The albums David Bowie described as his “best work”
Although he enjoyed five decades of global renown and retains an immortal legacy approaching the tenth anniversary of his death, David Bowie would be the first to admit that his career was uneven. Many artists who made it big in the 1960s do so with their first album. In Bowie’s case, his eponymous 1967 debut sank like a rock, failing to garner much critical or commercial attention in the UK, let alone overseas.
Bowie knew fully well that his debut was a little incoherent and obscure, but these traits had been a string to the bow of so many contemporaries, such as Marc Bolan and Syd Barrett. It seems the album’s bizarre nursery rhyme whims were a little too much for most people to stomach. “I haven’t much to say about that in its favour,” Bowie said of the album in a past conversation with Q. “Lyrically, I guess, it was striving to be something, the short storyteller. Musically, it’s quite bizarre. I don’t know where I was at. It seemed to have its roots all over the place.”
After his debut album, Bowie took a little while to regroup and restructure his musical outlook. Like a Martian on Earth, he seemed to study popular trends and gradually tailored his musical outlook to contemporary tastes. The tide began to change in 1969 with the release of Space Oddity. Though the album failed to make a huge splash, its like-titled lead single was timed to perfection with the Apollo 11 Moon landings and became Bowie’s first major hit.
The Man Who Sold the World continued to turn the tides before Bowie’s first masterpiece album, Hunky Dory. With this foundational success, Bowie continued on a star-bound trajectory as he crafted his first alter ego in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. As Ziggy Stardust, Bowie defined the burgeoning glam rock scene and crucially broke America.
In most opinion polls, Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust seem to surface as Bowie’s ultimate fan favourites. With enduring accessible highlights like ‘Changes’, ‘Life on Mars?’ and ‘Starman’, it is easy to understand why. Still, though Bowie could afford his three square meals by 1972, his time basking under the limelight was only just beginning.
Even those few who never really took to Bowie’s music would find it difficult to deny the artist’s jaw-dropping scope. Between ‘Starman’ and ‘Black Star’, Bowie treated us to soul, krautrock experimentalism, synth-pop and everything in between to varying degrees of success. Intriguingly, it seemed that the more Bowie rolled the dice, the more successful his output became.
After setting the pace for glam-rock, Bowie began to satiate his soul inclinations in Diamond Dogs and Pin Ups but fully embraced the transition in 1975’s Young Americans. Though the album remains popular among fans, Bowie soon came to despise its pop appeal. Most of all, he “loathed” the sax-laden title track. Fortunately, the soul embrace wasn’t in vain as it cleared the path to a more progressive soul-tinged release, Station to Station.
Station to Station debuted Bowie’s late 1970s persona, The Thin White Duke, and successfully bridged the soul era to the more experimental work of the lauded Berlin Trilogy. Like many seasoned fans, Bowie identified this as his creative peak, even if it wasn’t reflected in his personal life as he struggled with a life-threatening cocaine addiction. “Station to Station and Low,” Bowie said, picking out two personal favourites in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly. “Some of my best work was in those two albums. I understand Hunky Dory and Ziggy; they are indeed a lot more hummable.”
After receiving critical acclaim for his progressive work in the Berlin Trilogy, from Low to Lodger, Bowie began to reconnect with radio-friendly rhythms in Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, landing butter-side-up in 1983 with the danceable classic Let’s Dance. Sadly, this embrace of popular trends led to Bowie’s confessed nadir, which he humorously dubbed his “Phil Collins years”.
Bowie’s biggest discographic regrets arrived after Let’s Dance. “I felt dissatisfied with everything I was doing, and eventually, it started showing in my work,” he told Interview. “Let’s Dance was an excellent album in a certain genre, but the next two albums after that showed that my lack of interest in my own work was really becoming transparent. My nadir was Never Let Me Down. It was such an awful album.”
Released in 1987, Never Let Me Down was an incoherent collection of songs. Although it contained several promising ideas, Bowie’s sonic execution was somewhat misguided. As Bowie later admitted, he was lost and “wasn’t quite sure” what he was “supposed to be doing.”
