Listening to Bowie Albums in Order: Ziggy Stardust through Diamond Dogs

While I have listened to every Bowie album many times, this is the second of a series of blog posts about my immediate reaction to listening to them in order.

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While there are connecting threads between Bowie’s first four albums, they are really very different from one another. This is less so for the next four, which really form the heart of what many fans think of when they think of Bowie. My overall reaction to listening to Ziggy through Diamond Dogs in order is that they sound like works by the same artist (in contrast to, say, David Bowie versus The Man Who Sold the World). And they are, of course, fabulous.

That includes Pin Ups. Pin Ups often shows up near the bottom of rankings of Bowie’s albums. This, I think is not because Bowie doesn’t perform the songs well, but because they are not his songs. The conceit is that it is an entire album of covers of 1960s songs from British acts, done in the glam style that Bowie had really perfected in Aladdin Sane. And here I should say that he perfected the glam style on that album, not that the album itself is perfect. Bowie’s inclusion of the Rolling Stones “Let’s Spend the Night Together” on Aladdin served as a peruser to Pin Ups. But to my liking it would have been better on the cover album, absorbed by the others and either left off Aladdin entirely or swapped out for almost any of the other songs on Pin Ups.

That’s too much time on “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” but it is a good example of how Bowie would signal what’s coming next, which is something he seemed to be consciously doing as early as Hunky Dory with “Queen Bitch,” and perhaps earlier— Space Oddity begins and ends with space songs, though Bowie wouldn’t get back to that topic until Ziggy.

Oh yes, Ziggy. There’s a reason it is the favorite Bowie album of so many fans. It is so good that it is almost uncool to acknowledge how good it is. Whenever I listen to Ziggy, I feel like I should be growing tired of it, but then I never do.

But the highlight of this sequence for me is Diamond Dogs. It is the first album form this exercise— so the first of eight albums— that I played again, and then again after that. I didn’t advance to Young Americans because I kept repeating Diamond Dogs. It isn’t like I haven’t heard it in a while— there’s probably no album I have listened to more over the past six years than Diamond Dogs. The funk infusion of this album signals what’s on the horizon, but it also is the last word on glam. What more was there to be said?

The other thing that strikes me about this batch is that Bowie’s voice had already changed. It sounds stronger, more deliberate and less nasally than on his debut album. But in general he sings at a higher pitch than he will even a few years later, and he drops in gasps, warbles and sexualized sounds that would not come with him in albums to come.

So… back to “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” For me, that’s really the only misfire from this whole period. Some of my CDs include bonus tracks, which detract from the original albums, but the one song I don’t really like just highlights the absolute strength of the rest of the material.