Listening to Bowie’s Albums in Order: Labyrinth Soundtrack through Tin Machine 2

Bowie contributed to many soundtrack albums, especially in the 1980s. In most cases he recorded one song for the album (as with, for instance, Cat People or The Falcon and the Snowman), but a few are different. The soundtrack for Absolute Beginners includes three songs recorded by Bowie, while the soundtrack for Christiane F. is a (pretty good) Bowie compilation album. The Labyrinth soundtrack is different still— it contains six original Bowie compositions, which is as many songs as appear on Station to Station (though Bowie didn’t sing one of the songs he wrote for Labyrinth, the pretty awful “Chilly Down”). All this is to say that I count Labyrinth as a Bowie album, and it was the next one I listened to in chronological order after Tonight.

As I have noted before during this journal of my listening to each Bowie album in order, while I am writing of groups of albums, the actual experience is not so cleanly broken up. Labyrinth and Never Let Me Down are in the style of Bowie’s accessible, 80s pop that began with Let’s Dance. This, however, is where that persona starts wearing thin. Many feel that was the case with Tonight, but my immediate past reaction to Tonight was that it was a fun and energetic album. Labyrinth is where things start to get plodding.

Actually, it isn’t entirely Bowie’s fault. Half the soundtrack consists of instrumental pieces by Trevor Jones used in the movie. I have been a fan of movie soundtracks since before I’ve been a fan of Bowie— John Williams, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, Howard Shore and others are composers I still listen to. Sadly, Trevor Jones ain’t them. His music for the film sounds very dated and is an unwelcome interruption to the Bowie songs.

That means that the Bowie songs are actually not bad. Some are better than not bad. “As the World Falls Down” continues the tradition of juxtaposing love with something like the apocalypse that is evoked in songs like “Heroes” and “Let’s Dance.” “Within You” is a couple of steps away from something that could have appeared later on 1. Outside. “Underground,” in which Bowie toys with gospel, is actually one of my better-liked Bowie songs from this entire era. And, considering that these songs were created for a specific purpose, as part of a children’s movie, they should be considered to be an accomplishment. But the Jones (Trevor, not David) parts of the album detract significantly from the experience.

In a sense, the next three albums suffer from something similar— too much. Never Let Me Down has been derided since its release in 1987, but it includes several good songs, like “Time Will Crawl” and “Zeroes.” This is an album I still listen to now and again, so I can say that I like it. In this context, though, there’s just too much. A mediocre song like, say, “87 and Cry” is not itself hideous. But it sounds worse coming after all that Trevor Jones stuff, and it is set on an album that contains other (too many) songs that are not horrible but also not great. The experience of listening to all the Bowie songs in order makes Never Let Me Down sound worse.

Sadly, this is also true for both Tin Machine albums. The immediate effect of the opening chords of Tin Machine was to evoke in me a nostalgic sensation of my time in college, when the album first came out. The first few songs, “Heaven’s In Here,” “Tin Machine” and “Prisoner of Love” sound good and are not why people don’t like Tin Machine. But then the “too much” starts with the first of a series of preachy, overt songs pertaining to societal issues with “Crack City.” This is not Bowie’s first song depicting the dangers of drug use, but one of (many) reasons why something like “Ashes to Ashes” works better is that there’s more left to the imagination. There’s no misunderstanding “Crack City.” But take the issue-oriented songs out of this album, and Tin Machine would just be a welcomed return to Bowie being more serious. Ya know, his best since Scary Monsters.

Actually, while listening to it, it occurred to me that all the issue-oriented songs might have been included as a smokescreen to mislead us about the song, “I Can’t Read.” This is one of the few Tin Machine songs that Bowie kept talking about after Tin Machine. Musically, it is neither great nor terrible, but lyrically it is more subtle than the other songs on the album. The song is not about illiteracy, but rather the narrator’s inability to “reach it.” For years I heard the line as, “I can’t read shit anymore,” until I heard Reeves Gabrels (and subsequently others) pointing out that you can’t tell if Bowie is saying that or, “I can’t reach it anymore.” I have come to believe that that ambiguity is deliberate, but he’s saying “reach it,” and that works better in the song. Bowie often uses his movie roles to reflect ideas he plays with in his songs, and upon recognizing “reach it,” I was reminded of Bowie as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, saying, at one point, “I don’t even know what’s good anymore.” I wonder what could have been on his mind at this point in his career?

By the time I got to Tin Machine II, I was already ready to move on. I sometimes think of Tin Machine II as the great lost Bowie album, not because it is truly lost but because it is (nearly) an entire album of original Bowie songs that is just widely thought of as low value. Indeed, these days the album is tough to come by. But again, the problem is that by this time there has just been too much that hasn’t been great. It wasn’t too long ago that I mentioned the one relatively bad song on albums like Aladdin Sane or Young Americans, but by this point the relatively good songs stand apart from the album as a whole. That’s a little unfair because there are plenty of good songs— “Amlapura,” “Goodbye, Mr. Ed,” “Shopping for Girls” and others. Between the two Tin Machine albums there could have been one good one. It doesn’t help that Bowie is not the lead singer on two of the songs on this album— “Sorry” and the infamous “Stateside.” The context, again, matters. Nobody would think of these as crimes against Bowie had they appeared on a Hunt Sales album, but here they remove the album’s most attractive feature, Bowie’s voice, from the center of attention.

That said, with the exception of the Labyrinth album as a whole, I will go back to listening to the other three from this sequence once in a while. They are best appreciated out of context. In context, though, my enthusiasm for them just dropped and I better understand why so many fellow Bowie fans just dislike this period.

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OK, bonus content…I’ve been thinking about this— here’s what I think would have made for a really solid Tin Machine album:

1. “Heaven’s in Here”
2. “Tin Machine”
3. “Prisoner of Love”
4. “Amazing”
5. “Bus Stop”
6. “Amlapura”
7. “Betty Wrong”
8. “Shopping for Girls”
9. “A Big Hurt”
10. “Goodbye Mr. Ed”
11. “Hammerhead” (instrumental)

The caveats are, first, this is how I feel today. Second, not all of these are great songs, but a solid album doesn’t necessarily need all great songs. I do think these all sound like they belong on the same album and do not include any of the very overt, preachy songs. Third, there are some of these songs that can be swapped out for some I left off. For instance, I don’t consider “Better Wrong” to be essential, and I don’t hate, “You Belong in Rock ‘N’ Roll,” but for today, this is what I selected. Fourth, yeah, I know, I left off “I Can’t Read.” Finally, these are as they appear in order on the two Tin Machine albums and do not represent the optimal order if they all appeared on one album. That would require more thought.