Bowie or Bust, Pt. 2 - 1973-1975
Several weeks back, Spectrum Culture has us sit down and listen to the albums of David Bowie. Not knowing which albums they'd ask me to comment on, I made some notes as we went along.
Aladdin Sane, 1973
Up until this point I hadn’t really felt that I was missing out on anything from David Bowie. I have a best of compilation that covered the early years and was perfectly happy leaving things at that. I knew that a lot of people seemed to really like Aladdin Sane, as it turned up on quite a few Best of the Century lists back in 1999/2000, but I thought that this was basically on the strength of “The Jean Genie” and “Let’s Spend The Night Together.” How wrong I was! From start to finish, I think this was my favourite “newly discovered” Bowie album, a fitting rock counterpart to the folk of Hunky Dory.
Pin Ups, 1973
Um, an entire album of covers? Aladdin Sane’s “Let’s Spend The Night Together” suggested that this was coming, but to Bowie’s credit it actually took me a few songs in to realize that’s what this album was about, as I wasn’t terribly familiar with early Pink Floyd songs like “See Emily Play” or bands like The Things. It’s interesting to hear cover albums removed from the era of their release because different generations of listeners each find something unique in a particular song (or set of songs). What it was that Bowie fans heard that encouraged them to take this album to #1 though is beyond.
Diamond Dogs, 1974
To me, this album is famous, though it wasn’t until Spectrum asked that I listened to the whole thing from start to finish. The result? Well, remember when I said that Bowie has a tendency to over think what he’s writing about? That’s in evidence throughout Diamond Dogs. While songs like the title track and “Rebel, Rebel” move quickly despite their length; others like “We Are The Dead” sound like essays put to music and a lot of effort is put into describing a post-apocalyptic society. The whole thing was written as a stage show, and some of the songs are very much composed with that in mind.
Young Americans, 1975
If you’re counting, David Bowie had released an album a year since 1969. How did he do it, you might wonder. The answer, revealed during the tour for Diamond Dogs, was large amounts of cocaine. At some point, you might expect the wheels to fall off the bus, and to me, that is what Young Americans sounds like, a big screeching car crash of an album. Bowie on the otherhand, describes it’s sound as “Plastic Soul” something he developed during the second half of the American Diamond Dogs tour. When I mentioned the other day that Bowie’s observational skills could sometimes be cynical and mean (from his debut album), it was in part Young Americans I was thinking of – it’s like Bowie has collected the worst parts of the 1970s and fed it back to people. The sad part? The title track was his first #1 song in the U.S.
