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Popcast

Popcast: Love, Death and David Bowie

David Bowie in 2009.Credit...George Pimentel/WireImage, via Getty Images

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There is a way to take in a new David Bowie record: You see how it connects lyrically and musically with the rest of his work, hope you can feel it’s his best since nineteen-something-or-other, but nevertheless feel reassured that he’s still measuring the mood of the world. Plenty of people did that last week when his album “Blackstar” appeared. There he was, singing about transformation and absence over a bed of jazz. He hadn’t gone anywhere.

When he died two days later, the record sounded very different. An artist who dealt in theatrical illusion and metaphor seemed to be sending a DM about his own coming death, a message that would only arrive when he was physically gone.

(Since Sunday, there has also been a growing awareness of an Elvis Presley track called “Black Star” — it was the discarded first version of a 1960 movie theme song later called “Flaming Star” — in which Presley sang: “When a man sees his black star/he knows his time, his time has come.”)

But the first reaction wasn’t wrong. “Blackstar” does take up themes that Bowie had been working on at least since “Space Oddity” in 1969. Death — and exile, and between-ness, and alienation and erasure — was one. According to Simon Critchley, our guest this week, love was another.

Mr. Critchley, philosopher, author and the Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, is also the moderator of The Stone, the philosophy series on The New York Times’s Opinionator blog. He published the book-length meditation “Bowie” in 2014, and wrote an essay for the Stone this week proposing that to see darkness and hopelessness in Bowie’s songs is to miss the point. “At the core of Bowie’s music and his apparent negativity,” he writes, “is a profound yearning for connection and, most of all, for love.”

“What Bowie, for me, did,” Mr. Critchley said during our conversation, “was to depict a world that had completely disintegrated, a world that had dissolved, that had become nothing. And in that world, that had become nothing, to dredge from that the kind of nothing that is love.”

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