Also, until this album, he's largely been singing about himself; any others have been a rotating cast of the faceless and irrelevant.
But it could also describe this album's promotional campaign, in which Clark has popped up pretty much everywhere, doing pretty much everything.
And yet Jay-Z is not only looking out for his own children; he has also taken this album as a teaching moment for a new generation of rappers whom he's been observing with a keen (and sometimes ungenerous) eye.
And I had this Junior Boys album that was not inspiring me, but also this Jessy album that was totally inspiring me, and had all of my creative energy going into it.
"The production of 'Lazarus,' and also this new album, 'Blackstar,' when you look at them both, you find so many lines and phrases that meant so much more than people knew before today," said Ivo van Hove, the musical's director, who was one of a handful of collaborators with knowledge of Mr. Bowie's condition.
This was also the album that gave us "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," later recorded by Linda Ronstadt who, thankfully, excised the creepy line about being asked for a beating.
Ms. Lambert also finally uses this album to enter the world of alt-country, a scene she's long been falsely tagged as representing.
But it was his personal romance with the cellist Wendy Sutter that inspired him to compose the Partita No. 1, "Songs and Poems" (2007), which Haimovitz also recorded for this album.
Later on, he revealed a more personal, devastating reason: "I also knew that this album would be empty to me, because there would be no Spaceape".
There are also elements of folk on this album too.
