The 1970s band David Bowie called his greatest: “One of the best”
There was no way that David Bowie was ever staying in the same place for too long.
He was the perfect chameleon of rock and roll, and even if he didn’t have a flawless discography by any means, he liked the idea of his career being a tapestry of different sounds instead of someone who just found their signature and stuck with it. Being adventurous was half the fun for him whenever he was playing, but he felt that some of the best musicians that he ever worked with came when he had a bit of a genre pivot.
That’s not to say that his mainline band wasn’t still one of the greatest of all time. There isn’t a single soul that would have been able to appreciate his glam-rock period without Mick Ronson, and even aside from the musicians he worked with, his producers like Tony Visconti seemed to be one of the few people who knew what Bowie was going for before he seemed to realise it. Everyone he worked with was as interested in where the music was going as he was, but the best part of Bowie was how unpredictable he was.
No one would have expected the same guy who introduced himself to the world with vaudeville pop tunes to eventually make ‘The Jean Genie’, nor was the same guy who branded himself as a rock and roll alien expected to make strange post-rock tunes. But even if Bowie was looking to change things up with every other song he put out, there were those odd times where he would make full-on tributes to the genres he loved.
Pin Ups might be one of the least-loved Bowie albums in his discography, but it does show his roots as a lover of old-school psychedelic rock and pop songs. That was at least the start of him wanting to make more retrospective music, but even when he latched onto trends that were happening in the moment, like drum ‘n’ bass, he seemed to have a real knack for it when he made tunes like ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’.
But in terms of raw fun, Young Americans is still one of the greatest times you can have with a Bowie record. Let’s Dance might be the acknowledged moment where he got to become the world’s biggest superstar for a little while, but his adoption of Philly soul is one of the most pleasant surprises of his career. No one would have expected him to make this turn at the height of Diamond Dogs, and ‘The Starman’ could only claim to make a great album because of the people he was working with.
Even though he had a lot of love for every musician he worked with, Bowie felt that the Young Americans lineup was one step above what he was used to, saying, “Looking back, it was pretty good white, blue-eyed soul. At the time, I still had an element of being the artist who just throws things out unemotionally. But it was quite definitely one of the best bands I ever had. Apart from Carlos Alomar, there was David Sanborn on saxophone and Luther Vandross on backing vocals. It was a powerhouse of a band.”
Also, I imagine getting John Lennon to write and perform on one of the songs didn’t hurt, but the main draw of the album is hearing Bowie shift his voice just a little bit. He was already a powerhouse of a vocalist when he was singing tunes like ‘Five Years’, but getting the chance to work off of Vandross made for some of the most refreshing songs that he had ever made, especially on the title track.
No one could have known that this was a wave goodbye to danceable music at the time, but even when he was transitioning into a different sonic identity, Bowie still knew how to give his fans a good time. ‘The Thin White Duke’ was only a few months away after this album came out, but after giving us some of the best glam rock ever made, ‘The Starman’ knew how to throw one hell of a party on vinyl.
