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The Bowie Challenge

Calling all Bowie fans, post haste...

The wonderful website Pushing Ahead of the Dame has thrown down the gauntlet, asking readers to do the unthinkable task of reducing the career of David Bowie down to the "best" thirty songs and the "best" ten albums.  It's as subjective a task as you can have with such a deep and rich catalog spanning over five decades; however, for me, selecting my ten favorite albums (which, of course, may or may not be the "best") was by far the easier task. Those albums, in chronological order:

The Man Who Sold The World (1970)
Hunky Dory (1971)
The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders Of Mars (1972)
Aladdin Sane (1973)
Station To Station (1976)
Low (1977)
Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980)
Let's Dance (1983)
Black Tie White Noise (1993)
Outside (1995)

The songs, however, were much more difficult to whittle down. My first run -- just spitting out titles without any prompting, tunes where the melodies just jumped into my head -- was 77 songs, which is a bit more than the target of 30. I then took another pass at my original list, getting it down to a clean 50. Then things got ugly. Again, I went for my favorites rather than any notion of "artistic greatness" or "canon" or such, and I stuck to songs that Bowie had a co-write or sole writing credit, which meant that songs like "Sorrow" or "Kingdom Come" or "Criminal World" or "Waterloo Sunset" didn't make the final cut. So those songs, in chronological order, are as follows:

"In The Heat Of The Morning" / "Space Oddity" / "The Man Who Sold The World" / "Life On Mars?" / "Starman" / "Moonage Daydream" / "The Jean Genie" / "Rebel Rebel" / "Young Americans" / "Station To Station" / "Golden Years" / "Be My Wife" / "Heroes" / "Boys Keep Swinging" / "Ashes To Ashes" / "Fashion" / "China Girl" / "Loving The Alien" / "This Is Not America" (feat. The Pat Metheny Group) / "Absolute Beginners" / "When The Wind Blows" / "Never Let Me Down" / "I Can't Read" / "You've Been Around" / "Strangers When We Meet" / "Dead Man Walking" / "Seven" / "Slip Away" / "Days" / "Where Are We Now?"

So what did I miss? What would you have chosen? And how the hell could I have picked "When The Wind Blows" over a dozen other songs? I await your responses...

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