David Bowie: "Dollar Days"

For all David Bowie’s sleek, fashion-forward turns over the years, he always comes crawling back to ballads: Big, theatrical songs that luxuriate in sadness and turn loss into a kind of triumph. (If you’re looking for someone to blame for Radiohead, Drake, or any other alpha male weeping his way to the top, blame Bowie, whose melancholy always seemed more “artistic,” more apparently natural than Sinatra‘s.)

“Dollar Days,” the second-to-last song on Blackstar, isn’t all that substantively different from “Five Years” or “Ashes to Ashes” or any number of center-stage turns that have anchored his albums over the years: Songs that seem vulnerable but never really confess, as hot as vows and distant as satellites. “I’m dying to/ Push their backs against the grain and fool them all again and again,” he wails, clenched fist rising from the swamp implied, the phantom and the opera. It’s the kind of line anyone interested in Bowie would cling to like a driftwood in a wreck. Veil falls, trick revealed: a-ha. Of course anyone interested in Bowie would know better than to take such an honest appraisal at face value.

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