https://twitter.com/raquelherv/status/727548805600710656
On the surface, the artwork for David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, which is stylized as, well, a black star, seems very simple. There’s just a five-pointed black star. It’s very clean, but, perhaps, didn’t feel like it captured the eclectic genius of Bowie. However, around the time just after Bowie’s death, it became clear just how much preparation he was putting into what, it would seem, was clear to him was his final album. Now, we have found out, all these months later, that the artwork for Blackstar isn’t quite as simplistic as we thought.
If you have a physical copy of the album, and admittedly this is less common these days, which also may be why it took so long for this to become known, and you place it under direct sunlight, that simple black star is filled with an entire field of bright, shining stars. If you take it out of the sunlight, they disappear. Bowie had left us one last little mystery to solve, evidently and he also gave us some pretty cool artwork.
In a recent interview, Jonathan Barnbrook, who designed the cover, said, “It’s subsided a bit now, but a lot of people said it was a bullsh*t cover when it came out, that it took five minutes to design. But I think there is a misunderstanding about the simplicity.” He was certainly right about that.
(Via Consequence of Sound)
