This is a tricky question because Bowie changed his style frequently. He had an R&B, electronic, rock, and disco phase in the '70s alone. The commonalities were always his gorgeous voice and some of his lyrical themes.

IMO, you can't go wrong with: Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Station to Station, and Low.

His later works are more hit-or-miss. I wouldn't start with Blackstar - because I think it's too stark and meditative for someone looking to get into Bowie. But Earthling, Heathen, Reality, Hours, and The Next Day all have their moments. Reality is probably the one to get -- that was his first "farewell" album.

The Next Day is a good modern intro album for Bowie. The Stars (Are Out Tonight) is an amazing single.

Space Oddity, Ashes to Ashes, Modern Love, Heroes, Under Pressure (with Freddy Mercury and Queen), ...

As for movies: The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hunger, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Labyrinth,...

And you should try to see the German movie Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo as his artistic presence plays a very important part in the movie.

I wore out my "Peter & The Wolf" cassette tape as a five-year-old.

Today sucks.

The Lazarus video is bad ass. He bids goodbye in one of his "Station to Station" outfits (from a time when he almost died from drug use; he claimed to never remember making that album).

I kind of wonder whether James Murphy's participation on Blackstar prompted the LCD Soundsystem reunion. He played on a few tracks. Seems like he (and other musicians) must have known. Tony Visconti confirmed he knew, at least.

I'm also surprised how "under wraps" the news has been. He made a public appearance a few months ago - looking handsome as ever. There's been no TMZ bombshells or anything. It's actually refreshing how appropriate the coverage has been.

Same day my dog of 12 years died. Needless to say this was not good weekend.

Today is a lot like how it was when Lennon died.

Echos of the Past Reawoken



Same here. When my wife and I bought our house a few years ago, a friend of mine helped me repaint our Sun room a sky or Carolina blue. He had a mix of stuff he liked like Hunky Dory, The White Album, and Abbey Road mixed with some random songs from CCR, The Band, Dylan, and Lynyrd Skynard, bands I liked. I realized I had never really heard the whole album outside of Changes, and a few of the other songs sporadically on the radio and at parties.

I realized I had never given him much of a chance and searched out the touchstone of my youth, former Village Voice music critic, Robert Christgau for his take on the album.



Then I perused his other writings on Bowie and came across this written on the HD tour before Ziggy Stardust broke him in America.



http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/news/nd720929.php

I don't know how to explain to the kids what it was like back in the 1970's and early 1980's. There was no internet. If music or movies really spoke to you, most were treated as an ostracized weirdo like Kurt Cobain or Tim Burton. Robert Christgau in the VV and Pauline Kael film critic for The New Yorker spoke to many interested in these mediums out in the hinterlands through their local public library.

I don't know if people listen to REM anymore, but critics like Robert Christgau championed artists like them. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, the music world was very New York centric and Christgau tried to democratize and open it up to the rest of the nation with his Pazz and Jop polls (a typo that stuck) of nationwide music critics which started in 1971. By the time REM was breaking on the national scene it was not quite as New York centered and places like Minneapolis and Athens, GA were recognized as being as important as San Francisco and the Mersey sound in the 1960s and Punk in England in 1975-76. Seatle would be another origin of reinvention or revolution later in the decade.




Rock critics like Christgau, LB ("Philip Seymour Hoffman's character in Almost Famous"), Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh and countless others championed artists like Bowie, Springsteen and Marley. Avatar producer Jon Landau and director Cameron Crowe came out of this group.

Since I dredged up that lyric, I thought I would point out that I have always had trouble deciphering lyrics or hearing exactly what the artist sings. In the above song, I always thought it was "..it starts with an earthquake, virgin snakes." Later I always thought it was "jellybean, vermouth..."

So, when I started high school, and I began listening to the local rock station. Whenever "Suffragette City" played I would sing along with what I thought were the lyrics. I finally asked someone at school who was into Bowie, what is the title of that song that goes "You're so fuckin' conceited" since I thought that might be the title. I was also suprised they were allowed to play it with FCC rules. They looked at my like I was from Mars. Then I started singing the lyrics, "oh don't lean on me man 'cause you can't afford the ticket, you're so fuckin' conceited." They were like that is Suffragette City. I was like why is it called that? They explained that was the title and the words I thought I heard he was singing were Suffragette City.

I started understanding the world around me just after Bowie blew up with Ziggy. It was post The Beatles breaking up. I was into the Raspberries, because I was five and they sounded the most like The Beatles. Glam rock and sexual ambiguity was very scary to a mid-western Kansas kid in the early 1970s. He really did seem like a man from outer space or an alien. I didn't undersand his constant shifting personalities for each new album, until later in the decade when I was older. At the time, I didn't really care for his music which now many consider his peak or at least comparable to his earlier output. I didn't care for the singles like "Fame", and "Fashion" when they came out, but later grew on me. "Young Americans" might be his best single and I hated it at the time.

Radio at the time was balkanizing into classic rock, urban, and pop formats. The integration of the late sixties and early seventies was being resegregated for the coming Reagan Revolution and the rise of talk radio on the AM. If you wanted something safe and comforting Bowie was not for you. He was constantly reinventing himself and incorporating new musical styles which at times he had not yet mastered or was even proficent. So expectations of his output were dependant on how much slack you were willing to give him for trying something he hadn't quite figured out. I didn't at the time, but later and now appreciate his effort to grow and change with his interests. His attempt to take his audience along with him is admirable.

I have a hard time seperating his love of metallic music and sound which came out in the late 1970s and Tin Machine phase with his folky roots which came out in his early 70s output and sporadically from time to time later. He seemed to ebb and flow between trying to make a human connection with his lyrics and sound, then reverting to a more remote communication through the sounds of machines and technology. Many times it left me cold.

As I get older, I find it shocking how young artists like Dylan, Bowie, and others were when they would make a song about reminiscence or nostalgia. For instance, Bob Seeger's "Night Moves" album was a staple in the Midwest growing up. The first two songs are about a man barely in his 30s looking back a decade or so earlier at his life and comparing it to the present. As a teenager, it sounded like Satchel Paige reminiscing about the Negro Leagues.





On the openig track when I first listened to it, at the time 31 seemed really old. Listening in the back of the car as my parents drove, as a pre-teen I thought "wow, she sounds like an old hag." Only as I started college did I relate more to the song and its encapsulation of the tension between the dichatomy of trying to grow up and not necessarily grow old. There is a difference which is difficult to understand when you have little reference.

On the title track, Seeger did a great job of evoking looking back wistfully with just a few words and his voice in the openig moments of the song. I wonder how he would think about it now looking back. 31 is really more like the 4th of July, if you make it to 80 or 90. There is too much fatalism in rock and roll when artists turn 30 as they finally stare into the abyss and start to acknowledge they no longer feel immortal.

When you are young a few years is a big chunk of time. A seemingly different period of your life, "oh that was back in middle school", if you are a junior in high school. A decade seems like an eternity, because in your frame of reference that is most of your conscious lifetime.

A year is now the equivalent of a season, when I was a kid. A decade is the equivalent of a few years. As another contemporary of Bowie's once sang, "Time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future.."

Which is where Bowie and Rock intertwined in the early 1970s. Rock & Roll was no longer a fad or phase. It was no longer considered just teen music. It was now the dominant form of popular music. It had been mostly optimistic and looking forward in its first decade but by the mid to late 60s had grown darker and was more complex. How was it going to navigate maturity?

Bowie's response was to constantly reinvent himself and explore dance music, electro, and whatever interested him in the moment. Many times it was something the masses would glom onto a few years later. Bowie along with his fellow glam mate Bryan Ferry (at least their personas) personified the hedonism that would become prevalent later in the decade.

The 1970's were the Great Dissolutionment. In the US, the public was dealing with the repercussions of Watergate and the failed Vietnam War. The rest of the country got a glimpse into what the South felt after losing the Civil War or the WWI veterans returning to peace time on both sides of the war. Instead of looking inward into our collective failings and faults the majority escaped into drugs and alcohol which reached their highest per capita consumption rates in the the mid 1970s. Disco and other forms of music were other acceptable ways of escaping reality.

In th UK, the loss of the Empire and the resulting loss of prestige and resources brought about a weak economy by the 1970s. Youth had no future as far as they could tell, which was why Punk exploded and seemed like it might incite a revolution or at least a rebellion.

Bowie was too old and too established to be seen as a punk. However, he could see and feel the desperation the next generation was facing when he wrote what I think is his best song.



It is confusing because the narrator is falling down drunk. Yet, it hints at classism, declining economic prospects, the strength of tribal identification, sexual ambiguity, and other hazards facing the next generation. It is brilliant at how it evokes so many feelings in so few words. It is a time capsule to a certain time and a certain feeling whenever one hears it. It is an elegiac ode to an uncertain future when written, and a time gone by now.

Returning to Robert Chrisgau, this is what he wrote about Brian Wilson's long lost rumored masterpiece, Smile.



http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_arti ... ian+wilson

Now with Bowie's passing I can't help but think the bold section above could be a stated about Bowie's talent when he gave "All the Young Dudes" away to a band on the verge of breaking up Mott the Hoople. He had such a surplus of talent and ideas in the early 1970s he was willing to hand over a certain hit to give a struggling band a lifeline. Without his help that band would not have gone on to have such classic albums as "All...Dudes", "Mott" and "The Hoople."

I can't think of a more fitting coda for the man's talent, his legacy, and his generousity.

A posted a bunch of tribute cartoons on my blog if you're interested:

http://ventrellaquest.com/2016/01/12/da ... -tributes/

Dale Griffin, the drummer for Mott the Hoople, the band which turned the Bowie-penned "All the Young Dudes" into a radio hit, has died at the age of 67.



http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35342699

Dale Griffin had been in poor health for years. He couldn't play the reunion shows in 2009, only the encores. Martin Chambers had to fill in. Dale was probably the most screwed by the demise of Mott. His death while still sad, was not shocking. I'd been expecting it since I heard he wasn't well enough to play the full concerts.

Apparently, they are going to release another Bowie album in 2017 of unreleased material.

RIP


Bowie always was a master of marketing/finance.

Master of marketing???? Let me remind you...

"Produced to raise money for the Live Aid famine relief cause, 'Dancing in the Street' topped the UK charts for four weeks, and reached number seven in the United States."

Not bad for a cover song.

Not bad for two closet homosexuals.

Algren

I'm glad tree and a half is here. He's really brought KJ's humour level up to 1996.

who da hell is tree and a half? old member?

I have no idea, but he posted above. He/she seems more interesting/knowledgeable than most on here.