Ranking the Rankings

Just for fun I Googled “Bowie Albums Ranked.” As you might imagine, I got a very long list of results. So, I wanted to see what patterns emerged and, as you might imagine again this turned into a bigger exercise than I was thinking. I didn’t look at all the lists, and not all of them ranked the same albums. Some were top 10, some ranked all Bowie’s studio albums. Some counted the Tin Machine albums, Labyrinth and Toy, while others did not. One appeared to predate Blackstar.

The lists I looked at were from Screen Rant, The Top 10s, Ultimate Classic Rock, Far Out Magazine, Rough Trade Blog, Rolling Stone (reader’s poll), Spin, The Guardian, Rater and Consequence of Sound.

At the end of the day this is nothing— it isn’t a random sample, and it isn’t representative. That said, there are some interesting patterns. Heathen had an average rank of exactly 15. The overall average rank was 15.3. So anything below Heathen on the list is below average for a Bowie album.

Many of the individual lists, especially those that ranked all the albums, had outliers. But the averages produced an unsurprising top ten list (though the surprises started appearing a little further down).

Ziggy came out on top overall, but some of the other albums that landed at the top spot on some of the individual lists included Hunky Dory, Low, Scary Monsters, and Blackstar.

The albums that landed on at least one list at #2 was a smaller grouping— Hunky Dory, Ziggy, and Low.

The biggest swing was for The Buddha of Suburbia, with Screen Rant ranking it at #13 and The Consequence of Sound ranking it at #27. The second biggest swing was for Aladdin Sane, with Ranker ranking it at #5 but Screen Rant ranking it at #18.

Some surprises for me included the Tin Machine albums, Tonight and to a lesser extent Never Let Me Down ending up higher on average than I would have expected, and Reality and The Next Day ending up lower than I would have expected.

But maybe the most surprising thing is actually the least surprising thing. With all the caveats about this not being representative of anything, the amalgamated rankings are generally along the lines of what you would have guessed. There isn’t some secret consensus that Ziggy isn’t as good as people say, or that Buddha or David Bowie are actually the cool kids’ favorite. The 1970s yielded most of Bowie’s highest ranked albums, with the notable exception of Bowie’s final album, Blackstar.

And what is my personal ranking? Well, there’s a time I would have told you (and such a ranking might exist somewhere on this blog). But these days I’m not gonna say. I might want to interview someone who worked on one of my less favorite albums! And in any case, the worst Bowie album is still an album I want to have. Anyway, here’s the list of Bowie albums, ranked by their average placement across the sources I looked at:

1. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
2. Hunky Dory
3. Low
4. Station to Station
5. “Heroes”
6. Blackstar
7. Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
8. Young Americans
9. Diamond Dogs
10. Aladdin Sane
11. Let’s Dance
12. Lodger
13. The Man Who Sold the World
14. Space Oddity
15. Outside
16. Heathen
17. The Next Day
18. Black Tie White Noise
19. Earthling
20. Tin Machine 2
21. Buddha of Suburbia
22. Pin Ups
23. Tonight
24. Reality
25. Tin Machine
26. Never Let Me Down
27. Hours
28. David Bowie
29. Toy
30. Labyrinth