David Bowie’s 69th birthday on January 8 saw the release of his final and 25th studio album. It was also two days before the Starman boarded the mother ship back to the right light-year in the right galaxy. Blackstar is his parting gift to generations of his fans who will never find a perfect sound to fill the planet-sized hole that Ziggy has left here on earth.
Blackstar is as different from any of Bowie’s earlier works as is possible. The album got Bowie some of the best reviews of his career and was his first to be at No.1 in more than 20 countries. This was the farthest that Bowie ever strayed from pop, experimenting with hypnotic sax-heavy electro-acoustic jazz and enigmatic and often strange lyrics. After January 11, when the world heard of his passing and his illness, many of the lyrics took on a new meaning. When he sings, “I’m not a pop star, I’m a Blackstar” or “Oh, I’ll be free, just like that bluebird”, we now feel something new and sad.
There will never be another Bowie. And while we may listen and re-listen to his exceptional body of work, or watch and re-watch his incredible movies and videos, there will never be another song, another track. Which is why we hold on to, look for and get excited about anything with the name “David Bowie” attached to it.
Such is the case with the Instagram mini-series Unbound. Created by Carolynn Cecilia and Nikki Borges for the Instagram account InstaMiniSeries, Unbound is a 16-part series of 15-second visual interpretations of the tracks in Blackstar. The creators of these videos got early access to the tunes. Bowie was in on the project from the start, setting no limits or preconditions for the producers. The project was aimed at a younger audience through new and experimental social channels.
The videos are not literal interpretations of the songs, but instead feature evocative imagery to depict the mood suggested by the music, lyrics and artwork. There is no linear narrative, and while a short often leads into another, there is barely any correlation between the 12 videos that have been released so far.
Unbound 1, for instance features a group of people in a library where a blink-and-miss-it 15 second sweeping shot finds them talking and sifting through books till a woman finally opens up a book for the only little boy in a frame full of grown-ups. The only sign of Bowie in the entire short-shot is a book with a big black star on the table, which you might miss if you aren’t really looking for some meaning.
The series is one of the final and few visuals that accompany Blackstar, along with two music videos, one for the title track and another for Lazarus, both starring Bowie himself.
Instagram series has been able to get a few prominent names to be a part of the project too. Blogger and Rookie magazine founder Tavi Gavinson features in one short, while Six Feet Under’s Patricia Clarkson plays a lounge singer in another 15-seconder.
Social and digital media platforms are exceedingly becoming the most prominent formats when it comes to media distribution and content generation. Trailblazer that he was, Bowie’s experiment with Instagram was an attempt to do something different, both in terms of music as well as storytelling.
Unbound is a little shred to hold on to while we stubbornly look for ways to deny that this is the last we’ll see of Bowie. It is not a huge success when it comes to views and hits. The series has not been able to gather an audience or a following that can be expected for a work dedicated to and created in part by Bowie himself. However, it sure is a primer into an album that is remarkable, rich and fated to live-on. That is not in question. ۢ