The Korea Herald

지나쌤

Bowie finally tops chart in U.S., adopted home, after death

By KH디지털2

Published : Jan. 18, 2016 - 13:44

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NEW YORK (AFP) -- David Bowie’s final album on Sunday hit No. 1 in the United States, his adopted home, with the British music legend posthumously achieving a feat he never managed in life.

“Blackstar,” which was released two days before Bowie’s Jan. 10 death from a secret battle with cancer, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for the week through Thursday.

Amid the outpouring of grief, Bowie not only scored his first U.S. No. 1 album but became among the rare artists to have two in the top five, with his greatest hits collection “Best of Bowie,” released in 2002, hitting No. 4.

“Blackstar” wrested No. 1 from Adele’s blockbuster “25,” which had topped the chart for seven weeks.

“Blackstar” -- which came out on Bowie’s 69th birthday -- had immediately won critical acclaim for its experimentalism as the long-reinventing artist developed a dark, hard jazz sound.

His death threw a whole new light on “Blackstar” as it emerged that he intended the album as a final statement, full of meditation on a half-century on the cutting edge of music.

Especially poignant was the video for “Lazarus” as Bowie levitates from a hospital bed and returns into a dark closet.

Bowie spent the final two decades of his life living in New York and had said that his first love was African-American music, especially funk and soul.

Yet while Bowie cast a huge influence over U.S. pop culture, he was generally considered an avant-garde artist and did not win the same mainstream success as in Britain and a number of other European countries.

“Blackstar” also opened at No. 1 in Britain, where it was Bowie’s 10th chart-topping album.

In the United States, Bowie had gone to No. 2 with his previous album, “The Next Day,” in 2013 and reached No. 4 with his pop-driven “Let’s Dance” in 1983.

The United States always had a major pull over Bowie’s music. On his 1975 album “Young Americans,” Bowie explored soul music by recording in Philadelphia’s celebrated Sigma Sound Studios.

The title song was an almost stream-of-consciousness account of impressions of the United States including the line, “Do you remember your President Nixon?” who had resigned over the Watergate scandal days before Bowie entered the studio.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, mourning the rocker-resident as “a big presence in a lot of our lives,” told reporters that “Young Americans” was his favorite Bowie song and said the Nixon line “rang through my ears for many, many years.”