"The goal, in many, many ways, was to avoid rock and roll." That's how Tony Visconti, David Bowie's longtime producer, describes the thought process behind Blackstar, Bowie's new album. (The actual title, of course, is ?, but I'm not copy-pasting the damn star symbol all through this piece, sorry.) Over a five-decade career, Bowie has played around with genre more than maybe any other musician of his caliber. But he is still one of the foundational voices of rock and roll -- not one of the first to do it, of course, but one of the voices to show new directions in which the music could drift. Every singer trying to find space for operatic theatricality in rock music is, in some sense or another, a Bowie acolyte; it doesn't matter if they're in of Montreal or in Evanescence. And every Bowie album is a rock album -- including the soul album, the early-'80s dance-pop album, the drum-and-bass album, and all the various way-out experimental albums. So hearing that a Bowie album is trying to avoid rock and roll is like hearing that there's a new Star Wars movie and it's trying to avoid sci-fi. And somehow, Bowie did it. I'm not exactly sure what Blackstar is, but it doesn't feel like a rock album.