![David Bowie](/https/music.apple.com/assets/artwork/1x1.gif)
![David Bowie](/https/music.apple.com/assets/artwork/1x1.gif)
100 Best Albums
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- 16 JUN 1972
- 11 Songs
- The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (2012 Remaster) · 1972
- Hot Space (Deluxe Edition) · 1981
- Blackstar · 2015
- Music From Baz Luhrmann's Film Moulin Rouge (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2001
- Isn’t It Evening (The Revolutionary) [feat. David Bowie] - Single · 2024
- Rock 'n' Roll Star! · 2024
- Rock 'n' Roll Star! · 2024
- Rock 'n' Roll Star! · 2024
- Rock 'n' Roll Star! · 2024
- Rock 'n' Roll Star! · 2024
Essential Albums
- Following 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), it would take David Bowie three years to release another album—the longest gap in his career up to that point. But between hit-single collaborations with Queen (1981’s “Under Pressure”) and Giorgio Moroder (the theme song to the 1982 horror flick Cat People), not to mention a starring role in a Broadway production of The Elephant Man, he was never far from the spotlight. And all those extracurricular activities were effectively warming us up for his pop-cultural takeover in 1983: On top of appearing in three major films that year, Bowie dropped Let’s Dance, the album that signified his transformation from the world’s strangest rock star into its most dashing A-list celebrity. There’s a good reason why a buff and blonde Bowie appears on the cover with boxing gloves—this album delivers hit after hit after hit after hit. From a musical standpoint, Let’s Dance is a testament to Bowie’s unique status as both a classic-rock icon and post-punk pioneer that could bridge genre and generational divides. With “Modern Love”, he updates Motown motion with New Wave moxie and comes up with an eternal wedding dance-floor-filler in the process. For the truth-in-advertising funk of the title track, he fuses the mirror-ball-twirling sensibility of producer Nile Rodgers with the virtuoso blues licks of a then-unknown Stevie Ray Vaughan, as if to single-handely peace-broker the rockers-vs.-disco war once and for all. Ironically, the greatest measure of the album’s pop-savvy is the one track that dates back to Bowie’s left-field late-1970s Euro phase: originally a strung-out dirge that appeared on Iggy Pop’s 1977 solo debut The Idiot, “China Girl” is reborn as a peppy sing-along thanks to the addition of a swooning chorus hook and enchanting Asian instrumental motif. With the album’s unimpeachable opening string of instant MTV classics, it’s easy to overlook everything that comes after, but Let’s Dance never relents in its mission to provide maximal pleasure for the widest possible audience. Bowie gives British post-glam band Metro’s seductive 1977 signature “Criminal World” a 1980s sophisti-pop makeover that should’ve sent it to the top of the charts alongside the album’s aforementioned mega-singles, while a Moroder-less remake of “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” excises the original’s slow-building intro to thrust us right into the hot ’n’ bothered action, as Vaughan’s molten licks crank up the temperature. And the closing “Shake It” is effectively a remix of “Let’s Dance” that keeps the party going with a perky, Prince-like synth riff and cheeky vocal interplay that captures Bowie at his most light-hearted. As an artist, Bowie always thrived by plugging himself into the zeitgeist and reinventing himself accordingly, but with Let’s Dance he was the zeitgeist, the platonic ideal of a mass-appealing 1980s pop star—good looks, great taste and timeless tunes.
- When David Bowie released Station to Station in 1976, he hit a new commercial pinnacle: It would soon become his second album in a row to reach the Top 10 on both sides of the pond. But from a mental-health standpoint, Bowie was at an all-time low. Upon moving to LA in 1975 to film his starring role in Nicolas Roeg’s art-house classic, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bowie’s recreational cocaine use had developed into a full-blown snowstorm, plunging him into an all-consuming paranoia that manifested itself in a notoriously extreme diet of red peppers and milk, dramatic weight loss and an obsession with the occult. Given his precarious condition at the time, Bowie infamously claimed that he had no recollection of making Station to Station. But in reality, he savvily turned his diminished physical and psychological state into a new persona: The Thin White Duke. Pale, skeletal, yet still untouchably stylish, Bowie reinvented himself as the ghost of a pop star. Though Station to Station carries over the soul and funk influences of the preceding Young Americans, this is an album possessed by a more haunted and sinister energy. Its staggering 10-minute title track is the equivalent of opening a door and being greeted by a 100-foot-high brick wall, as an ominous swell of electronics gives way to an anvil-pounding beat that—while not quite heavy metal—is still crushing enough to have inspired a Melvins cover version many years later. But partway through, the song suddenly transforms from doomy dirge to rapturous disco, effectively encapsulating Station to Station’s uncanny balance of drug-addled delusion and futurist epiphany. Station to Station may have been born in a cloud of LA excess, but Bowie’s ear was already keying into the avant-rock experimentation flourishing in Germany. And if he wasn’t yet fully incorporating the electronic aesthetic of bands like Kraftwerk and Harmonia, their machine-like precision informed the funky-yet-frosty allure of songs like “Golden Years” and “Stay”. Perhaps the most fascinating attribute of Station to Station is the way it makes organic instrumentation sound unearthly—“TVC15” foregrounds the playful piano-runs of the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan and Bowie’s own free-ranging sax-work, yet the song’s steely rhythmic pulse, cryptic communiques and robotic chorus incantations sound like they’re beaming in from another planet. But even the album’s two side-closing ballads—the elegant “Word on a Wing” and a dramatic reading of the Nina Simone signature “Wild Is the Wind”—convey the same message as the album’s more outre excursions: Bowie was rapidly losing interest in traditional rock music and rock culture in general, and in order to escape its temptations and trappings, he needed to make records that would position him firmly outside that world. “The European canon is here!” he announced on Station to Station’s title track. His next move was to book himself a transatlantic flight back to the Old World and fulfill that promise.
- 100 Best Albums When David Bowie stood onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon in full Ziggy Stardust getup and announced his retirement in July 1973, nobody really knew what he meant. Was this Bowie’s retirement, or just Ziggy’s? And what was the difference, anyway? The persona had been laid on so thick, it seemed impossible to peel it away from the artist who invented it. Not to mention, of course, how liberating the persona had been to Bowie’s audience: the drama, the glitter, the possibility of becoming your most fantastic inner self, societal boxes and pre-existing roles be damned. If the crowd screamed in protest, you couldn’t blame them: Ziggy had promised that they weren’t alone—and now he was leaving them. The concept is catchy, but the subversion is in the music: nasty but glamorous (“Moonage Daydream”, “Suffragette City”), theatrical but intimate (“Five Years”), punk before punk (“Hang on to Yourself”) and cabaret for an audience who would’ve never deigned (“Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”). He’s so exceptional he talks about himself in the third person but so arrogant his fans kill him for it (“Ziggy Stardust”), so deluded he thinks rock ’n’ roll can save the world but so brave he’s willing to die trying (“Star”). “And it was cold, and it rained, so I felt like an actor,” he sings on “Five Years”—an image that captures the moments in life that feel so real they seem fake. The artifice brings him down, but it also sets him free. The album helped loosen binaries around gender, sexuality, performance and identity. But it also helped broaden the vocabulary of mainstream rock more generally, drawing on concepts from the underground (Bowie barely escaped an interview without talking about Iggy Pop), the art world, kabuki, mime and film (“Space Oddity” had been written under the influence of 2001, Ziggy Stardust under that of A Clockwork Orange). Calling him flighty or inauthentic missed the point: Like Andy Warhol, Bowie treated his art in part as a synthesis of his interests. For all the ways it was radical at the time, Ziggy also pointed to a referential, hyperlinked future we’re all familiar with—curation as creation.
- 1971’s Hunky Dory isn’t just David Bowie’s first great album, it’s the seed of everything he did after. “Life on Mars?”: There’s a song about chasing the unknown. “Oh! You Pretty Things”: A song about how the future’s already here. “Changes”: A manifesto for a career defined by them. Or how about the way he pours it on like an old-fashioned showman one minute (“Quicksand”) and turns a cold, modern shoulder the next (“Queen Bitch”). At a time when popular music was dominated by the earthy confessionalism of singer-songwriters, his embrace of persona was a radical gesture: Not only was his identity flexible, it was disposable—a costume that, as in the kabuki traditions he’d become fascinated by a few years earlier, could be put on or taken off depending on how you felt that day. And out of the gesture comes a philosophy: Just because you’re a boy doesn’t mean you can’t sometimes feel—or even dress—like a girl. And just because you’re human doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes feel weird living on Earth. Art, by extension, isn’t a place to find your identity, but to detach from it, a place where people can discover their selves by escaping them. Years before conversations about queerness and gender fluidity got anywhere near the mainstream, he presented the argument that we’re never just one thing, and that the things we are don’t always mean what people think they do. “Don’t believe in yourself, don’t deceive with belief,” he sings on “Quicksand”. It’s a scary proposition, and one that he’d spend most of his career facing up to: Let yourself peel away in the wind, and prepare for what comes next.
- 2013
Artist Playlists
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Appears On
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About David Bowie
Back at the height of the Ziggy Stardust era, David Bowie told an interviewer that he’d always felt like a vehicle for something else, even if he could never quite figure out what that something else was. For all the times he changed his getup—the glam alien of Ziggy, the moody existentialist of the late ’70s, the pop sophisticate of the ’80s and so on—he was, in his way, remarkably consistent, a barometer of where the culture was and a glimpse of where it was going. Gender fluidity, the hybridization of rock and electronic music, the transformative power of the internet: Bowie was never there first per se, but he was always there early, a transformative figure who managed to bring challenging ideas into mainstream culture in a way that felt stylish, digestible, exciting and most of all possible. Born David Jones in 1947, Bowie was raised in the suburbs of London, converting to the gospel of rock ’n’ roll after hearing Little Richard. He took a minute to find his creative footing (“The Laughing Gnome”—brace yourself), but by his early twenties he’d become a major force in English pop, exploring themes of alienation (“Space Oddity”), identity (“Changes”) and futurism (“Life On Mars?”) while developing a performance style steeped in everything from mime to kabuki and avant-garde theatre—a sense of visual identity that would last him the rest of his career. For three decades, Bowie rarely took more than a year between albums, exploring chilly, electronic art-rock (Low and the so-called Berlin Trilogy), pop (the early MTV hits Let’s Dance and Tonight), the noisy U-turn of the Tin Machine era and the quasi-industrial sound of such ’90s albums as Outside and Earthling. As prominent and productive as he was, he became more enigmatic as his career went on, a noble stoic at the outer reaches of pop music. His final two albums, 2013’s The Next Day and 2016’s Blackstar (released two days before his death), were among the grandest—and starkest—of his career. His final video, for the song “No Plan”, was released posthumously on what would have been his 70th birthday. Bowie doesn’t appear in the clip, at least not live. Instead, we see him in freeze-frame on a TV in the window of a rundown electronics store, just for a few seconds near the very end, a little fuzzy: Not a person, but an image fixed on the screen.
- HOMETOWN
- London, England
- BORN
- 8 January 1947
- GENRE
- Rock