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...

Comments

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...

The Natural's Not In It

For nearly seven years on the button, Courtney and I lived on Perch Lake, just outside of Gaylord. Right next to Perch Lake was The Natural Golf Course, eighteen holes that twisted and turned through the best nature that the 45th Parallel could offer. The picture above is the view of the first green, and if you left the wooden bridge to the right and briefly ambled through the woods and over a rusted metal fence, you'd get right to our old driveway. Every now and again, an errant golf ball would appear at the edge of our property, like a single egg laid by an itinerant duck. Of the three major elitist sports -- golf, tennis, skiing -- I golfed because the barrier to entry was pretty low and the interest in golf on my Dad's side of the family was high, from playing the sport to watching it on television on the weekends. As spare clubs were abundant and my growth spurt had yet to overwhelm statistical norms, my grandmother would take prepubescent me to the Roscommon driving ran...

THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Search This Blog