Will We Ever Forget David Bowie?

On the last song on the last album that David Bowie ever recorded – “I Can’t Give Everything Away” on Blackstar – its creator attempted to deal with his legacy. As he sang, wracked with the cancer that would soon kill him, “I know something is very wrong/The pulse returns for prodigal sons/The blackout hearts, the flowered muse/With skull designs upon my shoes”, he faced up to his mortality with both allusive wit and sly self-referentiality. The song began with a musical quotation from a song on his Low album, “A New Career in a New Town”, but, as Bowie knew, there would no longer be any new career and no new town.