David Bowie, Part II.

Yes, I've put up a top 5 of Bowie already,
but it was just a first top five, I mean, my Best of Bowie mix is 60 songs long! There are around 560 songs in my actual Bowie playlist, so imagine how difficult it was to cut out the other 500.

Well, in some cases, it wasn't hard. His cover of God Only Knows certainly isn't going on there, neither would most of Never Let Me Down (but I'm not too opposed to it), and I had a rule of no Tin Machine (but i would have put You Belong In Rock N Roll on there in a heartbeat). But still, he's got, what, 25 albums? Yes, i've said it before, but every time i listen to Bowie, I wish he had finished the inevitable trilogy of the early 00's.

Anyways, here are the next top 5 Bowie songs, to constitute a top 10, I imagine.


1. Red Sails (from Lodger)

The "Berlin" Trilogy (only Heroes was made in Berlin, natch) is noted for it's ground breaking, genre bending oddities. But what is truly the most fun about a lot of the trilogy is just how darn Goofy it can be! Lodger hold the most ridiculousness, and while some of it can be grating (Yassassin, I'm looking at youuuu), Red Sails proves that he can stretch his pleated pants over odd and catchy, and still retain a bit of the ground breakingness that permeated Low and Heroes. Granted, Lodger wasn't as Neumusik night and day, but Lodger has a different motive, that being a certain travel. The idea of travel suits Bowie well, being such a "chameleon" and all, and a lot of the songs have a gait to them. Move On sounds like it's on a train, Look Back In Anger sounds like a hard run, and Yassassin sounds like a jazz-handed sprint. Red Sails is a montage of sleek jets throughout time, and speed of sounds to the hinterland on a hoverboat dressed like Pierrot.

2. Memory of A Free Festival Parts One and Two, a single from Space Oddity.

There was a time when I was obsessed with finding as many songs as I could that had an ending like Hey Jude, with that kind of chord changes, and the whole rave-up quality. There are quite a few of those kind of songs, and they're often at the end of an album. Memory of A Free Festival is probably my favorite of these songs, maybe because of it's unabashed happiness. Young Bowie is painting a picture of a wonderful day, with all his friends, with free love, and at the end, they all gather around and apparently have the best trip ever, because, after all, "the sun machine is coming down, and we're gonna have a party."

Woah-ho-ho, indeed.

3. Space Oddity (1979 New Version)

Bowie did the first look back in his career when Scary Monsters came around. Not only did he resurrect the supposed first song he ever wrote (Tired of my life turned into It's No Game, more or less), he continued the story of his second most famous character, Major Tom (Ashes to Ashes). I can't say what prompted him to more or less cover his own song, but this new version of Space Oddity beats the original to a bloody pulp. This version is sparse and rife with between the lines anguish. Bowie's reading of the song seems like he's forcing himself to stand up at the mic and deliver the song, but the music behind it tells the real story. At the "lift-off" part of the song, usually full of weird noises goofily mimicking real space travel, the new version is completely silent. And not for a short amount of time, it's at least 15 seconds of pure silence, and it seems like it stretches on for hours. When the song kicks back in, the amount of relief you feel is the most masterful manipulation music can give you. At the end of the song, the outro stretches on and on, and it isn't that hard to imagine it going on forever, just like Major Tom, floating endlessly in space.

4. I Have Not Been To Oxford Town, from 1.Outside.

1.Outside is often insulted and placed in the lump of 90's Bowie, which for most people is almost as hard to listen to as 80's Bowie. The problem people give is that Bowie is "trying to hard," which I disagree with, as he'd learned his lesson not to do that with Never Let Me Down. Instead, he's pushing himself, trying new things to keep it interesting, have fun maybe. I feel like all of Bowie's 90's work can be summed up with the Outside song A Small Plot of Land, a free jazzy improv epic, which surely would have felt like a release for the parts of Bowie who don't want to embrace the single format.

Yet while people say that 1.Outside never embraced the pop single format, they're wrong, because right in the middle of the non-linear gothic drama hyper-cycle is I Have Not Been To Oxford Town, a wonderful song with a great hook and no over the top accompaniment. It's simple, and very pretty.

5. This List Is Impossible To Make, I Love David Bowie Too Much, But I Guess If I Really Have To I Will Pick "Lady Grinning Soul," Because I Love This One A Lot, but like others a lot, too.

I have no idea why Bowie has never performed this live. That's pretty much all I have to say about this song, because it's breathtaking beauty stands alone.

Here's what Bowie said about it: "A song will put you tantalisingly close to the past, so close that you can almost reach out and touch it. The sound of ghosts again."

Wow.

BONUS CUT: Without You, from Let's Dance. The lost fourth-single. It's not lost, it just got ignored after the big punches of Let's Dance, China Girl, and Modern Love. But Without You is the real Bowie song, with David singing sweetly, yet powerfully, of love's near defeat (it ends happily).





Oh, and don't forget this.

Bowie. Pt. 1

Okay, so I'm all about Bowie, yeah?

But push comes to shove, I'll make a top 5. It was pretty hard, but I've done it, and I think the results are pretty groovy.

I mean, as far as I'd use that word. They're all good, though. I mean, duh, it's Bowie.

And I'm pretty nutty about Bowie. I actually purchased the Tin Machine albums!

I didn't buy Never Let Me Down, though. I'm not that nutty.

Anyways, here's the list... in CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER:

1. Conversation Piece (from the Prettiest Star single from 1970, later released on the Rykodisc reissue of the Space Oddity album, and even later re-recorded for the unreleased Toy album. But this is the original.)

This is one of the Bowie songs I'm lucky to hear. The Rykodisc reissues are out of print now, and a lot of them had some killer choice bonus tracks, this one included. This song I like though for more than just being a deep cut. It doesn't ever force itself on you, it's quiet, but still intense in it's own way. But it doesn't need to be loud, if anything, that would contradict everything the song is about. As for that, it's a wonderful case of one of Bowie's "character" songs, songs he wrote while inhabiting a role. Of course his best known role is Ziggy, but as a character, Ziggy is pretty boring and undescribed. Bowie's earlier characters (pre Space Oddity) were pretty silly and too goofy to really take seriously for more than a laugh, which isn't to say they didn't show any creativity, they just weren't really gelling completely yet. Conversation Piece, I believe, is the first really great character song. The character is still quirky, but isn't from another planet. If anything, he's more human than almost any other character Bowie got into (until Hours, when the character became Bowie himself). This man's story is told so simply and directly that you can't help but be friends with him. Also, this song has the least-irritating key change in recent memory.


2. Candidate (Original Demo, released with the Diamond Dogs anniversary release)

While most of the bonus tracks on the Diamond Dogs reissue were pretty lame, Candidate makes the whole set worth buying (also, the phat picture of Bowie and Bourroughs). This demo sounds nothing at all like the Candidate that ended up on Diamond Dogs, but from the first deep drum hits, you know it's destined to be even more epic. It surely doesn't disappoint. What's really puzzling is how Bowie took two lines "i'll make you a deal" and "we'll pretend we're walking home," and made them into the album version of Candidate. Also, rather than ruining it, Bowie's semi off-key vocals make the song even more unnerving.


3. Can You Hear Me? (released on Young Americans, 1975)

This song has a number of nostalgic reasons for being on the list. For one, it was one of the first Bowie songs I heard, because it was on one of my Mom's killer cassette mixes she used to make (they had great titles, too, like "Olive View" and "Harry Woo's Bar Mitzvah" and "Isn't We.") The other reason it's important is because it's on Young Americans, which is the first Bowie album I consciously heard. Let me tell you the story:
It was 8th grade, and I was totally bored with everything I had to listen to. I would puke if I listened to anymore Peter Gabriel, I just wasn't in the mood for any more Pumpkins, and I was so bummed I couldn't even listen to the Beatles. So I went to my parent's CD shelf, which was pretty monstrous. After perusing it for a while, I saw Bowie, and I thought "Ohhh, that Bowie guy. I've heard his name, I think he did that Fill Your Heart song I like." At this point, I didn't even know Bowie wrote Space Oddity or China Girl (yeah, I know Iggy Pop wrote it, too. Wah, wah.) So I grabbed the three CDs they had: Hunky Dory, Station to Station, and Young Americans.

So I put them in my three-disc changer in random order and hit play. And with that first drum fill into Young Americans, I was never the same. Seriously.

Anyways, Can You Hear Me? is probably Bowie's best attempt at the Soul he was going for at the time. It's got the most feeling, and doesn't sound too coked out. It takes it's time, and by the end, you're hammered with feeling.

4. Teenage Wildlife (Released on Scary Monsters, 1980).

My biggest pet-peeve with Bowie releasing new albums is that every time it happens, people say "his best since Scary Monsters." That hasn't been true since Buddha of Suburbia, and it's unfair to every album. Shit, even Let's Dance is a good album, it's just been tainted by popularity. And, I must admit, I don't agree with all the hype Scary Monsters has. While it's got some of his best songs, it's also got some total yawnsville-throwaways.

Not so this. This song is a spiritual sequel to "Heroes," but takes the lyrics from mythical to more down-to-earth. It's pretty bleak on the lyric side, but the music is absolutely soaring and hopeful. Which makes the lyrics lifted out of just being a total bummer dirge. There's a great moment when Bowie riffs on the bands starting to copy his glam-phase, even including a great bit of dialogue with himself. The song is long, but uses it to the greatest. By the time it gets to the end, with Bowie screaming "Wiiiiiiiiild!," you're so fucking into the song you might as well cry. Or kill yourself. I mean, seriously, it's that good. If this list was made by order of how much i'm into it, this song might have been number one.

5. Untitled No. 1 (from Buddha of Suburbia, 1993).
This one comes from Bowie's most horrifically unknown album. It was released in 1993, when Bowie was still riding high from Black Tie, White Noise. But it was marketed as a soundtrack (which it isn't), and then got totally fucked by Bowie's label folding. This is really sad, because Buddha is seriously one of Bowie's best albums. It's a great precursor to Outside (even containing an early version of Strangers When We Meet), but mixes the wild experimentation of the later album with the beautifully tunesmithing of the earlier. And right in the middle of it, wedged between beautiful instrumentals and off-kilter but still gorgeous pop songs is Untitled No. 1, the best of the bunch. The song exists in such a different world than ours that I don't even feel qualified to discuss it fully, I'd really just rather have you hear it and travel wherever it takes you. I guarantee you'll enjoy yourself.




Okay, so there's the list. I promise that sometime, I'll return to Bowie again, and go in to other reasons he's awesome. Reasons that you don't already know. So stop making out with your photos of Ziggy and join the front lines in praying that he'll record just one. more. album...