsed star and a singularity (a state of infinite value) in physics – which makes sense if Bowie is placing himself as the collapsed star, and the singularity the state he will enter after his death. Yes, it’s a name for a cancer lesion, although one usually associated with breast cancer, so its meaning in outer-space terminology is likely to have been far more significant for the Starman. ![]()
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