We reach the middleweight section of the album poll: those that wound up ranked between 19 and 11, by you (don’t blame me).
We begin with what was once, for a time, Bowie’s “last” album:
19. Reality (25 points/votes).
It is ironic. You haven’t seen the artwork yet, but there’s a fakeness to the cover that undermines that. It’s the old chestnut: What is real and what isn’t? It’s actually about who’s stolen this world.
Bowie, 2003.
Reality ends up changing in the wake of Bowie’s return. The fact was that his disappearance made Reality a better album. Not that it was bad, ever, but the only reason it was important at all was because of its status as “The Last One.”…The Next Day was hell on Reality because it made Reality have to stand on its own legs as an album for almost the first time. In its defense, the only real difference is that now we *really* wish ‘Try Some Buy Some’ was a B-Side.
18. David Bowie aka Space Oddity aka Man of Words/Man of Music (28 points/votes).
I’ve been the male equivalent of the dumb blonde for a few years, and I was beginning to despair of people accepting me for my music. It may be fine for a male model to be told he’s a great looking guy, but that doesn’t help a singer much, especially now that the pretty boy personality cult seems to be on the way out.
My songs are all from the heart, and they are wholly personal to me, and I would like people to accept them as such. I dearly want to be recognized as a writer, but I would ask them not to get too deeply into my songs. As likely as not, there’s nothing there but the words and music you hear at one listening…I see you’ve noticed that my songs are seldom about boy and girl relationships. That’s because I’ve never had any traumas with girls.
Bowie, NME interview, 1969.
David Bowie can be viewed in retrospect as all that Bowie had been and a little of what he would become, all jumbled up and fighting for control: a rag-bag of ideas all getting in each other’s way.
Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr.
17. The Buddha of Suburbia (42 points, 34 votes, 2 #1 votes).
One idea pulled another behind it, like conjurers’ handkerchiefs…I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through.
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia.
I spent so much time in my bedroom [in Bromley]. It really was my entire world. I had books up there, my music up there, my record player. Going from my world upstairs out onto the street, I had to pass through this no-man’s-land of the living room, you know, and out the front hall.
Bowie, 1990.
16. Let’s Dance (50 points/votes, highest-ranked LP to get no #1s).
A friend of mine who heard this record before I did told me that he was rather disappointed by it. “It’s got guitar solos all over it,” he announced in the sort of tone that you might use for telling somebody that there is a large, maggoty dog turd on their new jacket. Despite the expectation that the combination of Bowie and Nile Rodgers would result in the kind of immaculately tortured but immaculately deft angst-funk that seems in vogue in certain quarters, the actual result is something quite different: some of the strongest, simplest and least complicated music that Bowie has ever made. Let’s Dance is clean, straight and…huge.
Charles Shaar Murray, LP review, NME, 1983.
I think I’m just a little tired of experimentation now…there is a proliferation of synthetic instruments being used in that kind of, er, Me generation icy cold vein. I feel it’s very hard to use those instruments without a kind of preconditioning already there. That if you use the synthesizer it means this particular thing; that I’m part of this angular society.
So that’s why I’ve used a very organic, basic instrumentation on this new album. Such instrumentation doesn’t say anything other than it comes from a hybrid of white and black culture. That is the only underlying subtext it has really…As I say, experimentation can be rewarding for finding awkward stances musically. But it just isn’t satisfying after a while. And it’s not satisfying because it’s not very useful, except – as Brian Eno would say – for setting up a new kind of vocabulary. Now I’ve got the vocabulary I’m supposed to do something with it! Ha ha!
Bowie, 1983.
15. Earthling (57 points, 49 votes, 2 #1 votes).
I’ve been featured in a long-running cartoon in Britain as being a rather disengaged culture vulture. A bit of a mad pilot that kind of flies from avant-garde trees, making this nest out of glittering jewels that belong to other beings. Well, I guess that’s me. The thing is, I agree with all that, and I don’t see anything wrong in that. Yes, that’s what I do. I’m a contagious, infectious enthusiast. It’s what I like doing.
Bowie, 1997.
What’s great about him in that he’s constantly looking for new input. There’s all this stuff going on around us, and it’s so easy to just shut it out because it’s too much. Instead, he just wades right in, like an old lady at a basement sale. Instead of going through racks of clothes, he’s going through racks of ideas, pulling out what interests him.
Reeves Gabrels, on Bowie, 1997.
and the first notable jump in votes:
14. The Next Day (98 points, 94 votes, 1 #1 vote, 2 voters specified Next Day Extra).
Effigies Indulgences Anarchist Violence Chthonic Intimidation Vampyric Pantheon Succubus Hostage Transference Identity Mauer Interface Flitting Isolation Revenge Osmosis Crusade Tyrant Domination Indifference Miasma Pressgang Displaced Flight Resettlement Funereal Glide Trace Balkan Burial Reverse Manipulate Origin Text Traitor Urban Comeuppance Tragic Nerve Mystification
Bowie’s “work flow diagram” for The Next Day, sent to Rick Moody, 2013.
Stay-At-Home Bowie isn’t boring, however…In fact, it’s one of the most interesting evolutions of Bowie’s public persona. He’s taken a conception of himself forced upon him by popular culture, an idea created in his absence from the public eye. It’s also a character that is forced upon him by the passage of time: he simply is older now. And he’s playing up to that, to a degree. He’s also raging against it, subverting it, adding to it, and generally not doing the sort of things you’d expect David Bowie to do. Plus, Bowie getting old and revelling in it: that has the same sort of rebellious spirit as modern-day Bob Dylan, his protest song period long behind him, putting out a record of Christmas standards.
13. The Man Who Sold The World (112 points, 104 votes, 2 #1 votes).
Tony Visconti’s compressed production gives the album an utterly synthetic audio quality: few records this simply played sound as studio-created.
Trouser Press Record Guide, 3rd edition.
It’s clearly the beginning of the Spiders from Mars…Though that band was yet to be invented, technically, it’s a logical extension of what was going on with The Man Who Sold The World. It was a pivotal album in that it gave [Bowie] a taste of what it was like to be in a rock band.
Tony Visconti.
It was all family problems and analogies put into science-fiction form.
Bowie, on MWSTW, 1976.
12. Heathen (150 points, 134 votes, 4 #1 votes).
Especially in one’s mid-fifties, you’re very aware that that’s the moment you have to leave off the idea of being young. You’ve got to let it go.
Bowie, Interview, 2002.
Heathen will surely be condemned by those who cannot forgive him for his past greatness, and will likely be loved by a few who still imagine strains of “Space Oddity” beneath its refrains. It’s hard to shake the thought that even thirty years later, some people still seem to be expecting another Ziggy.
Eric Carr, review, Pitchfork, 2002.
Heathen was written in the mountains, and kind of feels like that, I think.
Bowie, 2002.
11. Young Americans (157 points, 137 votes, 5 #1 votes).
Bowie played [Young Americans] for the ten blissed-out, formerly camped-out, devotees, who’d been ushered into the studio, finally, at 5 am by Stuart George. With wine, tears and adulation flowing around and from the blessed, Bowie was an affable host as he signed more autographs, apologized for the unfinished mix of the album and agreed to play it a second time, at which point the party erupted into dance. Bowie took center floor with a foxy stomp.
Rolling Stone, 1974.
My own recent music has been good, plastic soul, I think. It’s not very complex, but it’s enjoyable to write. I did most of it in the studio. It doesn’t take very long to write…about ten, 15 minutes a song. I mean, with Young Americans I thought I’d better make a hit album to cement myself over here [the U.S.], so I went in and did it. It wasn’t too hard, really.
Bowie, Melody Maker, 1976.
Next: the Top 10. Oy Vey Baby still has a shot.
Photos: mostly Discogs. Also: amateur painter, 2014 (Jimmy King); “According to G,” Next Day promo posters, NYC, 2013; Bowie at an HMV promo for Heathen, 2002 (unknown photog); Ms. Swift & Young Americans (ASOS).
