A list (in no particular order) of my 500 favorite songs (singles, deep cuts, hits, and more) of all time. Includes a wide array of selections from rock, punk, funk, R&B, soul, classical, jazz, folk, and world music.
Normally, I wouldn't go for something as gimmicky as a follow up song, where you find out the latest about a character whom you met 10 years earlier. But, dammit, when Bowie does it, it's a work of art. In "Ashes to Ashes" from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980), you get reacquainted with "Major Tom," the celebrity/space cadet/junkie from Bowie's very first hit song, "Space Oddity" (1969). If you're unfamiliar with "Space Oddity," it uses the sci-fi premise of an astronaut being launched into outer space and then losing touch with ground control back on earth as an extended metaphor for a meteoric rise to celebrity and eventual fall because of overindulgence. It's oddly prophetic, considering Bowie himself skyrocketed to fame only to nearly lose himself to a massive cocaine habit by the end of the 70s. Anyway, in "Ashes to Ashes," we meet up with "Major Tom" again to find out that he's doing well, even though he admits he's still fighting his demons. Ultimately, by the time Bowie gets to the end of the track, he decides that it's time to clean up his own act and put "Major Tom" behind him: My momma said to get things done / You better not mess with 'Major Tom'. As a narrative, the song is compelling enough. But the track's fractured funk with its twisted beat, slapped bass, and spacey synths make it even more desirable to visit and revisit.
I marvel at David Bowie's genius. In 1972, he created a character—a rock & roll alien that was one part Iggy Pop and one part Warhol Factory misfit—and turned it into a vehicle to bring his music to the masses. Granted, things got complicated when the line between the character, Ziggy Stardust, and the real David Bowie began to blur. But I still think the basic idea of being able to step into character and act as wild, creative, and unfettered as you want and then step out of character and go home at the end of the day is brilliant. I also think the entire The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) album is brilliantly executed—particularly the track "Moonage Daydream." The song actually was written by Bowie before the Ziggy concept ever took flight. He recorded a version of it in 1971 for a short-lived side project called Arnold Corns, a "band" that basically consisted of Bowie and a fashion designer named Freddie Burretti. The deal was, Bowie wrote and sang all of the words, and the meticulously dressed/coiffed Burretti played frontman and lip synced to Bowie's vocals. Anyway, the Arnold Corns version failed to make any kind of commercial impact. But it did plant the idea in Bowie's head of performing his songs as someone other than himself. Also, it explains why "Moonage Daydream" doesn't really fit the narrative of Ziggy, unlike, say, the song "Starman" or the title track. Nevertheless, it has that same brash and bold attitude that permeates the entire album. And that vibe has as much to do with Bowie's delivery as it does with the guitar skills of the late Mick Ronson. In fact, it's Ronson's guitar work that makes me love this song so much. During the first half of the song, his playing is rhythmic yet melodic, punctuating Bowie's vocals perfectly. During the last half of the song, when he launches into his extended solo, it's completely abstract and unhinged. It wails and screams like the throngs of British teenagers who got glittered up and packed concert halls to catch a glimpse of The Spiders from Mars. Apart from maybe John Coltrane's avant garde noodling on "My Favorite Things," I don't know of anything else on tape that sounds quite like it or that's packed with so much raw emotion.
David Bowie had gotten his fill of fame and its vices. So he left the glitz and drugs behind and relocated to Berlin in 1976, drawn by the city's Cold War-era austerity. In time, he was joined by longtime collaborator/producer Tony Visconti and musician Brian Eno and, together, they created a trilogy of challenging, groundbreaking albums (Low, 'Heroes', and Lodger) that still sound unbelievably fresh today. All three records, incidentally, were recorded at Hansa Studios, which sat within view of the Berlin Wall, or the "Wall of Shame" as it had been dubbed by the West. One afternoon while staring out the window of the studio's control room, Bowie happened to catch Visconti passionately kissing a young woman (who wasn't Visconti's wife) beneath a guard turret on the Wall. On the one hand, Bowie saw their act as heroic: they weren't allowing the very real danger of being shot by guards deter them from freely expressing their very real affection for one another. On the other hand, he surmised that they were meeting in such a dangerous place because they felt guilty about the affair, and they were psychologically justifying their rendezvous as an act of "heroism." The incident inspired Bowie to pen "'Heroes'", an intensely emotional, complicated portrait of ill-fated love winning a victory over oppression for a fleeting moment (hence the ironic quotation marks in the song's title). Although every note of this song is electrifying, my favorite moment comes in the second verse, as Bowie nearly cries the words And the shame was on the other side. It's such a smart bit of wordplay, referring not only to the lovers' literal location in the shadow of the "Wall of Shame" but also the feelings of self-reproach that they're attempting to put aside. In short, this is the song that made me a Bowie fan for life.
So David Bowie got his big break in 1972 with the album that launched glam rock: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It's a concept album about an androgynous/pan-sexual alien who comes to earth to bring one last message of hope as the planet is dying. This story, which is set in the not-too-distant dystopian future, basically gave Bowie a motive to dye his hair bright red, splash on some makeup, and rock out with hedonistic abandon at live shows that had Britain's parents (and to some extent America's parents) quaking in their square-toed shoes. As Bowie notes in a Blank on Blank interview (which is a great podcast series from PBS Digital Studios that combines archival interviews with animation), he basically crafted the Ziggy Stardust character because he had difficulty writing music for himself as David Bowie; however, the moment he started writing for a fictitious character with its own outlandish backstory, it opened up new possibilities and creative avenues. The song "Suffragette City," the next-to-last track on the album, is a crass little rocker that sort of does/doesn't fit in the whole narrative of the album. By that, I mean pretty much every other song specifically mentions Ziggy or his band, The Spiders from Mars, by name, whereas "Suffragette City" just paints a scene of teenage carnality on the edge of apocalypse. (In the song, its protagonist is kicking a friend—or, more likely, a friend with benefits—out of his house because he's decided to shack up with a girl who is liberated. Sexually.) Makes sense that it's the odd piece in the jigsaw puzzle, considering Bowie originally wrote the song as a vehicle for the band Mott the Hoople, who rejected it. (The band ultimately went on to record and make a hit out of Bowie's song "All the Young Dudes," which actually was written for the Ziggy character but not used on the album.) But just like the other tracks on the album, the song is a platform for underrated guitarist Mick Ronson to rip his way through some chunky power chords, seasoned with buzzing, swooping synthesizers. And I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my favorite part of the song is the false ending, where Bowie & Co. suddenly erupt with this old chestnut: Awww—wham, bam, thank you, ma'am! I'm sure it was all very shocking in '72.
A few years back, some cruise line was using "Lust for Life" as the soundtrack for its commercials. Who knows, maybe it still is. I couldn't help but picture Iggy Pop, sitting somewhere (a red couch in a rented flat on the Champs-Élysées, a hash bar in Amsterdam, the bathroom of the Astor Place K-mart...), holding a royalties check, and laughing his ass off about some ad exec unwittingly (or quite knowingly) picking this paean to debauchery with its various sly references to William S. Burroughs to hawk voyages to tropical locales. It was an especially odd choice, considering that the song had been used pretty appropriately in the drug-filled crime film Trainspotting (1996), which is where I (and countless others of my generation) first heard it. The track from the 1977 album of the same name features the same group of musicians, led by David Bowie, that had crafted Pop's art-rock reinvention/comeback album, The Idiot, earlier the same year—most notably, rhythm weapons Hunt Sales (drums) and his brother Tony Sales (bass). (Bar trivia fact: they're the sons of comedian Soupy Sales.) Anyway, the Sales brothers are the culprits behind the thunderous rhythm section, which sounds kind of like the rhythm section of The Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love" (had The Funk Brothers done an 8-ball before the recording session, that is). Even if the subject matter of "Lust for Life" doesn't exactly resonate, there's still something rousing about that shouted refrain Lust for life / I got a lust for life! that makes you want to go out and grab life by the lapels.
It was mid-1976. David Bowie was tired of the LA scene. Tired of cocaine addiction. Tired of addiction's bedfellow, paranoia. Just...tired. So he up and moved to Berlin--the brooding Bohemian center of the avant-garde with its hulking, graffiti-covered wall slicing it into West and East. It was a place where no one seemed to care that he was an international rock superstar, and that suited him perfectly. The first of three albums born of his German expatriation was Low (1977), a direct reference to how he was feeling at the time. Upon its release, Low confounded critics and fans, who were expecting another installation of R&B-flavored rock, à la Young Americans (1975) or Station to Station (1976). Instead, what listeners got was a record where Bowie navel gazed over buzzing/burbling/quivering guitars (courtesy of long-time Bowie cohorts Carlos Alomar and Ricky Gardiner), futuristic synths (courtesy of kindred spirit Brian Eno), and Dennis Davis's thunderous drums, which sounded like they were exploding with every lick (courtesy of producer Tony Visconti's then-new gadget, the Eventide H910 Harmonizer--one of the first combo digital pitch shifters/delay effects boxes.) A perennial favorite of mine from this timeless album is the track "Sound and Vision." It sneakily presents itself as an upbeat pop song, but then takes a left turn when Bowie finally shows up to croon after a 1:30 instrumental intro. Quite simply, he's singing about being hole up in his room with the blinds drawn, cut off from the rest of the world, watching TV. He's not really lamenting his isolation or particularly celebrating it; he's simply observing it like a bystander, hypothetically asking the listener, "Have you ever wondered about isolation, too?"
To my detriment, I didn't really get into Bowie until high school. I was in this experimental geometry class, where the students were supposed to work in groups and help one another learn theorems and whatnot, and the instructor was only there to babysit. As part of the "learning and discovery process," we were allowed to play music. It was a misguided disaster that reeked of hippie kum ba yah-ness. No one knew what the hell was going on. Redneck football players who could barely write their names were trying to learn about Pythagoras from homegirls who just wanted to talk about nails and hair. But at least there was the music. And this one girl kept bringing in old Bowie albums on CD, and each one was like some new door opening. It was the first time I'd heard Ziggy Stardust and that raunchy little awwwww wham bam thank you, mam! chant in the middle of "Suffragette City." There also was the album The Man Who Sold the World (1970), and I instantly recognized that Mick Ronson riff from Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York set. When that special aired on MTV, I had just assumed that it was some obscure Pixies or Meat Puppets song that Kurt Cobain had decided to cover. In all, it's a song about searching for your true self. Bowie uses the concept of a man who meets his doppelganger and then spends the rest of his days simultaneously running from/searching for him as a metaphor for self exploration/self-acceptance. It was a perfect and chilling cover for Nirvana, considering Cobain's personal struggles and death by his own hand a few months later, and a very telling, personal tale from a young David Bowie, who would continue to explore his real identity (David Jones) in light of his public and stage persona(s) (David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, etc.) for many years.
The better known version of this David Bowie-Iggy Pop composition is from the Bowie album of the same name. He recut the song in 1984 as a reggae-flavored duet with Tina Turner during his "I want to be a mainstream pop star" period. It's about as cringe-inducing as you might imagine. (Not quite as bad as his "Dancing in the Street" debacle with Jagger from '85, but it's close.) Pop's version from the album Lust for Life (1977) is worlds apart. It begins with a chilling monologue, which has Iggy watching his girlfriend turn blue from a heroin overdose as he emphatically vows to her that everything will turn out okay (even though all signs indicate it won't). His delivery is incredibly poetic and tender--crooning even, and his incomparable band (which consists of Bowie on keys and backing vocals, crack guitarists Carlos Alomar and Ricky Gardiner, and the rhythm assault team of brothers Tony and Hunt Sales on bass and drums, respectively) backs Iggy with an urgency that belies the gravity of the subject matter, tinged with a heavy dose of romanticism. It's like a majestic yet visceral update of a 1950s "teenage tragedy" ballad. Everything I love about this track comes to a head on the song's bridge, with Alomar's guitar wailing over Tony Sales's hyper-melodic bassline (which refuses to hang out on the same note for more than a second; it's one of my favorite performances on electric bass) and Hunt Sales's thunderous drumming (lesser drummers could only dream about the syncopated stuff he's doing with his double bass pedal on that bridge).
Everyone raise her/his hand who had never heard of "Under Pressure" before "Ice, Ice Baby" sampled unabashedly ripped off the intro and bassline. ...Keep 'em raised. I'm sure I'm just one of many who, until Kurt Loder brought it up on MTV News (where that infamous clip of Robert "Vanilla Ice" Van Winkle saying, "Ours goes ding-ding-ding-da-da-ding-ding..." debuted) had no idea that "Under Pressure" even existed. I'm a bit ashamed to admit that, because "Under Pressure" is a great song. And I don't mean "great" in a generic, lazy adjective sense, or merely that it's a good groove. I mean it's a majestic, larger-than-life composition that actually says something. Take a look at the lyrics sometime: it's a plea to humanity to re-examine our priorities and show some compassion toward our fellow man before we implode. The song speaks directly to the question that I've had hanging over my head numerous times over the years: what the hell's the point of it all? We get up every day and go to our jobs, where we spend half of our lives doing uncreative, unfulfilling crap that, in the long run, will be forgotten and completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. And, in even in the midst of this realization, there's still pressure. Pressure that's created by manufactured deadlines, unreasonable goals, and arbitrary rules that have nothing to do with our needs as human beings, much less as spiritual beings. Deep down, we know the answer to the big question is "love." But our culture creates a disconnect with that truth. It's a huge topic to tackle, and David Bowie, the late Freddie Mercury, and the boys from Queen do it in 4 minutes flat. That's why it is a great song.
