Listening to Bowie’s Albums in Order: David Bowie through Hunky Dory

I think, at some point, I’ve listened to all Bowie’s studio albums in order. I just don’t remember when I did this, so I have decided to do it again. Or maybe for the first time. In any case, my intent is to keep a little journal of my reaction. This is, after all, a blog.

I should note that, while not necessarily impossible, listening to all the albums in order would not actually be any fun all at once. Bowie released 26 studio albums, not including the two Tin Machine studio albums, the Labyrinth soundtrack or either the Baal or No Plan eps. Even without those, there would be about a day’s worth of music. It seems like not including the two Tin Machine albums would leave the exercise incomplete, and the same is probably true for Labyrinth. I’ll probably hit the two EPs, too. Bowie released other EPs, but these two stand out as including original songs rather than live versions or versions with unfamilair arrangements. Anyway, you get the point– there’s a lot of music.

There’s a lot of music, and a lot of it is among my favorite pieces of music. Actually, if it isn’t obvious, Bowie is my favorite musical artist, so much of what I’ll be listening to in order, I listen to all the time out of order.

As of this writing, I have begun, and listened to Bowie’s 1967 debut, David Bowie, the album we now call Space Oddity (1979), The Man Who Sold the World (1970) and Hunky Dory (1971). Bowie was not a star when he released these albums, and even Hunky Dory, now regarded as one of his best, was not widely recognized as a staggering work of genius right out of the gates.

My overall reaction? Well, these are four very different albums. The guy who did Space Oddity can be the same guy who did David Bowie, but Space Oddity is so much better that the experience of listening to the two albums is entirely different. I have long thought of The Man Who Sold the World as a heavy metal album, and it comes off that way even more when flanked by what comes immediately before and after. I was also struck by how much Mick Ronson’s playing sounds like Brian May from Queen. Queen came later, so May might have been influenced by Ronson, or they share common influences. Anyway, that stood out. As for Hunky Dory, after listening to it so often over more than 40 years, the really great songs like “Oh! You Pretty Things,” “Quicksand,” “Queen Bitch” and “The Bewlay Brothers” hold their position. So, too does “Life on Mars?”, despite hearing it, or covers of it maybe too frequently. The rest of the album certainly isn’t bad, but on the whole, three of these four albums are so familiar, I have heard them so frequently, that I wasn’t really taken by much that I haven’t noted before. It occurs to me that in recent years, with the exceptions of Diamond Dogs and Scary Monsters, I tend to favor Bowie’s later albums over his earlier ones, in large part because there’s more left to discover about the newer ones (I realize that there’s some irony in calling albums that are no less than ten years old, “newer”).

That said, David Bowie is different than the others. I am not nearly as familiar with David Bowie, because it I the one and only Bowie studio album that I do not listen to for pleasure. And I don’t do that because I think it’s terrible. For me the album keeps me honest in the sense that it proves to me that I’m not in the tank for the guy. Listening to David Bowie all the way through is an endurance contest. It’s painful. This is not a good album. I know, some people like it. If you are one of them, good for you. For me, just listening to it put me in a bad mood about Bowie and made Space Oddity less enjoyable than usual. It was like watching The Phantom Menace then, immediately after, The Empire Strikes Back. The bad one drags the good one down.

David Bowie is not uniformly awful. None of the songs are truly good, but some are worse than others. I realize I liked “Come and Buy My Toys” and “When I Live My Dream” a little more than most of the other songs, but because someone other than Bowie did something with them. In the former case, Madonna apparently lifted some of the music for her song, “Don’t Tell Me,” which I like. That highlighted for me that the music of the Bowie song is not bad, but the inane lyrics and Bowie’s immature, nasally vocalizations take away from it. As for “When I Live My Dream,” Brazilian singer Seu Jorge does a beautiful version of the song in Portugues, and Heathrow Airport used Bowie’s song in a commercial that worked. So, recontextualized, the original song is… OK.

So, “Love You till Tuesday” and “Silly Boy Blue” have some elements of merit, but that only stands out because everything else is so strikingly hideous.

And yet…

And yet, the thing that stood out the most about this sad collection of songs is that Bowie would return to some of their themes with far superior songs in the future. “We Are Hungry Men” is Bowie’s first dystopian song. He’d come back to this theme again and again. In this case, the world has come to the point that food and even air have to be rationed because of overpopulation. The last line, which functions as a kind of punchline is, “we’re here to eat you.” The song’s narrator also claims to be “your messiah,” which is another idea Bowie would return to (including through Ziggy).

“Join the Gang” tells the story of self-destructive joiners, conformists of the hippie era, who Bowie seemed to either despise or pity. I think Bowie wrote the song after the similar, “The London Boys,” but once again he’d return to the idea over and over. In this case, that idea is that groupthink and herd mentality is a form of nonsensical self-harm. His most immediate improvement on the concept would be “Cygnet Committee,” which has far more complex lyrics and just sounds better as a song. But the thematic ingredients are here.

“She’s Got Medals” is an early song about an androgynous character. It’s also one of Bowie’s many songs that has something to do with war (in which respect it is not alone even on this album). The only problem is that Bowie didn’t have a very good idea of what to do with either topic. The result is less provocative than it could have been, but once again the song kind of foreshadows things to come.

David Bowie’s final song, if you want to call the essentially spoken word piece a song, is one of the worst things he ever recorded. “Please Mr. Gravedigger” doesn’t use much music but does use sound effects, like Bowie sniffling and sneezing (which, I shouldn’t have to point out, are not pleasant sounds). Anyway, the narrator killed a young girl, is probably a serial killer, and decides to kill the gravedigger by the end of the song. Murderers of different variety appear in later Bowie songs with what be surprising frequency to the unexpecting. “Mr. Gravedigger’s” progeny include “Wishful Beginnings” (1995) and “Sue (or In a Season of Crime)” (2015) the character of Valentine in Lazarus and others. This particular song is so bad, it’s easy to miss that a killer resided somewhere in David Bowie’s imagination. Like many of the other topics on David Bowie, the killer would return…