"Blackstar" | ||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Single by David Bowie | ||||||||||||||||
from the album Blackstar | ||||||||||||||||
Released | 19 November 2015 | |||||||||||||||
Format | Digital download | |||||||||||||||
Recorded | 2015 at The Magic Shop and Human Worldwide Studios (New York, New York) |
|||||||||||||||
Genre | ||||||||||||||||
Length | 9:57 | |||||||||||||||
Label |
|
|||||||||||||||
Writer(s) | David Bowie | |||||||||||||||
Producer(s) |
|
|||||||||||||||
David Bowie singles chronology | ||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
"★" (pronounced and stylized as "Blackstar") is a song by English rock musician David Bowie. It was released as the lead single from his twenty-fifth and final studio album of the same name on 19 November 2015. "Blackstar" peaked at number 61 on the UK Singles Chart, number 70 on the French Singles Chart and number 78 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was nominated for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance at the Grammy Awards.
"Blackstar" is an art rock and jazztronica song. Also described as an "avant jazz sci-fi torch song", it features a "drum and bass rhythm, a two-note tonal melody inspired by Gregorian chant, and shifting time signatures." In the middle section, the song turns from an acid house-ish style to a sax solo to a bluesy slow middle section.
The song was originally over eleven minutes long, but after learning that iTunes would not post singles over ten minutes in length, Bowie and Visconti edited it down to 9:57, making it Bowie's second-longest track behind "Station to Station". Bowie did not want to confuse listeners by releasing different single and album versions.
"Blackstar" was released on 19 November 2015 as a digital download. In addition to its release on the album of the same name, the track is used as the opening music for the television series The Last Panthers.
The music video for "Blackstar" is a surreal ten-minute short film directed by Johan Renck (the director of The Last Panthers, the show for which the song was composed). It depicts a woman with a tail, played by Elisa Lasowski, discovering a dead astronaut and taking his jewel-encrusted skull to an ancient, otherworldly town. The astronaut's bones float toward an eclipse, while a circle of women perform a ritual with the skull in the town's centre.