David Bowie

David Bowie

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Blackstar
    Blackstar
    Blackstar

    2016

  • Let's Dance (2018 Remaster)
    Let's Dance (2018 Remaster)
    Let's Dance (2018 Remaster)

    Following 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), it would take David Bowie three years to release another album—the longest gap in his career up to that point. But between hit-single collaborations with Queen (1981’s “Under Pressure”) and Giorgio Moroder (the theme song to the 1982 horror flick Cat People), not to mention a starring role in a Broadway production of The Elephant Man, he was never far from the spotlight. And all those extracurricular activities were effectively warming us up for his pop-cultural takeover in 1983: On top of appearing in three major films that year, Bowie dropped Let’s Dance, the album that signified his transformation from the world’s strangest rock star into its most dashing A-list celebrity. There’s a good reason why a buff and blonde Bowie appears on the cover with boxing gloves—this album delivers hit after hit after hit after hit. From a musical standpoint, Let’s Dance is a testament to Bowie’s unique status as both a classic-rock icon and post-punk pioneer that could bridge genre and generational divides. With “Modern Love”, he updates Motown motion with New Wave moxie and comes up with an eternal wedding dance-floor-filler in the process. For the truth-in-advertising funk of the title track, he fuses the mirror-ball-twirling sensibility of producer Nile Rodgers with the virtuoso blues licks of a then-unknown Stevie Ray Vaughan, as if to single-handely peace-broker the rockers-vs.-disco war once and for all. Ironically, the greatest measure of the album’s pop-savvy is the one track that dates back to Bowie’s left-field late-1970s Euro phase: originally a strung-out dirge that appeared on Iggy Pop’s 1977 solo debut The Idiot, “China Girl” is reborn as a peppy sing-along thanks to the addition of a swooning chorus hook and enchanting Asian instrumental motif. With the album’s unimpeachable opening string of instant MTV classics, it’s easy to overlook everything that comes after, but Let’s Dance never relents in its mission to provide maximal pleasure for the widest possible audience. Bowie gives British post-glam band Metro’s seductive 1977 signature “Criminal World” a 1980s sophisti-pop makeover that should’ve sent it to the top of the charts alongside the album’s aforementioned mega-singles, while a Moroder-less remake of “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” excises the original’s slow-building intro to thrust us right into the hot ’n’ bothered action, as Vaughan’s molten licks crank up the temperature. And the closing “Shake It” is effectively a remix of “Let’s Dance” that keeps the party going with a perky, Prince-like synth riff and cheeky vocal interplay that captures Bowie at his most light-hearted. As an artist, Bowie always thrived by plugging himself into the zeitgeist and reinventing himself accordingly, but with Let’s Dance he was the zeitgeist, the platonic ideal of a mass-appealing 1980s pop star—good looks, great taste and timeless tunes.

  • Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) [2017 Remaster]
    Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) [2017 Remaster]
    Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) [2017 Remaster]

    Conventional wisdom suggests that 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) marked the moment when David Bowie resurfaced from the experimental fog of his Berlin Trilogy and reclaimed his pop-star status. And really, his timing couldn’t have been any better. Right when the incoming music-video era was foregrounding the outrageous visual aesthetics that Bowie always valued, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) found him in the rarefied position of being both an elder-statesman influence on the prevailing post-punk/New Wave revolution—and also the artist spearheading its evolution into the dominant Top 40 sound at the dawn of a new decade. By this point, Bowie was still cutting-edge enough to reformulate our ideas of what pop music could be, yet enough of a familar brand that he could afford to be self-referential about his own mythos. On Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), that existential tension yields two of his definitive tracks: the ping-ponging paranoia of “Ashes to Ashes” provides a grim postscript to the Major Tom story introduced back on 1969’s “Space Oddity”, while the mutant funk of “Fashion” subversively blurs the line between trendspotting savvy and authoritarian conformity to the point where you could replace its titular chorus hook with “Fascism!” and the song would still make perfect sense. Those singles helped thrust Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) to No. 1 in several countries, but the album is still very much spiritually in tune with the preceding Berlin Trilogy, to the point where you could consider it the unofficial fourth chapter (even if it was recorded in New York and London). The return of Robert Fripp’s brain-bending guitar noise serves as the connective tissue to the totemic “Heroes”, whether he’s shooting sparks all over the hard-charging title track or providing the emotional undercurrent to the poignant “Teenage Wildlife”, which feels like an art-house spin on a widescreened Springsteen anthem about bygone youth. But Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) is ultimately a testament to how Bowie’s avant-garde sensibilities could bolster his pop ambitions rather than merely corrupt them: “It’s No Game, Pt. 1” may aggressively weed out casual fans with its grinding groove, Japanese spoken-word preambles and screamed-out verses that push Bowie’s voices to its physical limit. But all that clamour gives way to an indelible middle-eight melody that effectively points the way to the brash Britpop of Blur and Suede. And if Bowie’s past use of covers often saw him modernise the songs of his youth to make them his own, his graceful reading of Tom Verlaine’s “Kingdom Come” feels like a generous act of charity toward an unsung peer, an uncorking of the commercial appeal embedded in otherwise ignored American underground rock. As one of the album’s most insidious sing-alongs puts it, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) is the sound of Bowie going “Up the Hill Backwards”—a counter-intuitive yet wholly successful journey back to the top of the pops.

  • "Heroes" (2017 Remaster)
    "Heroes" (2017 Remaster)
    "Heroes" (2017 Remaster)

    “Heroes” isn’t merely the peak achievement of David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy; it feels like the moment that his entire 1970s discography was building toward. Throughout the album’s 10 tracks, we hear all the elements the singer had toyed with before—theatrical rock, flamboyant funk, Syd Barrett whimsy, curtain-closing balladry, krautrock precision, austere electronics, free-jazz wandering—fused into an immaculate, 360-degree portrait of Bowie’s sound and vision. “Heroes” also emphasises a quality that’s often downplayed in discussions of this phase: While the Berlin Trilogy has become shorthand for Bowie at his most fearlessly experimental, the music he created in this period is positively juddering with vim and vigour. That nervy energy can be largely attributed to the album’s recording locale. The only entry in the Berlin Trilogy to be entirely conceived in the city from start to finish, “Heroes” was laid down at Hansa Studios in the west, a stone’s throw from the Berlin Wall; from their window, Bowie and co. could see the Russian snipers ready to take out any potential defectors from the east. Released in 1977, “Heroes” carries over much of the same personnel as the preceding Low, including producer Tony Visconti, spiritual advisor Brian Eno, guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis. It also follows a similar split structure, with electrified rock songs populating the first side, and ambient compositions on the second. But it differs in a few crucial respects. Where Alomar’s funky style had been an animating force of Bowie’s mid-1970s sound, “Heroes” finds him playing the rhythm-guitar counterpoint to King Crimson axe-master Robert Fripp, whose freakozoid guitar noise smears like hot mercury over songs like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Blackout”, amplifying the overall sense of delirium. And where Low presented an oppositional relationship between Bowie’s pop and avant-garde sensibilities, “Heroes” achieves a more harmonious balance between the two. The exuberant kosmische piece “V-2 Schenider” serves as a natural bridge into more meditative pieces like “Moss Garden”, on which ominous helicopter sounds are offset by a soothing string-plucked instrumental. And even in its darkest moments, “Heroes” provides a light at the end of the tunnel, with the closing track, “The Secret Life of Arabia”, guiding listeners back to proper song territory with a flash of debonair exotica that anticipates the incoming New Romantic generation. Like the city that birthed it, “Heroes” is an album divided, but it’s undergirded by a defiant sense of optimism. And nowhere is that sentiment felt more profoundly than on the album’s towering title track. Folding Bowie’s past as a Velvet Underground-worshipping rocker into his new incarnation as a Teutonic-pop prophet, “Heroes” remains an underdog anthem for the ages. And though it came in the thick of Bowie’s most exploratory phase, the song is a masterclass in steadiness and simplicity, coaxing maximal power and drama out of the subtlest of shifts. It’s like a revolution building in slow motion: When Bowie shifts to his dramatic higher register for the fourth verse, it feels like a call-to-arms, and by the time those call-and-response backing vocals join in for the fifth pass, the rabble are ready to tear down the wall. Bowie had spent much of his career breaking down genre and gender barriers; with “Heroes”, he harnessed pop music’s potential to dismantle geopolitical ones.

  • Low (2017 Remaster)
    Low (2017 Remaster)
    Low (2017 Remaster)

    The first instalment of David Bowie’s famed Berlin Trilogy actually wasn’t birthed in Berlin. After barely surviving the druggy LA hedonism that birthed 1976’s Station to Station, Bowie vowed to get clean and stowed himself away in a chateau studio in northern France, with fellow addict Iggy Pop in tow. The detoxing duo recorded Pop’s 1977 solo debut, The Idiot, which featured a collision of seedy, urbane rock and cold, mechanistic rhythms—a reflection of Bowie’s growing obsession with the electronic-oriented sounds coming out of Germany at the time. And with his own next record, Bowie immersed himself so deeply in that realm, he practically disappeared into it. Released in 1977, and recorded with producer Tony Visconti and fellow glam survivor Brian Eno, Low closely mirrors the former Roxy Music figurehead’s own transition from eccentric art-rock artist to ambient-music icon. An exemplar of how the vinyl format could influence aesthetic choices, Low is divided into two distinct, oppositional sides: The first is made of up of compact, synth-shocked pop songs; the second is a suite of abstract ambient pieces that merge the worlds of electronic experimentation, opera and neoclassical composition. It’s easy to see Low’s first half as a logical extension of Station to Station’s icy avant-funk. But the buzzing keyboards, chromatic leads and industrial-strength beats of songs like “Breaking Glass” and “What in the World” push Bowie far away from the American soul music that initially inspired him to trade in his glitter for grooves. And for all its radical sound design and cryptic lyrical fragments, Low’s Side A offers some of Bowie’s purest expressions of emotion, be it the irrepressible “Sound and Vision” or the sorrowful “Always Crashing in the Same Car”, both of which spin traditional mid-century radio into other-worldly transmissions. If Low’s first act offers a glimpse of a totally wired future, its meditative second half is firmly grounded in the moment of its creation. Inspired by Bowie’s walks through the battle-scarred post-war cityscapes of Warsaw and West Berlin (where the album was eventually completed and mixed), Low’s Side B is a haunted aftershock of the 20th century’s darkest hour: In the isolated moments when Bowie’s vocals do appear—via the indecipherable incantations that complement the foggy drones of “Warszawa”, the Steve Reich-like percolations of “Weeping Wall” or the closing sax-speckled synthphony “Subterraneans”—he isn’t so much singing to his audience as praying for humanity. Low’s unconventional nature initially prompted RCA Records to delay its release by several months, as the label feared the record would flop commercially. But its influence immediately filtered down to the post-punky synth-pop acts that would dominate the British weeklies into the 1980s, andLow’s legacy would continue to proliferate decades later, when alt-rock auteurs like Trent Reznor, James Murphy and St Vincent embraced its forward-thinking fusion of ruptured rhythms, idiosyncratic melody and dissonant texture. After spending the better part of the 1970s using his body as a blank canvas to develop new personae, Low halted that ceaseless cycle of visual reinvention with an act of self-negation, as Bowie completely surrendered to the impressionistic power of sound. And as he dug his heels deeper into his new Berlin base, the line between vanguard pop star and avant-garde explorer would continue to blur in fascinating and unpredictable ways.

  • Station to Station (2016 Remaster)
    Station to Station (2016 Remaster)
    Station to Station (2016 Remaster)

    When David Bowie released Station to Station in 1976, he hit a new commercial pinnacle: It would soon become his second album in a row to reach the Top 10 on both sides of the pond. But from a mental-health standpoint, Bowie was at an all-time low. Upon moving to LA in 1975 to film his starring role in Nicolas Roeg’s art-house classic, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bowie’s recreational cocaine use had developed into a full-blown snowstorm, plunging him into an all-consuming paranoia that manifested itself in a notoriously extreme diet of red peppers and milk, dramatic weight loss and an obsession with the occult. Given his precarious condition at the time, Bowie infamously claimed that he had no recollection of making Station to Station. But in reality, he savvily turned his diminished physical and psychological state into a new persona: The Thin White Duke. Pale, skeletal, yet still untouchably stylish, Bowie reinvented himself as the ghost of a pop star. Though Station to Station carries over the soul and funk influences of the preceding Young Americans, this is an album possessed by a more haunted and sinister energy. Its staggering 10-minute title track is the equivalent of opening a door and being greeted by a 100-foot-high brick wall, as an ominous swell of electronics gives way to an anvil-pounding beat that—while not quite heavy metal—is still crushing enough to have inspired a Melvins cover version many years later. But partway through, the song suddenly transforms from doomy dirge to rapturous disco, effectively encapsulating Station to Station’s uncanny balance of drug-addled delusion and futurist epiphany. Station to Station may have been born in a cloud of LA excess, but Bowie’s ear was already keying into the avant-rock experimentation flourishing in Germany. And if he wasn’t yet fully incorporating the electronic aesthetic of bands like Kraftwerk and Harmonia, their machine-like precision informed the funky-yet-frosty allure of songs like “Golden Years” and “Stay”. Perhaps the most fascinating attribute of Station to Station is the way it makes organic instrumentation sound unearthly—“TVC15” foregrounds the playful piano-runs of the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan and Bowie’s own free-ranging sax-work, yet the song’s steely rhythmic pulse, cryptic communiques and robotic chorus incantations sound like they’re beaming in from another planet. But even the album’s two side-closing ballads—the elegant “Word on a Wing” and a dramatic reading of the Nina Simone signature “Wild Is the Wind”—convey the same message as the album’s more outre excursions: Bowie was rapidly losing interest in traditional rock music and rock culture in general, and in order to escape its temptations and trappings, he needed to make records that would position him firmly outside that world. “The European canon is here!” he announced on Station to Station’s title track. His next move was to book himself a transatlantic flight back to the Old World and fulfill that promise.

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About David Bowie

Back at the height of the Ziggy Stardust era, David Bowie told an interviewer that he’d always felt like a vehicle for something else, even if he could never quite figure out what that something else was. For all the times he changed his getup—the glam alien of Ziggy, the moody existentialist of the late ’70s, the pop sophisticate of the ’80s and so on—he was, in his way, remarkably consistent, a barometer of where the culture was and a glimpse of where it was going. Gender fluidity, the hybridisation of rock and electronic music, the transformative power of the internet: Bowie was never there first per se, but he was always there early, a transformative figure who managed to bring challenging ideas into mainstream culture in a way that felt stylish, digestible, exciting and most of all possible. Born David Jones in 1947, Bowie was raised in the suburbs of London, converting to the gospel of rock ’n’ roll after hearing Little Richard. He took a minute to find his creative footing (“The Laughing Gnome”—brace yourself), but by his early twenties he’d become a major force in English pop, exploring themes of alienation (“Space Oddity”), identity (“Changes”) and futurism (“Life On Mars?”) while developing a performance style steeped in everything from mime to kabuki and avant-garde theatre—a sense of visual identity that would last him the rest of his career. For three decades, Bowie rarely took more than a year between albums, exploring chilly, electronic art-rock (Low and the so-called Berlin Trilogy), pop (the early MTV hits Let’s Dance and Tonight), the noisy U-turn of the Tin Machine era and the quasi-industrial sound of such ’90s albums as Outside and Earthling. As prominent and productive as he was, he became more enigmatic as his career went on, a noble stoic at the outer reaches of pop music. His final two albums, 2013’s The Next Day and 2016’s Blackstar (released two days before his death), were among the grandest—and starkest—of his career. His final video, for the song “No Plan”, was released posthumously on what would have been his 70th birthday. Bowie doesn’t appear in the clip, at least not live. Instead, we see him in freeze-frame on a TV in the window of a rundown electronics store, just for a few seconds near the very end, a little fuzzy: Not a person, but an image fixed on the screen.

BORN
1947
GENRE
Rock

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