I did have a plan for today’s blog. Honest. It was super-clever. So clever, I’m going to retain it for next week’s post.

But in the meantime, I’ve been asked to do a review of David Bowie’s posthumous download-only No Plan EP that dropped yesterday. So I’ve been working on that today.

[Feeling short-changed by today’s post? There’s more at the Apoplexy Tiny Letter.]

That was the nudge I needed to watch the BBC documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years. It premiered yesterday, on the seventieth anniversary of his birth, and the first anniversary of the release of Blackstar. The director had kind of turned me off with interviews to promote the film in which he claimed that Blackstar was not really intended as a farewell message.

Because agreeing with the cultural consensus, no matter how well-founded, does not a thesis make.

The basis of this claim is that in the doc, the director of the video for Lazarus mentions that Bowie didn’t tell him at the time of shooting that he was ill. Furthermore, that was the week his treatment had been stopped.

Now, call me a recovering ex-lawyer, but that does not mean that Blackstar wasn’t a carefully planned and calculated farewell. But, y’know, feel free to piss all over the idea that it was, even if it was.

So, I don’t think that it’s worth getting into that doc in any more detail. Stick with the music. I’ll pop back in here when the review’s up with a link…

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