Shameless plug for my upcoming interview with Nick Smart as a setup to my long essay, “The Bowie Continuum”

How Bowie’s Studio Albums (Almost) Work Like One Coherent and Continuous Work

I’ll start by not burying the lede— my interview this upcoming Saturday will be Nick Smart, who will be joining me to talk about his new bestselling book, David Bowie: The Collector. You’ll want to come back for that to be sure. Now, I record the interviews in advance, so as I write the discussion has already happened. I mentioned to Nick an idea that I’ve been kicking around for a while that, if you listened in chronological order to Bowie’s albums starting with what we now know as Space Oddity (1969) through BlackStar (2016), they just about work as a single, coherent and continuous piece of work. Nick seemed to think that this idea might be the basis of its own book. Maybe, but for now I’m gonna give you a blog post!

Before I explain, there are a couple of key caveats— I acknowledge that the continuum does not really start with Bowie’s eponymous debut album from 1967. The Man Who Sold the World (1970) also doesn’t fit, nor really do the two Tin Machine albums (1989 and 1990) (which really were band albums, not Bowie albums anyway). I’m also not counting quasi-Bowie albums like the Labyrinth soundtrack (1986), bootlegs or live albums. So, that’s a lot to leave out, but what’s left remains about a day’s worth of music that was created over a span of 55 years.

The basic observation is this: with the above exceptions aside, Bowie would include in each new album either one or more song that would foreshadow his next direction and/or reach back to connect his present work to his immediate past project. These references were usually musical, but sometimes they were also thematic.

This tendency of Bowie’s is so obvious that it’s hardly worth mentioning among albums within definable periods of Bowie’s career. For instance, I don’t think I’d have to make an argument that the glam-era albums are of a piece. So, largely to avoid turning this into the book-length piece of writing envisioned by Nick Smart, I’m going to skip ahead between eras. But with that said, let’s start at the beginning, Space Oddity:

Space Oddity begins with the song of the same name, which famously fades in. The opening sounds of the song are either barely audible or inaudible, but before long we have the lively song that would become Bowie’s first and most enduring hit. Skip to the end— Blackstar. The final song is, “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” which fades out, but more than that has a sense about it that it’s summing up the totality of Bowie’s entire career. I’m not the first to make this point and again, I’m going to assume that you, as someone reading a Bowie blog, has enough familiarity with the song to know what I mean.

Bowie lays out many of the themes he’d come back to again and again in Space Oddity — most obviously space, but also isolation, the individual’s relationship to the crowd and rejection of conformity. Blackstar is a testimony to the process of dying, but also brings many of Bowie’s themes to a conclusion. “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is, in a sense, a set of keys to the kingdom— “I know something’s very wrong” seems to sum up about half of Bowie’s songs; “The post returns for prodigal songs,” seems to refer to Bowie’s technique of self-reference; “saying no, but meaning yes” hints that Bowie’s characteristic negativism is undergirded by a hidden optimism. But at the same time, Bowie won’t, and in fact can’t give everything away. He’ll only explain so much and to some extent even he can’t fully explain what he had been doing all this time.

Between the two albums Bowie retuned to many of the same themes again and again even while sometimes radically shifting musical style. Skipping over The Man Who Sold the World, Bowie’s fourth (but second in the sequence) album was Hunky Dory (1971). This one, contains musical references to the past (“Eight Line Poem” could easily have found a home on Space Oddity) and the future (“Queen Bitch” could have fit nicely on Ziggy Stardust (1972) or Aladdin Sane (1973)). That latter song affirms another of Bowie’s topics— gender identity — which he had only hinted at previously (such as in the obscure song, “She’s Got Metals”). “Changes” was almost a theme song for Bowie and “Life on Mars” and “Andy Warhol” were among the first Bowie songs to conflate real life and fantasy, specifically “the silver screen.”

All this, with the musical hint provided by “Queen Bitch,” paved the way for Bowie’s glam albums— Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups (1973) and Diamond Dogs (1974). But much as Hunky Dory did before it, Diamond Dogs contained hints at the future while retaining a hook to the past. That album’s most famous song, “Rebel Rebel” could easily have appeared on any of the four previous albums (well, maybe not Pin Ups because it wasn’t a cover). I was too young to know what listening to Diamond Dogs was like when it came out, so I don’t know how noticeable it was that most of the rest of the album doesn’t sound like “Rebel Rebel.” Some of the new songs, like “1984” and “Rock and Roll ‘n’ Roll with Me” have funky elements that would flower into the “plastic soul” of his next album, Young Americans. I’d also note that Bowie’s voice had already changed by Diamond Dogs. It’s generally deeper, and he uses it to gymnastic effect on songs such as the “Sweet Thing/Candidate” suite, and that in itself would also serve as foreshadowing.

Diamond Dogs serves as a crossroads of a few other of Bowie’s themes. “Five Years,” from Ziggy Stardust, is a song about the end of the world before it happens. “Panic in Detroit,” from Aladdin Sane, describes societal breakdown in progress, and pretty much the whole of Diamond Dogs describes its aftermath. The album’s protagonists carry on with almost nihilistic abandon, looking for the latest party in a dystopian hellscape. Bowie would later address the long-term consequences of this type of behavior.

But in the short term, Bowie’s next effort was the soulful Young Americans (1975), and then after that Station to Station (1976). Much as Diamond Dogs anticipated Young Americans, Station to Station hearkens back to it with “Stay” and, even more so, “Golden Years.” But as the name of the album itself implies, Station to Station is a transitory work, with the synth-heavy title track laying the groundwork for the Berlin trilogy, all the more considering that it first begins with an three-plus-minute instrumental opening—if you think of it as its own song, the beginning of “Station to Station” is the progenitor of the instrumentals on Low (1977) and Heroes (1977).

On the other side of the Berlin Trilogy is Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980). I write this not as someone informed by musicology, but to me that album sounds like it came from the same guy who did Lodger (1979). Again, I’m going on the premise that I don’t need to walk through the connectivity of all the Berlin albums, but if it isn’t obvious from the start, songs like “D.J.”, “Look Back in Anger” and “Boys Keep Swinging” seem like they go hand-in-hand with “Ashes to Ashes” and Fashion.” In other words, there wasn’t a major leap from Lodger to Scary Monsters. There was, however, when it came to Let’s Dance (1983).

The most tenuous connection in what I’m calling the Bowie continuum is the relationship between Scary Monsters and Let’s Dance. Bowie took a three-year hiatus from making studio albums between the two, and when he returned he had made what might have been the most abrupt stylistic change of his entire career. There were little hints leading up to Let’s Dance— the soundtrack version of “Cat People” (Putting Out the Fire)” (1982), “Under Pressure” (1982) and his almost shockingly family-friendly duet with Bing Crosby (1982). But none of these songs originally appeared on a Bowie studio album, so to move forward from Scary Monsters to Let’s Dance, you have to break the album-to-album sequence.

That said, Let’s Dance contains hints of Bowie’s own past, though not necessarily specifically to Scary Monsters. Bowie wrote “China Girl” with Iggy Pop in 1976 (in my estimation partially in reaction to Bowie’s Thin White Duke persona). Iggy first recorded the song on the Bowie-produced The Idiot (1977). More subtly, Bowie’s inclusion of the gay-themed “Criminal World” went almost unnoticed by his newly acquired mainstream fans at the time. Meanwhile, another lesser-noticed of the album’s songs, “Ricochet,” was, as Bowie chronicler Nicholas Pegg put it, “the album’s only excursion into the experimental realms we had hitherto come to expect on a Bowie record.” Incidentally, Pegg’s assessment of the song suggests that it also anticipated “the Creole structures of Tonight (1984) tracks…” All of which is to say that it might have been tough to predict Let’s Dance from Scary Monsters, but Bowie left enough bread crumbs on the latter albums for those looking backward to appreciate where it came from.

Tonight and Never Let Me Down (1987) continued Bowie’s foray into pop super-stardom, and it is usually observed that he rejected all that with his dramatic turn to Tin Machine. Tin Machine is not part of our continuum exercise— but Black Tie White Noise (1993) is. Co-produced by Nile Rodgers (like Let’s Dance) and anchored by songs like “Miracle Goodnight” and “Jump They Say,” Black Tie White Noise sounds like it came from the same guy who did Never Let Me Down. And while the album gave plenty to those wondering what had happened to the Bowie of the 80s, it also included a big hint at the Bowie of the 90s in the form of the song, “Pallas Athena.”

Bowie’s voice is so distorted on “Pallas Athena” that he initially released a version of the song to dance clubs without his name attached, as kind of an experiment to see if he could still have an underground hit (he did). The song is very similar to “Law (Earthlings on Fire)” from Earthling (1997), on the other end of the sequence, and could have easily fit in on that album. But Bowie’s actual next album, which wasn’t distributed in the United States right away, was The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), within which “Pallas Athena” could also have fit nicely. Buddha is almost ambient and lacks the sharp edges of 1. Outside (1995) and Earthling, but nonetheless serves as a bridge in the continuum through its experimental sonic textures, eclectic genre blending, narrative and thematic exploration, and improvisational aspects. Think of the quieter songs on 1. Outside. And if all of that was not enough, for the one and only time Bowie linked two albums with one song— “Strangers When We Meet.” The electronic aspects of 1. Outside were taken further on Earthling, and it isn’t a stretch to link those two albums.

Bowie took another seemingly abrupt turn with Hours… (1999) By this point, however, he had decided to signal as plain as day that he was making a shift— the album cover depicts the newest manifestation of Bowie holding— Pietà-like— the exhausted or dead version of his last version. Hours… signals Bowie’s entrance into middle age. Everything that would come after would be generally more reflective than what came before. He seemed to cease trying to make music for young people. The ambitions of “Star” (1972) and the excesses of “Fame” (1975) were long-since abandoned for the regret of “Survive” (“You’re the great mistake I never made”) and “Thursday’s Child” (“All of my life I’ve tried so hard; doing my best with what I had”). “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell” closed a sequence that began with “Oh! You Pretty Things” (1972) wherein the hedonistic next generation who were driving their mammas and papas insane, took over a world whose rules did not apply to them. But that free-spiritedness degenerated into perversity by the time of the 1989 Tin Machine song, “Pretty Thing.” But even that depraved energy had collapsed a decade later, as Bowie sang of the pretty things having “worn it out” even while having “worn it well.”

What I see as the “pretty things” sequence is part of a pattern of Bowie returning to themes that play out along a similar progression: youthful unwise behavior that turns seems defiant or rebellious but later deteriorates into degradation before finally ending in a whimper. Major Tom fled Earth and all its problems — or started shooting heroin in 1969. By 1980, he was “strung out in Heaven’s high” alone and addicted in “Ashes to Ashes.” “Blackstar” does not mention Major Tom by name, but if it seems like the song, and the whole album, tell are the final chapter in the astronauts’ sorry story, that idea is mor or less confirmed by the video featuring his (presumably his) jewel-encrusted remains on some distant moon or asteroid.

I don’t think it’s too tough an argument to make that what comes next after Hours… continues along the continuum.* Bowie perfected the expression of middle-aged angst with Heathen (2002), to which Reality (2003) was largely a sequel. I kept a journal of my reaction when The Next Day was released in 2013, and my initial reaction was that it was Reality II. In time, I have come not to think that, but my initial reaction underscored the musical thread connecting the two albums across the chasm of Bowie’s decade’s absence from music. In many ways, Bowie’s weak-voiced annunciation on “Where Are We Now” set the table for Blackstar, as Bowie’s regretful reflection gave way to serine acceptance that the end was near.

Which brings us back to, “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” And that’s the continuum. The next time you have about 24 spare hours, sit down, give the 24 albums a listen in sequential order and see for yourself. It works!

* What should have been next was Toy, which wasn’t released until 2021. It was originally conceived of as songs Bowie wrote in the 1960s performed in his style from around 2000, with a few new songs thrown in, two of which ended up on Heathen. It isn’t a given that the 2021 version of the album is what would have been released if everything came together in 2000, so it probably would have fit into the continuum nicely, but it is impossible to say exactly how.