Leah Kardos on “I Can’t Give Everything Away”

This is the latest commentary by Leah Kardos based on her book, Blackstar Theory. She’s covered much of what’s in the book, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the last of the series. As usual, her level of analysis is far beyond anything I am capable of doing myself and I don’t have a whole lot to add…

…But I do have something to add. I think of Blackstar as Bowie’s deliberate attempt to turn his own death into art. While he didn’t time his death, on January 8th, 2016, he surely timed its release to be his birthday, two days earlier. Further, he was well aware that he was very sick for most or all the time he was making the album. Kardos, however questions id Bowie truly meant for the album to be his final statement to the public, in part because his health took a turn for the better at some point in 2015 and in part because he was talking about making more music.

Personally, I don’t think this is a case like Heathen, which somewhat coincidentally seemed like it was a commentary on the events following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Blackstar was not coincidently about mortality, and it did not coincidently seem to have a number of references to Bowie’s own situation. Bowie probably hoped that he could keep recording and would make a recovery, but death was very obviously on his mind when he was making the album. Would it have been a happy accident that Bowie turned it around and recorded an album after Blackstar? I think, had events played out that way, that would have been a result of “no plan” (to make a play on the name of a posthumously released song and EP) rather than the themes of Blackstar just coincidently taking on unanticipated meaning once Bowie died.

I am even more certain that Bowie was very deliberate in choosing “I Can’t Give Everything Away” as the final song on the album, with an awareness that it might very well be the final song on Bowie’s last album. I will probably write in coming days about Bowie’s penchant for being very deliberate in selecting final songs on most of his albums, but for now, I do think there’s a message here that entirely works if you started listening to Space Oddity and kept going in order, album by album to Blackstar. After all that, Bowie had nothing left to give.

As for the rest of the message in the song, I think Kardos has it, so I’ll leave that to her. But I do think this is a very special song, entrusted by a dying Bowie to close out his body of work.