Some readers are listening to a Bowie album every day this month. If that appeals to you, here’s a place to talk about what you’re hearing. This is it: the last week.
Usual commenting guidelines apply: have fun; don’t be jerks, etc.
This week’s schedule is: Feb 22, Outside (and Leon, for purists); Feb 23. Earthling; Feb 24. ‘…hours’; Feb 25. Toy; Feb 26. Heathen; Feb. 27 Reality; Feb. 28 The Next Day and Blackstar for leap-year day.
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Reader Poll: 2015 | 
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Posted by col1234
Some readers are listening to a Bowie album every day this month. If that appeals to you, here’s a place to talk about what you’re hearing. I put up a new open thread each Monday.
Usual commenting guidelines apply: have fun; don’t be jerks, etc.
This week’s schedule is: Feb 15, Scary Monsters; Feb 16. Let’s Dance; Feb 17. Tonight; Feb 18. Never Let Me Down; Feb 19. both Tin Machine albums; Feb 20. Black Tie White Noise; Feb 21. Buddha of Suburbia.
Other odds and ends:
* Tin Machine II is out of print and is going for silly prices in the used markets. You shouldn’t buy it there: it’s up on YouTube for now.
* The book is back in stock on both UK and US Amazon, at long last. And the list price has been reduced (at last).
* I was sent a review copy of a new book assembled by the Historic Newspapers group—it’s a leather-bound, personalized collection of Bowie newspaper articles, dating from the early Seventies to his death. Most articles are from the Daily Mirror, and a few are fairly rare (the first article reprint is from April 1971, a look at “domestic life” at Haddon Hall; I’d never seen it before). Lots of good photos, too. Fans may find it of interest; price is rather substantial.
* A young man who goes by “Jack SS” has ambitiously tried to cover all of the Blackstar songs by himself: you can listen here.
* Are you still interested in more “reissued” entries? Yea or nay in the comments.
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Posted by col1234
Some readers are listening to a Bowie album every day this month: here’s a place to talk about what you’re hearing. I’ll put up a new open thread each Monday.
Usual commenting guidelines apply: have fun; don’t be jerks, etc.
Week 2 schedule: Feb 8. Young Americans; Feb 9., Station to Station; Feb. 10. The Idiot; Feb. 11. Low; Feb. 12. Lust for Life; Feb. 13. “Heroes” and Lodger on St. Valentine’s Day.
96 Comments | Reader Poll: 2015 | Permalink
Posted by col1234
Some readers plan to listen to a Bowie album(s) every day this month: here’s a place to talk about what you’re hearing. I’ll put up a new open thread each Monday. Starting with the two David Bowie albums (Deram and Philips) today, I believe?
Usual commenting guidelines apply: have fun; don’t be jerks, etc.
Edit: schedule is:
Feb 1. David Bowie+Space Oddity; Feb 2. TMWSTW; Feb 3. Hunky Dory; Feb 4. Ziggy; Feb 5. Aladdin Sane; Feb 6. Pin Ups; Feb 7. Diamond Dogs
week 2: Feb 8. Young Americans; 9. Station to Station 10. The Idiot; 11. Low; 12. Lust for Life; 13. “Heroes”: 14. Lodger
week 3: Feb 15. Scary Monsters; 16. Let’s Dance; Feb 17. Tonight;18. Never Let Me Down; 19. Tin Machine I + II; 20. Black Tie White Noise; 21. Buddha;
week 4: Feb 22. Outside; 23. Earthling (hey, my birthday); 24. ‘Hours…’; 25. Toy; 26. Heathen; 27. Reality; 28. The Next Day and leap-year baby Feb 29. Blackstar
Top: Sophia Anne Caruso, one of the stars of Lazarus, on the Lazarus set, January 2016.
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It’s the end. The album poll’s Top 10 results show that even for as diverse a group as Bowie fans are, the power of consensus is mighty and vast.
It’s interesting to note some rises and falls in fashion: album #4 likely would have been atop any Bowie LP survey until, maybe, 1995? As late as 1990, some critics considered the top-ranked album akin to The Buddha of Suburbia. And #9 wouldn’t have made the list as recently as five years ago, I’m betting.
Presenting: the Top 10 Favorite Bowie Albums, as determined by about 350 people at the end of 2015.
10. Lodger (207 points, 179 votes, 7 #1 votes).
The true ‘lodger,’ the refugee from everywhere, would have more to say, more at stake, and could never be so passionless, so facile. There is still good music here, well-played, unusual, once in a while excellent. The LP is easy to listen to because it rarely challenges the listener; it only baits you with slick and highly embossed surfaces. It is not really a departure from Low and ‘Heroes’, but a rejection of their serious nature.
Paul Yamada, LP review, New York Rocker, 1979.
The oft-overlooked Lodger…is slight to the point of invisibility, ten tracks in 35 minutes with nary a grand statement in sight. And upon its release, everyone—Bowie, Eno, Adrian Belew, Carlos Alomar, the record label—was underwhelmed. I come, however, not to bury Lodger but to praise it. We’ve had decades for the album to ingratiate itself to our ears, and it has been (partially) successful—Belew, for example, now dubs it “the greatest thing Bowie has given to the world”. It is perhaps the great lost Bowie album, with not a single dud to be found in the ten songs and maybe the finest second half of any of his efforts.
Ian Mathers, 2004.
And here’s the only post-1980 album to crack the Top 10. Your latter-day canonical pick is…
9. 1. Outside (234 points, 162 votes, 18 #1 votes).
The new album is called Outside and what Brian and I were trying to achieve more than anything else was an album that was made up of components that were bitten off from the periphery of the mainstream, rather than jumping into the middle of what’s kind of artistically and commercially known.
Bowie, 1995.
If we were proper fine artists, we would be terribly concerned about which school we belonged to. The advantage the popular arts have is that they are not ideologically proud.
Eno, 1995.
I don’t think it’s easily accessible at all [laughs], and it’s 75 minutes, which is extremely long by most current CD standards, but, frankly, I don’t think accessibility was something that was at the top of our list when we were making it. I think, as always, when Brian and I work together, we tend to work very much for our own enjoyment and for whatever fulfillment we get out of it. We just hope and presume that somebody else will also like the things we find interesting.
Bowie, 1995.
from Oxford Town back to Hunger City…
8. Diamond Dogs (259 points, 215 votes, 11 #1 votes).
Diamond Dogs useta make me laugh; right now it scares the shit out of me.
Charles Shaar Murray, 1975.
A guitar chimes in, another churns the rhythm along, and a sax section blows a storm. All played by D. Bowie. “Angie bought me a baritone sax, so I’ve got the whole set now and I can do a brass section,” David later informs me, “and I play all the guitars on this one, except for one bit on ‘1984’ which is Alan Parker.” He’s also playing a series of mellotrons and moog synthesizers, which give the first side of the album a ghostly mechanical effect. Between tracks you can hear those machines whirring and clicking away. They create the impression of a machine society, and yet it’s still strange that an album which is about the break-down of an over-mechanized society should rely so heavily upon machines. None of this album would be possible without 16-track tape machines, sophisticated recording studios, mellotrons, and moogs.
Rock, 1974.
His favorite album of his own – and always has been, no matter what he says in interviews – is Diamond Dogs.
A source familiar with Bowie.
7. Aladdin Sane (276 points, 232 votes, 11 #1 votes).
Aladdin Sane was a result of my paranoia with America at the time. I hadn’t come to terms with it, then. I have now, I know the areas I like best in America…And I’m quite happy over here. I found different people.
But I ran into a very strange type of paranoid person when I was doing Aladdin. Very mixed up people, and I got very upset. It resulted in Aladdin … And I know I didn’t have very much more to say about rock’n’roll. I mean Ziggy really said as much as I meant to say all along. Aladdin was really Ziggy in America. Again, it was just looking around, seeing what’s in my head.
Bowie, 1974.
Besides the fact we were in a different country, city, studio and I couldn’t touch the board, the general feel of the [Aladdin Sane] sessions in New York was a bit strange as well. For whatever reasons, it happens frequently that some members of English bands touring the States for the first time get involved in cults or religions.
Ken Scott.
Now, a set of albums that fought like scrappy (diamond) dogs for the 6-4 slots (they were often tied during the vote tallying):
6. Scary Monsters (342 points, 258 votes, 21 #1 votes).
[Scary Monsters is] Bowie’s decision to take his work in rock & roll seriously. Anyone who goes to New York takes his work seriously — the city certainly has that effect. So his return to a degree of involvement with New York, I think, is very healthy.
There are an awful lot of mistakes on that album that I went with, rather than cut them out. As much as possible, [one wants] to put oneself on the line artistically, ever since the Dadaists, who pronounced that art is dead. Once you’ve said art is dead, it’s very hard to get more radical then that. Since 1924 it’s been dead, so what the hell can we do with it from there on? One tries to at least keep readdressing the thing and looking at it from a very different point of view.
Bowie, 1980.
5. “Heroes” (349 points, 253 votes, 24 #1 votes).
[Bowie] writes them in the studio now. He goes in with about four words and a few guys, and starts laying all this stuff down and he has virtually nothing—he’s making it up in the studio.
John Lennon, 1980.
I listened to the record for 72 hours. Day and night. Watching tv and in my sleep. Like Station To Station and Low, Heroes is a cryptic product of a high order of intelligence. Committed to survival….His new work is not immediately accessible but neither was Exile on Main Street. Beauty and the Beast is a shock that is eventually absorbed into shining acceptance. Joe the Lion is startling too, and stretched out by some great guitar. It takes some time to get under the skin…Records sound different in Europe. I think the turntables are faster. There’s more treble.
Patti Smith, 1978.
4. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (352 points, 256 votes, 24 #1 votes).
Ziggy was this kind of megalomaniac little prophet figure who came down to tell us it was all over. We never quite sure whether he meant it or not, whether he was from outer space or not.
Bowie, 1980.
What you have there on that album, when it does finally come out, is a story which doesn’t really take place…it’s just a few little scenes from the life of a band called Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars…who could feasibly be the last band on Earth. It could be within the last five years of Earth…I’m not at all sure. Because I wrote it in such a way that I just dropped the numbers into the album in any order that they cropped up. It depends in which state you listen to it in. The times that I’ve listened to it—I’ve had a number of meanings out of the album…but I always do. Once I’ve written an album, my interpretations of the numbers in that album are totally different afterwards than the time that I wrote them, and I find that I learn a lot from my own albums about me.
Bowie, US radio interview, early 1972.
Before reaching the throne room, we pass through a small conservatory…
3. Hunky Dory (389 points, 265 votes, 31 #1 votes).
He really started to think about how he was going to have a kid. That was interesting to him. He got along very well with his father, so from that relationship, he had an optimistic prognosis on what it was going to be like. It wasn’t a scary thing for him. ‘Changes’ and ‘Eight Line Poem’ were about that. And of course, ‘Kooks’.
Angela Bowie.
The songs were more structured. Honestly, I didn’t think he had these songs in him.
Woody Woodmansey.
When Hunky Dory came out, I took one look at the album cover – a soft, vague picture of the artist looking soft and vague – and anticipated a soft, vague sensibility. Instead, Bowie turned out to be an intelligent, disciplined, wry Lou Reed freak.
Ellen Willis, 1972.
Which leaves us with…what you might have expected. The mid-1970s were Bowie’s golden age, at least according to this poll. Check out the numbers!
2. Station to Station (593 points, 293 votes, 75 #1 votes).
If Bowie was James Brown he could well have entitled the second, up-tempo half of Station To Station “Diamond Dogs ’76.” The dominant sound of this album overdubs the claustrophobic guitar-strangling garage band chording of Dogs (plus, to a lesser extent, the howling, wrenching lead guitar of The Man Who Sold The World) over the itchy-disco rhythms of the Young Americans album, while Bowie’s vocals evoke the lugubrious, heavily melodramatic vibratoed almost-crooning of Scott Walker.
Charles Shaar Murray, LP review, NME, 1976.
I love this record. I love it because it rocks like a bitch, because it has stupid lines like “It’s not the side effects of her [sic] cocaine. I’m thinking that it must be love”, and because Bowie has the sense of humour to not only mumble half the songs, but mix them so low down it’s impossible to make out a word.
John Ingham, LP review, Sounds, 1976.
We tried to keep [Station to Station] on a private basis…We started at 10 or 11 at night and went to anywhere from eight in the morning to whatever, 36 hours later. David knows exactly what he wants, it’s just a matter of sitting there and doing it till it’s done…David knows a great deal about technical things. He doesn’t know everything, he’s not an engineer, but he knows more about arranging a song, he knows more about how to relate to people and get what he wants out of them…If you listen to the rhythms specifically on this album, there are very strange things going on rhythmically between all the instruments… If nothing else, David’s a genius when it comes to working out rhythmic feels. He was the mainstay behind it all.
Harry Maslin.
and lastly, your all-time #1 (at least for today).
1. Low (621 points, 305 votes, 79 #1 votes).
On this album David Bowie achieves the ultimate image-illusion available to an individual working within the existing cultural forms of the West. He vanishes. The first impression Low imparts to the listener is that he is somehow hearing it sideways.
Ian MacDonald, LP review, NME, 1977.
I loaded the second side of Bowie’s Low onto the cassette deck. Those ominous Berlin synthesizer sounds were probably never imagined as a soundtrack for a dawning stretch of highway on the Tennessee-Kentucky border, but they seemed perfect for my alien mood.
Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink.
When you say ‘avant-garde’, you fall into a category of no melodies, very bizarre-sounding stuff, and [Low] is not like that at all. Some of it is very pretty, some of it is very up…
RCA PR exec to Wesley Strick, Circus, 1977.
It was a dangerous period for me. I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity. But this was in France. Overall, I get a sense of real optimism through the veils of despair from Low. I can hear myself really struggling to get well.
Bowie, 1999.
And that’s it. Thanks to all who voted. No more polls! (Never again: my hat’s off to anyone who works in data entry.) We’ll be back with an open thread for Blackstar on Friday. I also should be on Norman B‘s radio show on Sunday to talk about my first impressions.
My ballot (I didn’t vote in the poll, though).
Photos: Mostly Discogs. Bowie holding “Heroes” (Claude Vanheye); Robert Smith and Ziggy (couldn’t find photog credit: via a Cure Tumblr); Bowie and Hunky Dory (Mick Rock).
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Posted by col1234
We reach the middleweight section of the album poll: those that wound up ranked between 19 and 11, by you (don’t blame me).
We begin with what was once, for a time, Bowie’s “last” album:
19. Reality (25 points/votes).
It is ironic. You haven’t seen the artwork yet, but there’s a fakeness to the cover that undermines that. It’s the old chestnut: What is real and what isn’t? It’s actually about who’s stolen this world.
Bowie, 2003.
Reality ends up changing in the wake of Bowie’s return. The fact was that his disappearance made Reality a better album. Not that it was bad, ever, but the only reason it was important at all was because of its status as “The Last One.”…The Next Day was hell on Reality because it made Reality have to stand on its own legs as an album for almost the first time. In its defense, the only real difference is that now we *really* wish ‘Try Some Buy Some’ was a B-Side.
18. David Bowie aka Space Oddity aka Man of Words/Man of Music (28 points/votes).
I’ve been the male equivalent of the dumb blonde for a few years, and I was beginning to despair of people accepting me for my music. It may be fine for a male model to be told he’s a great looking guy, but that doesn’t help a singer much, especially now that the pretty boy personality cult seems to be on the way out.
My songs are all from the heart, and they are wholly personal to me, and I would like people to accept them as such. I dearly want to be recognized as a writer, but I would ask them not to get too deeply into my songs. As likely as not, there’s nothing there but the words and music you hear at one listening…I see you’ve noticed that my songs are seldom about boy and girl relationships. That’s because I’ve never had any traumas with girls.
Bowie, NME interview, 1969.
David Bowie can be viewed in retrospect as all that Bowie had been and a little of what he would become, all jumbled up and fighting for control: a rag-bag of ideas all getting in each other’s way.
Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr.
17. The Buddha of Suburbia (42 points, 34 votes, 2 #1 votes).
One idea pulled another behind it, like conjurers’ handkerchiefs…I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through.
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia.
I spent so much time in my bedroom [in Bromley]. It really was my entire world. I had books up there, my music up there, my record player. Going from my world upstairs out onto the street, I had to pass through this no-man’s-land of the living room, you know, and out the front hall.
Bowie, 1990.
16. Let’s Dance (50 points/votes, highest-ranked LP to get no #1s).
A friend of mine who heard this record before I did told me that he was rather disappointed by it. “It’s got guitar solos all over it,” he announced in the sort of tone that you might use for telling somebody that there is a large, maggoty dog turd on their new jacket. Despite the expectation that the combination of Bowie and Nile Rodgers would result in the kind of immaculately tortured but immaculately deft angst-funk that seems in vogue in certain quarters, the actual result is something quite different: some of the strongest, simplest and least complicated music that Bowie has ever made. Let’s Dance is clean, straight and…huge.
Charles Shaar Murray, LP review, NME, 1983.
I think I’m just a little tired of experimentation now…there is a proliferation of synthetic instruments being used in that kind of, er, Me generation icy cold vein. I feel it’s very hard to use those instruments without a kind of preconditioning already there. That if you use the synthesizer it means this particular thing; that I’m part of this angular society.
So that’s why I’ve used a very organic, basic instrumentation on this new album. Such instrumentation doesn’t say anything other than it comes from a hybrid of white and black culture. That is the only underlying subtext it has really…As I say, experimentation can be rewarding for finding awkward stances musically. But it just isn’t satisfying after a while. And it’s not satisfying because it’s not very useful, except – as Brian Eno would say – for setting up a new kind of vocabulary. Now I’ve got the vocabulary I’m supposed to do something with it! Ha ha!
Bowie, 1983.
15. Earthling (57 points, 49 votes, 2 #1 votes).
I’ve been featured in a long-running cartoon in Britain as being a rather disengaged culture vulture. A bit of a mad pilot that kind of flies from avant-garde trees, making this nest out of glittering jewels that belong to other beings. Well, I guess that’s me. The thing is, I agree with all that, and I don’t see anything wrong in that. Yes, that’s what I do. I’m a contagious, infectious enthusiast. It’s what I like doing.
Bowie, 1997.
What’s great about him in that he’s constantly looking for new input. There’s all this stuff going on around us, and it’s so easy to just shut it out because it’s too much. Instead, he just wades right in, like an old lady at a basement sale. Instead of going through racks of clothes, he’s going through racks of ideas, pulling out what interests him.
Reeves Gabrels, on Bowie, 1997.
and the first notable jump in votes:
14. The Next Day (98 points, 94 votes, 1 #1 vote, 2 voters specified Next Day Extra).
Effigies Indulgences Anarchist Violence Chthonic Intimidation Vampyric Pantheon Succubus Hostage Transference Identity Mauer Interface Flitting Isolation Revenge Osmosis Crusade Tyrant Domination Indifference Miasma Pressgang Displaced Flight Resettlement Funereal Glide Trace Balkan Burial Reverse Manipulate Origin Text Traitor Urban Comeuppance Tragic Nerve Mystification
Bowie’s “work flow diagram” for The Next Day, sent to Rick Moody, 2013.
Stay-At-Home Bowie isn’t boring, however…In fact, it’s one of the most interesting evolutions of Bowie’s public persona. He’s taken a conception of himself forced upon him by popular culture, an idea created in his absence from the public eye. It’s also a character that is forced upon him by the passage of time: he simply is older now. And he’s playing up to that, to a degree. He’s also raging against it, subverting it, adding to it, and generally not doing the sort of things you’d expect David Bowie to do. Plus, Bowie getting old and revelling in it: that has the same sort of rebellious spirit as modern-day Bob Dylan, his protest song period long behind him, putting out a record of Christmas standards.
13. The Man Who Sold The World (112 points, 104 votes, 2 #1 votes).
Tony Visconti’s compressed production gives the album an utterly synthetic audio quality: few records this simply played sound as studio-created.
Trouser Press Record Guide, 3rd edition.
It’s clearly the beginning of the Spiders from Mars…Though that band was yet to be invented, technically, it’s a logical extension of what was going on with The Man Who Sold The World. It was a pivotal album in that it gave [Bowie] a taste of what it was like to be in a rock band.
Tony Visconti.
It was all family problems and analogies put into science-fiction form.
Bowie, on MWSTW, 1976.
12. Heathen (150 points, 134 votes, 4 #1 votes).
Especially in one’s mid-fifties, you’re very aware that that’s the moment you have to leave off the idea of being young. You’ve got to let it go.
Bowie, Interview, 2002.
Heathen will surely be condemned by those who cannot forgive him for his past greatness, and will likely be loved by a few who still imagine strains of “Space Oddity” beneath its refrains. It’s hard to shake the thought that even thirty years later, some people still seem to be expecting another Ziggy.
Eric Carr, review, Pitchfork, 2002.
Heathen was written in the mountains, and kind of feels like that, I think.
Bowie, 2002.
11. Young Americans (157 points, 137 votes, 5 #1 votes).
Bowie played [Young Americans] for the ten blissed-out, formerly camped-out, devotees, who’d been ushered into the studio, finally, at 5 am by Stuart George. With wine, tears and adulation flowing around and from the blessed, Bowie was an affable host as he signed more autographs, apologized for the unfinished mix of the album and agreed to play it a second time, at which point the party erupted into dance. Bowie took center floor with a foxy stomp.
Rolling Stone, 1974.
My own recent music has been good, plastic soul, I think. It’s not very complex, but it’s enjoyable to write. I did most of it in the studio. It doesn’t take very long to write…about ten, 15 minutes a song. I mean, with Young Americans I thought I’d better make a hit album to cement myself over here [the U.S.], so I went in and did it. It wasn’t too hard, really.
Bowie, Melody Maker, 1976.
Next: the Top 10. Oy Vey Baby still has a shot.
Photos: mostly Discogs. Also: amateur painter, 2014 (Jimmy King); “According to G,” Next Day promo posters, NYC, 2013; Bowie at an HMV promo for Heathen, 2002 (unknown photog); Ms. Swift & Young Americans (ASOS).
87 Comments | Reader Poll: 2015 | Tagged: Album Poll, David Bowie | Permalink
Posted by col1234
If the song poll was a cavalry battle, the “readers’ favorite Bowie albums” poll was trench warfare.
The song poll’s results came after many sweeps and shifts, with a wide range of songs jockeying for position during the vote tallying. The album poll, by contrast, quickly settled into a long slog between two LPs for the top slot, while three albums slugged it out in the middle of the top 10. The rest of the list soon sorted itself out, position-wise. The top 15 was cemented by the time I’d compiled 100 ballots (out of roughly 350 cast).
So, at least within the confines of this poll, there’s a substantial consensus on what the top Bowie albums are. You’ll find out soon enough.
But first, as in the song poll, here are the single-vote picks: those albums loved by one single voter. Mainly a list of bootlegs and compilations:
Blackstar (one clairvoyant, or optimistic, voter). ChangesTwoBowie. Christiane F. (soundtrack). Images: 1966-1967. iSelect. Nothing Has Changed. Peter and the Wolf. A Reality Tour. Live Santa Monica ’72. A Portrait in Flesh (bootleg: Los Angeles, 5 September 1974). 50th Birthday Bash (bootleg: New York, 8 January 1997). Heaven’s In Here (bootleg: Tin Machine, Chicago, 7 December 1991). Sound + Vision (voter specified the original 1989 set).
Then the handful-favorites:
Lust for Life; Glass Spider (2 points/votes each); All Saints; Ziggy Stardust: the Motion Picture (soundtrack) (3 points/votes); Labyrinth (soundtrack), Bowie at the Beeb (4 points/votes); Baal (5 points/votes); Deram Anthology (5 points, 1 vote—its sole vote was a #1); Tin Machine II (6 points/votes); ChangesOneBowie (6 points, 2 votes, 1 #1 vote).
Now, we reach the outer regions. The top 30-20 Bowie albums, starting with the last “underrated” Bowie LP?:
30. ‘hours…’ (7 points/votes).
I’ve watched [friends] flounder a little over the last 10 years, when they’re reaching that stage where it’s very, very hard to start a new life. Some of them are affected with resignation and some of them, a certain bitterness maybe…they found themselves in relationships that aren’t what they had expected to be in when they were younger.
Bowie, 1999.
‘Hours . . .’ wafts into the room, breezily delivers its angsty arabesques and afterlife lullabies, and then luminously bows out in a succinct 45:42… an album that improves with each new hearing…further confirmation of Richard Pryor’s observation that they call them old wise men because all them young wise men are dead.
Greg Tate, Rolling Stone, 1999.
THREE WAY TIE, 29-27, among albums that have little to do with each other:
Stage (10 points/votes).
This particular package, extravagant yet minimal, arrives hard on the heels of a critically and commercially successful world tour: to capitalise on the thousands thirsting for vinyl souvenirs – love me, love my records – and to conveniently fill the contract quota. Spanning four sides and six years, it’s an obvious complement to the earlier, more fraught ‘David Live’ – there being no reduplication of any songs therein – and serves as a suitably ‘weighty’ and timely summary to the latest (and to many, the most interesting) stage.
Jon Savage, Sounds, 1978.
Leon (10 points, 6 votes, 1 #1 vote).
(For new readers asking ‘wait, what the hell is Leon?’ A not-quite-album, Leon is a bootleg collection of three 20-minute mood/song suites that were later cut up and diced into Outside.)
Our conceptual parameters are not that dissimilar. Brian would often set tasks which would define the movements of the day and then we would work according to that plan, which he would redefine in the studio. This is a great way to start because, as Brian often says, “When you ask musicians to jam, the common ground will always be the bloody blues.” So you always end up with these endless, boring bloody blues pieces. Brian’s thing is to break the structure from the beginning of the day and enter into a feeling of improvisation from new places.
Bowie, 1994.
Never Let Me Down (10 points, 6 votes, 1 #1 vote).
My nadir was Never Let Me Down. It was such an awful album. I’ve gotten to a place now where I’m not very judgmental about myself. I put out what I do, whether it’s in visual arts or in music, because I know that everything I do is really heartfelt. Even if it’s a failure artistically, it doesn’t bother me in the same way that Never Let Me Down bothers me. I really shouldn’t have even bothered going into the studio to record it. [laughs] In fact, when I play it, I wonder if I did sometimes.
Bowie, 1995.
Never Let Me Down is an inspired and brilliantly crafted work. It’s charged with a spirit that makes art soul food; imbued with the contagious energy that gives ideas a leg to stand on.
Glenn O’Brien, Spin review, 1987.
26. Tin Machine (11 points/votes).
We were sick of turning on the radio and hearing disco and dance music and drum machines, which I think in the business they call “crap.”
Tony Sales, 1989.
I’ve never been worried about losing fans. I just haven’t bothered to put that into practice recently. My strength has always been that I never gave a shit about what people thought of what I was doing. I’d be prepared to completely change from album to album and ostracize everybody that may have been pulled in to the last album. That didn’t ever bother me one iota. I’m sort of back to that again…
Bowie, 1989.
25. The Idiot (13 points, 9 votes, 1 #1 vote).
Iggy is in great shape – he’s not the drug-crazed lunatic of yore. Iggy is very together…he’s still got mischief forever. And it’s a great album. David plays saxophone on it. Everybody’s gonna find out where all the punk bands that are making it did their homework. I mean, Iggy’s so far ahead of everybody…
RCA official, to Wesley Strick, Circus, 1977.
I was happy to be a guinea pig if [Bowie] had a new idea. The more obscure and weird the idea, that’s what I wanted.
Iggy Pop.
CAREER SPANNING TWO-WAY TIE for 24-23: young man; rich man:
David Bowie (1967) (14 points, 10 votes, 1 #1 vote).
It was such a weird album. I can’t believe it got released.
Gus Dudgeon, 1993.
Oh, that thing… that was on a very semi-professional basis. I was still working as a commercial artist then, and I made that kind of in my spare time, taking days off work and all that. I never followed it up, did any stage work or anything. I just did an album, ’cause I’d been writing, y’know, sent my tape into Decca and they said they’d make an album. Thought it was original.
Bowie, to Lenny Kaye, 1973.
Tonight (14 points, 10 votes, 1 #1 vote).
It was rushed. The process wasn’t rushed; we actually took our time recording the thing; Let’s Dance was done in three weeks, Tonight took five weeks or something, which for me is a really long time. I like to work fast in the studio. There wasn’t much of my writing on it ’cause I can’t write on tour and I hadn’t assembled anything to put out. But I thought it a kind of violent effort at a kind of Pin Ups.
Bowie, 1987.
Tonight is not a great album. It is, however, a good album, and perhaps more importantly, it’s a much better album than you think it is, or may have been led to believe. Bowie’s made some subpar records, but this isn’t one of them—and frankly, even its failures aren’t boring, because, well, it’s an ‘80s Bowie album, from a decade in which he was wildly inconsistent, but also never dull. And remember: your family is a football team.
Thomas Inskeep, 2005.
22. David Live (17 points, 9 votes, 2 #1 votes).
The artiste at his laryngeal nadir, mired in bullshit pessimism and arena-rock pandering–and the soul frills just make it worse.
Robert Christgau.
The first track, “1984” burst into the room, and again Bowie settled back in a chair to listen. While the album was playing, several of the musicians traveling with him and some of the MainMan staff came into the room to hear it. Bowie was very much a musician, not a “personality” in the manner of so many rock stars when they listen to their own music. He was like a fan pointing out special touches – some crisp guitar lick or a particularly hot saxophone solo – that delighted him. There were, quite justifiably, many reasons for his delight. Though it is a bit dangerous making such judgements on the basis of a single listening, David Live is quite possibly the best live rock album I’ve ever heard – an urgent, highly accessible, brilliantly performed collection.
Robert Hilburn, Melody Maker, 1974.
WE END ON ONE LAST TIE, 21-20:
Black Tie White Noise (19 points/votes).
I knew what people would think when they heard I was going back in to work with Nile. But I was thinking, ‘I hope this doesn’t turn into another ‘Let’s Dance’,’ and that probably drove me even harder. It is a very personal album.
Bowie, 1993.
Black Tie is a very straight album. The skills which were once Bowie’s by default have been irretrievably passed on to the kind of talents he used to eat for breakfast, and he is left flapping alone, a mudskipper when the mud’s dried up. Welcome to the middle-aged disco, welcome to the dehydrated dance and, once past the hopeful roar of the instrumental opening ‘Wedding’, welcome to the disinherited second cousin of Let’s Dance again (like we did last summer).
Dave Thompson, The Rocket, 1993.
Pin Ups (19 points/votes).
This flashy tribute to the English scene, ca. 1966, remains Bowie’s quirky triumph–not that he’d come up with any other kind of triumph. I mean, who else could sing ‘Here Comes the Night’ as a raging queen and make it sound right?
Greil Marcus.
In those days [the 1960s] I was an audience, but I never dressed like anybody that was in the rock business.
Bowie, 1973.
Next: Bowie albums, 19-11 (I think—unless I find enough time to put it all together tomorrow. but most likely 19-11).
49 Comments | Reader Poll: 2015 | Tagged: Album Poll, David Bowie | Permalink
Posted by col1234
First, an announcement.
I’m happy to say that I’ve signed with Repeater Books for Ashes to Ashes, the sequel to Rebel Rebel. Repeater was co-founded by Tariq Goddard, who signed me at Zero for the first book, and I’m very happy to be working with him and the Repeater team. (You can follow Repeater on FB or Twitter.)
The new book will be larger than Rebel Rebel, which is quite a large book. It will start with “Sister Midnight” and will end with whatever songs Bowie’s put out by summer 2017. I hope you enjoy it. And thanks so much to everyone who bought the first book, or is considering buying it.
OK, the last bunch of songs. The big megillahs. The top of the heap. Here goes, with the first book’s namesake, as it turns out:
25. Rebel Rebel (105 points, 93 votes, 3 #1 votes, 3 specified the U.S. single because they have good taste).
It’s a fabulous riff. Just fabulous. When I stumbled onto it, it was ‘Oh, thank you!’
Bowie.
David Bowie hopped onto the stage…Right in front of my face, this beautiful, hypnotic, strange man was singing to me…I instinctively knew that what I was experiencing was something religious.
Cherie Currie.
Heaven loves ya, no. 24!
24. Boys Keep Swinging (108 points, 104 votes, 1 #1 vote).
I played an over-the-top bass part, in the spirit of The Man Who Sold the World.
Tony Visconti.
Bowie played it for me, and said, ‘This is written for you, in the spirit of you.’ I think he saw me as a naive person who just enjoyed life.
Adrian Belew.
23. Drive-In Saturday (109 points, 101 votes, 2 #1 votes, 1 vote specified the 1999 VH1 Storytellers performance).
This takes place probably in the year 2033.
Bowie, debuting “Drive-In Saturday” on stage, 1972.
…the creaking Palais saxophones combining with post-Eno electronic whooshes, the references to Jung, Jagger and (yet to be realised!) Sylvian, Bowie’s sometimes reflective, other times barking vocals – the song is a warning about allowing the past to dominate our future so heavily if we cannot actively use it to get ourselves forward, or indeed back.
22. Starman (113 points, 101 votes, 3 #1 votes).
After ‘Starman,’ everything changed.
Woody Woodmansey.
In 1972 I’d get girls on the bus saying to me, ‘Eh la, you got a lippy on?’ or ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ Until [Bowie] turned up, it was a nightmare. All my mates at school would say, ‘Did you see that bloke on Top of the Pops? He’s a right faggot, him!’ And I remember thinking ‘you pillocks.’…With people like me, it helped forge an identity and a perspective on things, helped us to walk in a different way, metaphorically…
Ian McCulloch, in David Buckley’s Strange Fascination.
21. Lady Grinning Soul (115 points, 111 votes, 1 #1 vote.)
How can life become her point of view?
We reach the heights of the top 20, starting with an encounter on the stair:
20. The Man Who Sold the World (120 points, 116 votes, 1 #1 vote, 1 vote specifying the 1990s remake).
This is a David Boowie song.
Kurt Cobain.
I guess I wrote it because there was a part of myself that I was looking for.
Bowie, 1997.
Top of the pops TIE for 19-18, though if “Shane75″‘s ballot had come through (see comments yesterday), he’d have given the vote to push “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” one step ahead of..
Stay (123 points, 111 votes, 3 #1 votes).
It started with a groove, and when I came up with the guitar bit at the front I could tell it would be a monster song. The funny thing about it is, I came up with that lick because we were messing around with an older song called ‘John, I’m Only Dancing.’
Earl Slick.
hold on a sec, while time takes a cigarette:
Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide (123 points, 107 votes, 4 #1 votes, 1 specifying live 1973 versions)
It looked good when he did that whole sort of Messiah thing.
Angela Bowie.
A declaration of the end of the effect of being young.
Bowie.
17. It’s No Game (Pts. 1 and/or 2) (127 points, 119 votes, 2 #1 votes, 9 specified “Pt. 2,” 20 specified “Pt. 1”)
I wanted to break down a particular type of sexist attitude about women. I thought the [idea of] the “Japanese girl” typifies it, where everyone pictures them as a geisha girl, very sweet, demure and non-thinking, when in fact that’s the absolute opposite of what women are like. They think an awful lot!, with quite as much strength as any man. I wanted to caricature that attitude by having a very forceful Japanese voice on it. So I had [Hirota] come out with a very samurai kind of thing.
Bowie, 1980.
Well, this one had better have been on the list, seeing as how it named the blog. If I’d voted, this would’ve been my #1.
16. Queen Bitch (130 points, 122 votes, 2 #1 votes, 1 specifying the “Bowie at the Beeb” performance).
There’s blood and glitter in this song: it’s as good as anything Bowie ever made.
Rebel Rebel.
and to start the top 15, a leap from the 11th floor of some cheap NYC hotel up to the exosphere:
15. Aladdin Sane ( 138 points, 122 votes, 4 #1 votes).
The ‘Aladdin Sane’ solo actually shocked me when I heard it again and I realized… that it was pretty good.
Mike Garson, ca. 2005. (above: transcription of 2:20-2:29 of “Aladdin Sane”).
Bowie has created entire universes in my mind with his words. It’s just that, on one level (to the grammar Nazi English teacher in me, at least), they’re eccentric doggerel: “Passionate bright young things / Takes him away to war (don’t fake it) / Saddening glissando strings / Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh (you’ll make it)”. The verbs and the nouns don’t even agree! And how could you fake being taken away to war? Where’s the orchestra? It makes no sense!
“They’re atmospheric,” Bowie once said of his lyrics. But actually, what I’ve underestimated is that the vagueness is tactical. Bowie has also said that he’d be delighted if his work allowed people to find different characters within themselves. In order to do that, you don’t overdetermine things. There’s a kind of negative capability in not being too intentional, too specific, too narrative. This is artistry on a higher level.
Momus.
THE LAST TIE: 14-13, TWO TALES OF ISOLATION
Space Oddity (140 points, 136 votes, 1 #1 vote, 2 votes specified the 1979 remake, 2 the Italian version)
It’s not a David Bowie song, it’s “Ernie the Milkman.”
Tony Visconti, recalling his reaction to it in 1969.
This is the great control of Major Tom, so great, that in fact, I don’t know anything.
rough translation of Seu Jorge’s Portuguese lyric in The Life Aquatic.
“And there’s nothing I can do”—this is repeated. Initially, this is just an observation and Ground Control, at this point, is still in control. The repetition comes at a stage when Ground Control is just as helpless as Major Tom.
Nelson Thornes Framework English 2 textbook.
and buckle up, because he’s:
Always Crashing In the Same Car (140 points, 128 votes, 3 #1 votes).
So that initial period in Berlin produced Low, which is ‘isn’t it great to be on your own, let’s just pull down the blinds and fuck ’em all.’ The first side of Low was all about me: “Always Crashing In The Same Car” and all that self-pitying crap,
Bowie, 1977.
Roaring out of Berlin and into Philly…
12. Young Americans (141 points, 133 votes, 2 #1 votes).
I peered and peered, trying to catch the ultimate vibe…Johnny Ray. Johnny Ray on cocaine singing about 1984… Don’t be fooled: Bowie is as cold as ever, and if you get off on his particular brand of lunar antibody you may well be disappointed in his latest incarnation, because he’s doubling back on himself.
Lester Bangs, 1974.
We come now to a fine example of how the “#1 vote bonus” worked out. The following song would’ve been nowhere near the Top 10 but for the fact that 12 people chose it as their number one. Borne aloft on pure love, this was.
11. Teenage Wildlife (149 points, 101 votes, 12 #1 votes).
The lead singer, banging around in a lurex mini-dress, was drawing entirely from a vocabulary invented by Bowie. And people stood and took it.
Jon Savage, 1980.
Ironically, the lyric is something about taking a short view of life, not looking too far ahead and not predicting the oncoming hard knocks. The lyric might have been a note to a younger brother or my own adolescent self.
Bowie, 2008.
and here we go, at the height of heights. Your Top 10 (don’t blame me!)
10. Bewlay Brothers (150 points, 118 votes, 8 #1 votes, 1 specified the alternate mix).
I was never quite sure what real position Terry [Burns] had in my life, whether Terry was a real person or whether I was actually referring to another part of me.
Bowie, 2000.
This wasn’t just a song about brotherhood so I didn’t want to misrepresent it by using my true name. Having said that, I wouldn’t know how to interpret the lyric of this song other than suggesting that there are layers of ghosts within it. It’s a palimpsest, then.
Bowie, 2008.
9. Five Years (155 points, 147 votes, 2 #1 votes).
The cycle of the Earth (indeed, of the universe, if the truth had been known) was nearing its end and the human race had at last ceased to take itself seriously.
Michael Moorcock, 1972.
Maybe the bleak future Bowie likes to scare his fans with is a metaphor for his own present.
Robert Christgau.
but cheer up! if we’ve only got five years left, at least they’ll be:
8. Golden Years (169 points, 149 votes, 5 #1 votes).
David goes to the piano and plays, ‘they say the neon lights are bright, on Broadway…come de dum ma baby.’ That’s the kind of vibe he wanted…I play the opening guitar riff and he says, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, like that, do that, do that.'”
Carlos Alomar.
When we came to recording the backing vocals [for “Golden Years”], David lost his voice halfway through. That meant I had to sing the series of impossibly high notes before the chorus, which were difficult enough for David but were absolute murder for me.
Geoff MacCormack.
One last burst of glam majesty:
7. Moonage Daydream (173 points, 153 votes, 5 #1 votes, 1 specified the 1973 concert film version).
BAMMMMM-BLAMMMMMMMMM!!!
I’m an ALLIGATOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BAMMMMMMMMMM-BLAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!
I’m a MAMMAPAPA coming FOR YOU!!!
Every night you knew that “Moonage Daydream” was going to be the one that really lifted them. Then we’d go and follow on from there to the end.
Trevor Bolder.
Now, the big gap. During the vote tabulation, the remaining songs quickly segregated themselves from the rest of the rabble. But the next song always kept to itself, never threatening the top 5, yet never in danger of being overtaken by any other song. A perfectly isolated entity, and so fitting for the song…
6. Sound and Vision (244 points, 184 votes, 15 #1 votes).
“Low” was a reaction to having gone through that peculiar… that dull greenie-grey limelight of America and its repercussions; pulling myself out of it and getting to Europe and saying, For God’s sake re-evaluate why you wanted to get into this in the first place? Did you really do it just to clown around in LA? Retire. What you need is to look at yourself a bit more accurately.
Bowie, 1977.
Bowie adopts a distanced, contemplative attitude. He studies his own depression. Typically, rock music is presented by the frontman — virile, confident, strident, desirable — as Bowie himself was in 1973. In 1977, we find him frail, reticent and seemingly doubting his very self. Not nightclubbing. He is the anti-rockstar, alone in his room, thinking:
Lloyd Cole.
5. Life on Mars? (312 points, 228 votes, 21 #1 votes, 2 specifying 2000s-era live versions).
“Life on Mars?” remains the decadent aesthete’s first and last question—his whole world’s proof there’s none here.
Greil Marcus.
This song was so easy. Being young was easy. A really beautiful day in the park, sitting on the steps of the bandstand. ‘Sailors bap-bap-bap-bap-baaa-bap.’ An anomic (not a ‘gnomic’) heroine. Middle-class ecstasy. I took a walk to Beckenham High Street to catch a bus to Lewisham to buy shoes and shirts but couldn’t get the riff out of my head. Jumped off two stops into the ride and more or less loped back to the house up on Southend Road.
Workspace was a big empty room with a chaise lounge; a bargain-price art nouveau screen (‘William Morris,’ so I told anyone who asked); a huge overflowing freestanding ashtray and a grand piano. Little else. I started working it out on the piano and had the whole lyric and melody finished by late afternoon. Nice.
Bowie, 2008.
Next, did being a suite help inflate its vote total? Probably, but one can’t imagine it without all of its constituent parts..
4. Sweet Thing-Candidate-Sweet Thing (Reprise) (323 points, 215 votes, 27 #1 votes, 1 specifying the live 1974 version).
Sounding like a B-movie Scott Walker, Anthony Newley and Mae West, Bowie tour-guides the brothel district of his Armageddon city…Mike Garson’s florid piano qualifies it as one of the few legitimate successors to Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.
Scott Miller.
Pass by in the night, and strain imagination to picture the weltering mass of human weariness, of bestiality, of unmerited dolour, of hopeless hope, of crushed surrender, tumbled together within those forbidding walls.
George Gissing, The Nether World.
and now….Each of these final songs at some point in the tabulations were leading the pack. Only in the last 50 to 75 votes did a winner clearly emerge. But it was a long, hard battle.
Presenting, your bronze medalist:
3. Ashes to Ashes (358 points, 238 votes, 30 #1 votes).
It was me eradicating the feelings within myself that I was uncomfortable with…You have to accommodate your pasts within your persona. You have to understand why you went through them. That’s the major thing. You cannot just ignore them or put them out of your mind or pretend they didn’t happen or just say “Oh I was different then.”
Bowie, 1990.
So Major Tom thought he was starring in an Arthur C. Clarke story and found himself in a Philip K. Dick one by mistake, and the result is oddly magnificent.
Tom Ewing.
Bowie may still release more songs. But “Ashes to Ashes” is his last song. It’s the final chapter that came midway through the book. Bowie sings himself offstage with a children’s rhyme; eternally falling, eternally young.
and your runner up…
2. Station to Station (364 points, 236 votes, 32 #1 votes, 1 for the Stage version).
Uprooted from his native context in the cultural artifice of Europe, isolated in a largely unironic and cultureless alien land, Bowie was forced back on himself, a self he didn’t much like.
Ian MacDonald.
Hermes teaches that the seven spheres of the stars enclose the soul of man like a prison…But man is a brother to those strong daemons who rule the spheres; he is a power like them, though he has forgotten this…For if the sun is at the center and not the earth, then there are no crystal spheres to hold us in; we have only and always fooled ourselves, we men, kept ourselves within the spheres which our own flawed and insufficient senses perceived, but which were never there at all.
John Crowley, The Solitudes.
This is from back in the Seventies. Well, my Seventies, they weren’t necessarily your Seventies.
David Bowie, introducing “Station to Station,” Atlantic City, 2004.
So you know what’s left. Too obvious? Too popular? Too epic to be denied? Well this is David Bowie’s finest song, if just for one day…
1.“Heroes” (385 points, 237 votes, 37 #1 votes (the most in the poll), 5 specifying “Helden,” one noting it was for the LP cut, not the single)
For whatever reason, for whatever confluence of circumstances, Tony, Brian and I created a powerful, anguished, sometimes euphoric language of sounds. In some ways, sadly, they really captured, unlike anything else in that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass.
Bowie, 1999.
And that’s it.
Honor roll: Songs that got #1 votes but not enough points to make the Top 100.
Right (29 points); Letter to Hermione (28 points); Untitled No. 1 (28 points); What In the World (24 points); 5:15 The Angels Have Gone (22 points); Time Will Crawl (22 points); Memory of a Free Festival (21 points); Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud (20 points); Art Decade (18 points); A Small Plot of Land (18 points); We Prick You (17 points); It’s Gonna Be Me (15 points); Repetition (14 points); See Emily Play (11 points); Glass Spider (8 points); Ian Fish, U.K. Heir (8 points); Tonight (7 points). And When the Boys Come Marching Home, which got only 2 votes, but one was a #1 (6 points).
Thanks to everyone for participating. Album poll results at some point before Xmas.
Top 100 Songs Spotify link.
195 Comments | Reader Poll: 2015 | Tagged: Poll, Songs | Permalink
Posted by col1234
We enter the outer circle of top Bowie songs, as chosen by blog readers. If, like me, you were a sorta-Catholic kid who was weirdly fascinated by the hierarchy of angels (oh, you weren’t, eh?), you might say we’re in the Second Sphere, home of Powers, Virtues and Dominions.
Speaking of angels, the speaker in the first song of the Top 50 was one:
50. Look Back In Anger (73 points, 69 votes, 1 #1 vote).
If I’m going to take a solo, I’m going to take a rhythm guitar solo.
Carlos Alomar.
It’s a TIE for 49-48 (don’t worry! there aren’t many now): matrimony and blood.
Be My Wife (74 points, 70 votes, 1 #1 vote).
A mime sketch of a rock star making a rock video, yet too comically glum and sulky to go through the required hoops, and lacking the necessary gung-ho conviction…the character (because it isn’t really Bowie, it’s a fellow, a sad sack, a thin-lipped melancholic) makes to play his guitar and gives up halfway through the phrase. He just can’t be bothered.
Momus, on the promo video.
The Hearts Filthy Lesson (74 points, 66 votes, 2 #1 votes).
The filthy lesson in question is the fact that life is finite. That realization, when it comes, usually later in life, can either be a really daunting prospect or it makes things a lot clearer.
Bowie, 1995.
47. Oh! You Pretty Things (75 points, 71 votes, 1 #1 vote).
All the nightmares came today and it looks as though they’re here to stay.
46. Bring Me the Disco King (77 points, 65 votes, 3 #1 votes, one specified the “Loner” remix).
Once we’d put down the song against Garson tinkering away, it didn’t need any more. That was the song.
Bowie, 2003.
It’s a TIE for 45-44, with a drunk John Lennon or Chris Burden (RIP, both) drawing something awful on the carpet.
Joe the Lion! (78 points, 70 votes, 2 #1 votes).
Art doesn’t have a purpose. It’s a free spot in society, where you can do anything.
Chris Burden.
It’s Monday.
You slither down the greasy pipe—so far so good—no one SAW you
hobble over any FREEway
you will be like your DREEEEEEEEEEEEEAMS
tonight!
Breaking Glass (78 points/votes).
He probably did that shit yesterday in somebody’s room! David’s writing some shit about life here!
Dennis Davis, recalling hearing Bowie’s vocal for the first time.
43. Fantastic Voyage (79 points, 71 votes, 2 #1 votes).
The recurrent “learning to live with somebody’s depression” motif that forms the song’s chorus reminds us that we all get whacked out when we’re depressed, but that the chief of a nuclear nation can get whacked out, too, and then we’re all in trouble.
Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr.
42. TVC 15 (80 points, 76 votes, 1 #1 vote).
Despite its quadraphonic sound and hologramic televisions, “TVC 15” was at heart a Fifties teenage death ballad, like “Teen Angel,” “Endless Sleep” or “Last Kiss,” where the singer recalls how his girl perished and wonders whether to join her in death.
Rebel Rebel (still available for Christmas gifting).
Anybody who can merge Lou Reed, disco and Huey Smith — the best I can do with the irresistible ‘TVC 15’— deserves to keep doing it for 5:29.
Robert Christgau.
Onward. Though I admit I’ll never love this song, over the years I’ve come to respect it, and how much it means to a lot of people. I’m glad it’s here…
41. Time (81 points, 73 votes, 2 #1 votes).
I’ve written a new song on the new album which is just called “Time,” and I thought it was about time, and I wrote very heavily about time, and the way I felt about time—at times!—and I played it back after we recorded it and, my God, it was a gay song!
Bowie, 1973.
40. Fame (82 points, 78 votes, 1 #1 vote, one specified for the “Fame 90” remix).
When ‘Fame’ came out, that was the first time Bowie had bridged going to AM–he was always FM.
Carlos Alomar.
The fucking price of fame. Somebody had made a transfusion of the wrong blood type into Yoko. I was there when it happened, and she starts to go rigid, and then shake, from the pain and the trauma. I run up to this nurse and say, ‘Go get the doctor!’ I’m holding on tight to Yoko while this guy gets to the hospital room. He walks in, hardly notices that Yoko is going through fucking convulsions, goes straight for me, smiles, shakes my hand and says, ‘I’ve always wanted to meet you, Mr. Lennon, I always enjoyed your music.’ I start screaming: ‘My wife’s dying and you wanna talk about my music!’ Christ!
John Lennon, 1980.
39. Modern Love (85 points/votes).
I’ve left behind “Ziggy Stardust” in favor of “Modern Love,” though the endless “ah-dern-LOW-OH-OVE” vamping at the end of the latter gets exhausting.
Rob Sheffield, on his Bowie karaoke picks.
38. Fashion (88 points, 84 votes, 1 #1 vote).
[The disco scene] seems now to be replaced by an insidious grim determination to be fashionable, as though it’s actually a vocation. There’s some kind of strange aura about it.
Bowie, 1980.
When I started this blog in 2009, I didn’t know the next song—I’d heard the album a few times but the track had left no impression on me. But when I got to it in due course, I was stunned: why did no one talk about how great it was? So I tried to make the case for its brilliance in the blog entry, and I hope, in some way, that I helped its standing here:
37. Win (89 points, 81 votes, 2 #1 votes.)
I would listen to the album in my room and when ‘Win’ came on I would feel as though I was swimming in my fish tank.
Commenter “Red Fields,” 2013.
A mild, precautionary sort of morality song.
Bowie, 1975.
36. Absolute Beginners (90 points/votes).
When Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, who were producing the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, heard Bowie’s studio demo of “Beginners,” they were flummoxed, as they had no idea how to improve it. “We’ve been handed this one on a plate,” Langer recalled saying in the elevator afterwards.
When I started going through the ballots, I was wondering what the post-“retirement” consensus pick would be. Pretty soon, it was obvious…
35. Where Are We Now? (93 points, 89 votes, 1 #1 vote).
It did make me cry. It’s what the song is about. I totally identify with what he has done. I know exactly how he feels. It’s like a lament.
Herbie Flowers.
34. Suffragette City (95 points, 83 votes, 2 #1 votes).
“Suffragette City” is just so cool.
Woody Woodmansey.
I remember very clearly the physical reaction I felt listening to “Suffragette City” [for the first time]. The sheer bodily excitement of that noise was too much to bear. I guess it sounded like…sex. Not that I knew what sex was.
Simon Critchley.
And it’s a straight run from Suffragette City across the plains to..
33. Warszawa (96 points, 92 votes, 1 #1 vote).
You may also say that Bowie immortalized a certain image of the city, his inner Warsaw. I thought it always one of the most solemn, uncanny Bowie songs, and a proper homage to my city, which is until this day quite sinister.
Agata Pyzik (who’s now writing a 33 1/3 book on Japan’s Tin Drum).
It’s time for a TIE for 32 and 31 (hey, it’s been a while). Possibly the oddest cohabitation of the survey, but both songs are about transcendence, in a way.
Let’s Dance (97 points, 89 votes, 2 #1 votes, 1 vote specifying the single edit).
When David and I were doing tons and tons of pre-promotion on the album that would become “Let’s Dance”, after we did all this research, David summed what this album was going to be, by a picture he found of Little Richard getting into a Cadillac. Little Richard was getting into his red drop-top Cadillac with his ‘do’ like that (leans forward) and he had a red suit, red Cadillac, bam, had the pomp, and David held it up and said: “(English accent) Nile, that’s rock ‘n’ roll.”
Nile Rodgers.
Word On a Wing (97 points, 81 votes, 4 #1 votes).
In times of spiritual crisis, when the very self is being swept away, the Higher Self comes to the rescue, terrible as an army with banners. [If successful, one has a sense of calm] like a ship hove-to, securely riding out the storm.
Dion Fortune.
Well, so much for the epic ‘Station to Station’ ballads…but wait?
30. Wild Is The Wind (99 points, 87 votes, 3 #1 votes).
“Romance is coming back, Warren,” I said.
“You know what’s coming back?” Warren said. “Everything. And then it’s going away for good.”
George W.S. Trow.
I recorded it as a homage to Nina [Simone]…Her performance of this song really affected me.
Bowie, 1993.
29. Strangers When We Meet (101 points, 85 votes, 4 #1 votes, 12 votes specified the Outside version, 2 the Buddha of Suburbia one).
The only time his cut-up lyrics moved me, thanks to that gorgeous vocal. All the stresses fall on unexpected places.
Alfred Soto.
28. Quicksand (102 points, 98 votes, 1 #1 vote, 1 vote specified the 1971 demo).
My knowledge had to be the only important knowledge. I wouldn’t own up to the fact I didn’t know it all.
Bowie, 1999.
Brett Anderson: You mention [Aleister Crowley] in ‘Quicksand.’
Bowie: Well that was before I tried reading him. Hahaha! That’s when I had his biography in my raincoat so the title showed. That was reading on the tube.
NME interview, 1993.
Well, he had to show up at some point: all hail the leper messiah. And the last song in this list to have reached its position solely by strength of numbers, no #1 votes:
27. Ziggy Stardust (103 points/votes).
Later, Dave [Marsh] and I talked about Bowie. What was it that was missing? ‘Innocence,’ Dave suggested. But maybe it’s just that unlike Lou Reed (who will never be a star here, either) or Iggy (who just might), Bowie doesn’t seem quite real. Real to me, that is—which in rock-and-roll is the only fantasy that counts.
Ellen Willis, 1972.
As David Bowie appears, the child dies. The vision is profound—a sanity heralding the coming of consciousness from someone who—at last!—transcends our gloomy coal-fire existence. David Bowie is detached from everything, yet open to everything; stripped of the notion that both art and life are impossible. He is quite real, impossibly glamorous, fearless, and quite British. How could this possibly be?
Morrissey, Autobiography.
And a fitting end just before the Top 25. Turn and face the strange..
26. Changes (104 points, 100 votes, 1#1 vote).
Don’t tell them to grow up and out of it!
Next: The Top 25 Bowie Songs.
86 Comments | Reader Poll: 2015 | Tagged: Poll, Songs | Permalink
Posted by col1234
“I’d better be impressed,” the taciturn man says as he turns on his laptop. So, here we go.
The issue with the lower stretches of the top 100 songs is, as you’ll soon see, that there are lots of tied songs. This isn’t often the case above the 50-song barrier. But get ready. If one of your picks is in a tie, well, you can say it’s the best of the bunch and no one can contradict you.
Let’s begin at Haddon Hall, 1971:
TIE: 100-99. Kooks. (30 points/votes).
Soul Love (30 points/votes).
98. Fascination (31 points, 27 votes, 1 #1 vote). Go Luther!
97. Watch That Man (32 points/votes).
96. Up the Hill Backwards (34 points/votes).
The vacuum created by the arrival of freedom
And the possibilities it seems to offer,
It’s got nothing to do with you, if one can grasp it...
Hey, it’s a TIE 95-94.
Everyone Says ‘Hi’ (35 points/votes).
Blue Jean (35 points, 31 votes, 1 #1 vote). A strategic #1 vote by a certain music writer.
If you want it, boys, it’s a THREE-WAY TIE, 93-91.
Hang Onto Yourself (36 points/votes (2 for live 1972 recordings, 1 for Stage)).
I’m Deranged (36 points/votes, 1 for Lost Highway edit).
New Killer Star (36 points, 32 votes, 1 #1 vote).
Yeah, well now it’s a FOUR-WAY TIE, 90-87.
Love Is Lost. (37 points/votes, 7 for the James Murphy remix).
Slow Burn (37 points/votes).
I Have Not Been to Oxford Town (37 points, 33 votes, 1 #1 vote). Toll the bell.
V-2 Schneider (37 points, 33 votes, 1 #1 vote). “YES OKAY I PUT V–2 SCHNEIDER AT NUMBER ONE OKAY WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME” email from its #1 voter.
What’s that? You say you want another FOUR-WAY TIE? 86-83.
Conversation Piece (38 points/votes, 7 specified the Toy version, 2 the original). One of the most surprising and loveliest of placings in the top 100. Well done, everyone: well done.
I’m Afraid of Americans (38 points/votes, 1 specified the Earthling version, 1 the NIN remix).
The Next Day (38 points, 34 votes, 1 #1 vote). Not quite dying indeed!
and another fun surprise:
Alternative Candidate (Candidate Demo), (38 points, 30 votes, 2 (!) #1 votes).
Ok, a break from the ties for a bit.
82. Cracked Actor (39 points/votes).
81. Heathen (the Rays) (42 points/votes). Bit of a surprise placement? More support than I expected.
80. China Girl (43 points, 39 votes, 1 #1 vote; 1 vote specified Iggy’s version, 1 Bowie’s).
79. Thru These Architects’ Eyes (44 points, 40 votes, 1 #1 vote).
78. Cat People (45 points/votes, 2 specified the Let’s Dance remake).
77. Diamond Dogs (46 points/votes).
76. DJ (48 points/votes).
75. Sunday (49 points/votes, 1 specified the Moby remix).
and presenting, the rookie of the year:
74. Blackstar (50 points/votes). For a song that debuted midway through this poll, this is a pretty damn impressive showing. The big question: had it come out a month earlier, how high would it have been?
Now the hitters get heavier:
73. All the Madmen (51 points/votes).
72. Red Sails (52 points, 40 votes, 3 #1 votes).
71. Hallo Spaceboy (53 points/votes, 3 specified the Pet Shop Boys remix, 2 specified “NOT the Pet Shop Boys remix”).
Well, it’s been so long, time for a THREE-WAY TIE: 70-68.
Sons of the Silent Age (54 points/votes).
Jean Genie (54 points, 50 votes, 1 #1 vote).
We Are the Dead (54 points, 50 votes, 1 #1 vote).
another high-speed TIE for 67-66.
Jump They Say (55 points/votes, 1 for “rock” mix).
Speed of Life (55 points, 51 votes, 1 #1 vote).
and a hard rocking glam TIE for 65-64.
John, I’m Only Dancing (56 points, 52 votes, 1 #1 vote).
The Width of a Circle (56 points, 48 votes, 2 #1 votes).
63. The Secret Life of Arabia (57 points, 53 votes, 1 #1 vote). At one point, early on in the tabulations, this was in the top 30 songs, votes-wise. I knew that streak couldn’t last, but hey, I had no idea there was so much love for this one.
62. A New Career In a New Town (58 points/votes).
And a titan-clashing TIE, 61-60.
Under Pressure (60 points/votes, 1 specified the Dorsey-sung Reality Tour version).
The Motel (60 points, 48 votes, 3 #1 votes). Lights up, boys.
was rooting for this to do a little better than it did, but still..
59. Uncle Floyd/Slip Away (61 points/votes, 4 specified “Uncle Floyd”).
It’s a post-apocalyptic Che Guevara TIE for 58-57.
Panic In Detroit (63 points/votes).
Loving the Alien (63 points, 59 votes, 1 #1 vote; 2 votes specified early 2000s live versions, 1 vote specified the full version on Tonight).
Now the “too low!” yells from the crowd grow in number and fervor:
56. Lady Stardust (64 points, 52 votes, 3 #1 votes).
55. All the Young Dudes (66 points, 58 votes, 2 #1 votes; 1 vote specified Bowie live 1973, 2 specified Mott the Hoople, 2 specified Bowie live 2003.)
54. Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). (68 points, 64 votes, 1 #1 vote).
53. Blackout. (69 points, 61 votes, 2 #1 votes).
And finally, a tie for the almost-made-it-ins (from the class of 1977), 52 and 51.
Beauty and the Beast (71 points, 67 votes, 1 #1 vote).
Subterraneans. (71 points, 47 votes, 6 #1 votes). Broke my heart: it was so close to the top 50 but couldn’t go the last 100 meters. The last ten votes compiled sealed its fate.
Next: Winners’ Outer Circle: Songs 50-26.
60 Comments | Reader Poll: 2015 | Tagged: Poll, Songs | Permalink
Posted by col1234
Pushing Ahead of the Dame 