10 Perfect Albums With Dark Backstories

There isn't much that could possibly top David Bowie's dark bow out on Blackstar. The man lived through various different rock star lives during his career, and capping things off with one final masterpiece was just the kind of demented thing that fans would have flocked to. The real darkness always comes from inside your heart, and the Bowie that we all loved had been replaced by the Thin White Duke on Station to Station.

Moving out to Los Angeles to cut his next album, Bowie was getting much more fascinated with the world of krautrock, with this album adding a bit more electronic elements into the mix. Aside from musical ventures though, Bowie had started to get a bit off the rails with some of his extracurriculars, letting the image of the Thin White Duke take over his persona a lot of the time, leading to a fixation on the occult and even making semi-fascist remarks whenever he would do interviews around this time.

There was more than just the shock factor driving this though, with Bowie saying that his diet consisted of only milk, peppers, and cocaine around this time and going so far as to say that he doesn't remember a single session from this album because of how out of his mind he was. Inspiration can always come from the strangest places, but Bowie seemed to be flirting with something a lot more than just rock and roll theater. If anything, The Thin White Duke is the dark mirror of Ziggy Stardust...incredibly clinical and looking to cut out rock and roll's heart.