2016 :: SONG OF THE YEAR
DAVID BOWIE
I CAN’T GIVE EVERYTHING AWAY
We have lost so many this year. People who shaped the later half of 20th century and carried us into the 21st are gone. It’s as if they were stepping aside for new blood to fill those great iconoclastic and defining shoes. Time will tell if that will happen, but this song seemed to be a dispatch to that next generation. The last message of a true artist with so much to give, so much creative life force, ever in bloom. The words of a man looking into the void, confronting his inability to deliver everything he had inside at the end of things. This is not a dirge, though. It’s a celebration. The young jazz lions Bowie surrounded himself with for this last album are in full voice, exultant and alive with swing here. As final goodbye, it is a perfect, whistful-but-bright look back and forward at the same time. That’s what, it seems, 2016 was all about.
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