A Beginner’s Guide to Bowie

I was recently telling a friend about this very blog when he revealed to me that he knew next to nothing about David Bowie. He asked for a good record to start with. I gave him some suggestions (cutting to the chase, I recommended tracking down the compilation album, Changesbowie) (click to link to my discussion of the Changes series).* At his suggestion, I’m building out from my initial feedback here, with the intent of providing a concise beginners guide to David Bowie. For links to songs and albums I have commented on elsewhere, click on the first appearance of the album and song titles below.

Who was David Bowie?
Bowie, born David Jones, is mainly remembered as an innovative and influential rock musician whose career spanned from the early 1960s through 2016, the year of his death. He released 28 studio albums (including two with the band, Tin Machine). Especially counting posthumously released albums, he (or whoever owns the rights to his music these days) also released a large number of live albums and compilations. In addition to performing, Bowie was also a music producer, actor, painter and fashion icon. He was married twice, with his second marriage, to the model Iman, lasting to his death. Despite the conspicuous heterosexuality of his personal life, Bowie explored issues related to gender identity and sexual orientation in some of his music, mannerisms and appearance, especially during the 1970s. He has two children, including the director Duncan Jones. Bowie was English, but lived the last twenty years of his life in New York State.

What are some of Bowie’s best known songs?
Most of Bowie’s greatest hits come from the period of 1969-1983. Some of his best known songs include “Space Oddity” (1969); “Changes” (1971); “Life on Mars?” (1971); “Starman,” (1972); “Rebel Rebel” (1974); “Fame” (1975); “Heroes” (1977); “Ashes to Ashes” (1980); “Under Pressure” (1982) and “Let’s Dance” (1983).

Which of Bowie’s studio albums should I listen to first?
The temptation here is to go down the rabbit hole and list out about a dozen or more contenders. Upon reflection, I think I can narrow the list of options down to three: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972); Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980) and Let’s Dance (1983). Ziggy is Bowie’s most beloved album. It regularly appears high on lists of best rock albums of all time and contains many of Bowie’s better known songs. It is one of the defining works of the “glam rock” sub-genre and is the album that made Bowie famous. Scary Monsters, my personal favorite, has become the benchmark by which Bowie’s later records were evaluated. Following a string of poorly regarded albums starting in the mid-80s, it became a trope amongst critics to declare Bowie’s latest album, starting in the early 1990s, as his best since Scary Monsters. Let’s Dance was one of Bowie’s most commercially successful albums. The album and accompanying tour got Bowie on the cover of Time Magazine (click to link to the cover). While some hardcore Bowie fans dismiss it as too commercial, it probably has the broadest appeal of any of his albums.

Did Bowie make any good music after 1983?
Yes! And plenty of it! Bowie once again began releasing solid albums at a rate of about one every two years from 1993 through 2003, after which time he went into a period of semi-retirement for a decade before releasing two very well regarded final albums. Of everything Bowie did after the 1980s, one album stands out above the rest— his final album, Blackstar. Blackstar was one of the best selling albums of 2016 and one of the best selling albums of Bowie’s entire catalog. Bowie created it while he was dying, and it turns the experience of dying into art. I think it it easily one of Bowie’s ten best albums, and on some days I think its in the top five. That said, I think Blackstar and the rest of his later works are best appreciated with a foundational familiarity with some of Bowie’s earlier works. Bowie became self-referential in middle age. As a middle-aged man myself I relate to his later themes of evaluating his own past, accomplishments, and laments. But it helps to understand the references. Another reason I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Bowie’s later works as an introduction is that, unlike much of his earlier material, even the best of his later stuff has not become part of the classic rock canon, nor has it been at the forefront of any new musical genre. There’s still a lot of great music in his post 80’s output, it just isn’t where I’d recommend starting.

So why not just start at the beginning?
There are many recordings of Bowie performing as a teenager and in his early 20s, including his first, self-titled album from 1967. Most of the music from this period is pretty awful, up until his second album, Space Oddity (1969), which includes his first hit (“Space Oddity”). The song, “Space Oddity” remains one of Bowie’s most recognizable, and the album of the same name is far superior to anything he did previously, but he still hadn’t reached his peak, so I would skip ahead a little for my first Bowie album.

Why this blog?
I write this blog primarily because I like to write. David Bowie is my favorite musical artist and his 50+ year career produced enough music (and more) for nearly endless contemplation (at least for me). Plus, the discipline of committing to a daily blog both helps structure my day and helps me pause for a moment to look at the world through a different lens. Though many of my blog entires are strictly about Bowie, many others use Bowie as a launching point to discuss something else. There are many movie reviews of Barbie, for instance, but I doubt any others are written from a Bowie-centric perspective (click on the title to link to my review).

Obviously, I can (and do) write much more about David Bowie, but I’m going to limit myself here so that this entry remains a true beginners guide. If you’ve read this far and want more, there’s several years worth of (searchable) material here. Or, as Bowie sang in “Rebel Rebel,” “You can’t get enough, but enough ain’t the test…”

* Update (9/11/23): The original embedded video linked to Changesonebowie, which is an earlier version of the compilation that came to finally be known as Changesbowie. The title of this blog is a play on Changeesonebowie. Unfortunately, the video came down a few weeks after I first made this post and I cannot find a YouTube link to the entire album. So, what I have here is a remastered version of the album’s first song, “Space Oddity.” I found it on a YouTube page (is that what they are called?) that would play the songs from ChangesOneBowie in order as separate videos. If you listen to the song on this site, it will not automatically play the next song from the album, but know that the playlist is on YouTube and pretty easy to find.