Ten years later, David Bowie's final album is still challenging and thrilling...

Screenshot via the internet Archive

Ten years ago today I published what I didn't realize at the time would be the last review of a new David Bowie album I would ever write.

You can only see the review via the Internet Archive these days, since the Chicagoist archives disappeared from the internet a few months ago, and I have lost hope they'll ever return. But I'm still proud of this piece, though it does bring back a flood of memories. I would leave for a vacation in San Miguel de Allende a few days after this was published—news broke of his death in the night before I left—and I spent that week haranguing every bar I was in to play Blackstar over and over, along with other selections from the Bowie catalog. It wasn't as depressing as you might thing, and quite honestly not a single person ever asked the various bartenders to turn it off in favor of something more conventionally upbeat.

In the decade singe then we've seen plenty of reissues, repackaging, and unreleased material from Bowie hit the market, and I certainly have mixed feelings about some of them. However I'm mostly pleased to have been able to enjoy the stream of Bowie-related material that has been released since his death. 

But it's still hard to live in a world where Bowie will never produce anything that's brand new.

Updated 2:20 p.m. I just finished reading Chris O’Leary's new entry about the song "Blackstar" from his indispensable Pushing Ahead of The Dame blog, and he closes the excellent piece with the tease that there are in fact a few final unheard Bowie recordings. And he summarizes my thoughts on this so perfectly I must share his writing with you:

A final perspective. There are five new David Bowie songs, songs that we know nothing about, not even their names. We may never hear them, but we know that they exist. Let them be unheard. Let this be our gift to the future. There will never be a last David Bowie song if there are always five more to come. The end of the David Bowie story is that it doesn’t end. There will always be another chapter to write. An old-time ambassador, may he forever keep pushing ahead.