88. David Bowie, "Hunky Dory"

 

All David Bowie ever did was cocaine and make great albums and this one is one of his best.  Commenter Stephen had his doubts that Baduizm was the 89th best album of all time - I'm agnostic on the subject, but think he made some good points about the lack of cultural currency - but to my mind there is no doubt that this album could be the 88th best album of all time, maybe even higher.  There are at least two absolute all-time classic songs on this album, "Changes," which you probably can at least fake an attempt at singing, it's so engrained, and "Life on Mars?" (I'm not asking, the song ends in a question mark.)

Let's talk about "Mars" for a second.  If you don't know this song, listen to it right now.  Or even if you do.

I mean, come on, an absolutely beautiful song.  The piano is played by Rick Wakeman, who you might remember from such bands as Yes, on the same piano that was used in "Hey Jude" and "Bohemian Rhapsody."  That is a good piano!  But there's strings and Mick Ronson's guitar and most of all one of the most incredible vocal performances Bowie ever delivered.  The melody is also beautiful, almost perfect, and did Avril Lavigne borrow some of it for her song "Complicated"?  Maybe!  The song has shown up regularly ever since, most recently in the Paul Thomas Anderson's movie Licorice Pizza (and, less happily, when Elon Musk launched his car into space).  The song seems to be about escape, or rather the failure of escape, through movies and TV:

But the film is a saddening bore
For she's lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man, look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man, wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

There are other songs on this album too, I just remembered.  I love "Queen Bitch," which has a great chord progression (borrowed, apparently, from Eddie Cochran's "Three Steps to Heaven" - Bowie giveth and taketh away) and was written as a Velvet Underground tribute (not surprisingly).  "Kooks," which sounds extremely Beatlesy to me but was inspired by Neil Young, was written as a tribute to Bowie's newborn son Duncan (who grew up and has a lively Twitter presence).  "Song for Bob Dylan" is, you guessed it, about Bob Dylan and I guess I'm just now realizing how much of this album is about other artists, just at the time when Bowie was finding his own voice and helping invent glam rock and becoming the genius we all know and love.

There is one oddly out-of-place song, the last one, "The Bewlay Brothers," a vaguely sinister song that sounds like Meddle-era Pink Floyd maybe.  Bowie later confirmed that the song is about his relationship with his schizophrenic half-brother.  But it's fascinating in its own way, just like the rest of this album.

The record didn't sell well out of the gate; it was only after the success of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars that it began to sell.  It's number 88 here, but has been ranked as high a number 3 (on NME's list of the 500 best albums, behind Revolver and The Queen Is Dead, which, ok I guess).  You could do worse!

Is this album in my personal Top 500? Yes.