David Bowie’s latest album Blackstar, released just two days before his death in January, was the first not to feature his image on the cover. The newly-released video for his first posthumous single, “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” also lacks the physical, often striking, presence of the theatrical singer—but in doing so, it embraces the spirit of the album’s meditative and transcendent closing track.
Directed by British graphic designer and typographer Jonathan Barnbrook, the video animates bits of the song’s lyrics in black and white to invoke a plaintive sense of the cosmos before ultimately erupting into a spiral of prismatic colors in its closing moments. “This is really a very simple little video that I wanted to be ultimately positive,” explained Barnbrook who also designed Blackstar’s minimalistic artwork. You can check out the lyric video below.
“We start off in black and white world of [Blackstar], but in the final chorus we move to brilliant color, I saw it as a celebration of David, to say that despite the adversity we face, the difficult things that happen such as David’s passing, that human beings are naturally positive, they look forward and can take the good from the past and use it as something to help with the present. We are a naturally optimistic species and we celebrate the good that we are given.”