Blackstar

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It’s those two things raging against each other… that produces these moments that feel like real truth.

Black Star: ‘No Fear of Time’ Album Review - Vulture Black Star: ‘No Fear of Time’ Album Review - Vulture

The same can be said about No Fear of Time, the long-awaited sophomore Black Star album, produced in full by Madlib and recorded in various mobile studios in hotels and dressing rooms backstage at Chappelle gigs. The record arrived at a precarious moment in the late ’90s, amid difficult discussions about oppression. As Bey articulated in “Thieves in the Night,” our “synthesized surface conceals the interior America: land of opportunity, mirages, and camouflages. They seem like they’re having fun rapping but they also sound like they’re getting lost in the weeds.

This sparked further examinations of the artwork by fans, one of whom discovered earlier this week that the cover, when exposed to a blacklight, appears to change the design to fluorescent blue.

David Bowie – ★ (Blackstar) (2016, MPO, 180 Gram, Vinyl

At this point, it is all but impossible for Bowie to escape himself, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try. Even the group’s name is a provocation of a sort, a reference to Jamaican author and activist Marcus Garvey’s ill-fated plan for ferrying Black Americans back to Africa. Bey made dubious headlines in 2006, when it was revealed that he came up short on child-support payments, and in 2008, when his ex-wife wrote a tell-all detailing an incident of physical abuse and told a newspaper that he refused to sign divorce papers to keep her from marrying anyone else.The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Kweli and Bey, born Dante Smith, got to know each other in the early ’90s, freestyling in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park and appearing at the same local spoken-word events. Dollar Days" is the confession of a restless soul who could not spend his golden years in a blissful British countryside even if he wanted to. Bowie’s longtime studio wingman Tony Visconti is back as co-producer, bringing along with him some continuity and a sense of history. It’s also a dodgy time for entertainment-industry figureheads who broke through in the ’90s and are now having their politics scrutinized and their past and present failings examined.

Blackstar Vinyl at Juno Records. David BOWIE - Blackstar Vinyl at Juno Records.

Another fan, Matias Hidalgo, told SPIN that the inside gatefold art of the album, which shows a star field on one side and a portrait of Bowie on the other, can be arranged so that Bowie’s image is reflected on the opposite cover. Based at London’s 180 Studios, Fact is a multimedia platform championing the global movement of electronic art. Those collisions come hard and strong throughout the album, unpredictable jazz solos and spirited vocals meeting timeless stories of blunt force and destruction. Kweli touches on creeping white nationalism throughout the album: “Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,” he raps in “OG,” “we gonna bash these fascists and fuck them up.

The debut episode goes into chilling detail about trying to stay in touch with Amy Winehouse as the singer was in the throes of multiple addiction. Fear also sees the duo trying to get back on the same wavelength over a decade after the last time we heard them on a song — time apart where Kweli towed the line for sturdy East Coast hip-hop, while Bey took inspiration from left-of-center voices like MF DOOM, rhyming like a getaway car trying to lose the fuzz, moving with puckish disinterest in being followed. In music it was the height of the jiggy era, smack in the middle of the long trail of singles supporting No Way Out and Harlem World, where Puff and Mase made platinum hits out of healthy samples of existing platinum hits.

David Bowie – ★ (Blackstar) (2016, MPO, 180 Gram, Vinyl David Bowie – ★ (Blackstar) (2016, MPO, 180 Gram, Vinyl

Now, a term that used to refer to maintaining awareness of one’s past and present is a catchall phrase describing anything that grinds Republican Party gears at any given moment as books like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye — name-checked in “Thieves in the Night” — come up in conversations about school book bans.I’m dying to push their backs against the grain and fool them all again and again," he sings, the words doubling as a mantra for Blackstar and much of Bowie’s career.