The 10 worst songs released by David Bowie
There’s a certain spot in the hallowed halls of rock history reserved for David Bowie. While the Thin White Duke changed up his styles more times than most can count, he was always looking for the next thrill in his music, either through different genres or bending the rules of fashion. Though Bowie has given us a goldmine of excellent material, he didn’t get there without having to shovel through some trash along the way.
Throughout Bowie’s extensive discography, there are also a few lowlights that don’t measure up to the massive heights that he already set for himself. Despite some of these songs having a good idea at the outset, not all of them panned out that well, either sounding half-finished or never fully realised.
While it’s easy to forgive something that wasn’t executed properly, there are also a handful of songs that never should have seen the light of day to begin with, either stemming from a bad idea or getting torn apart when they reached the studio. There are also a handful of eras from Bowie’s career that have not aged well, which really shows when you put the contemporary classics next to his heavy hitters.
From his days of ‘selling out’ to his humble beginnings in the world of glam rock, every one of these songs shows Bowie working out what works and what doesn’t. Even though these didn’t pan out, no one could fault Bowie for wanting to take a risk.
The 10 worst songs by David Bowie:
10. ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’
Out of all of Bowie’s mainline albums, Pin Ups has always felt the least necessary. Since Bowie was white hot at the time, his label thought he should do a bunch of covers to help appeal to the American market. While it did make some interesting moments, his cover of this classic Who song sounds like he’s going through the motions.
Across this album, Bowie’s choice of songs is fairly eclectic, taking on lower lights like The Easybeats as well as his own warped rendition of Pink Floyd’s ‘See Emily Play’. When it came time for him to enter his Mod phase, this Who B-side feels like album filler, as Bowie plays the song completely straight.
Though Bowie’s usual schtick might have clicked with the Mod aesthetic in a few ways, hearing him not add anything to a classic song by The Who feels like a real missed opportunity. For a man that exuded musical color in everything he did, this entire track feels like he’s knocking out a couple of tunes with a cover band down the street.
9. ‘Too Dizzy’
Much has been made about Bowie’s drastic turn into pop music during the ‘80s. Although he might have been trying to incorporate different dance textures into his sound, Never Let Me Down is where he hit a wall, with some of the most production jobs of any of his albums. Bowie may have stood by his experiments, but even he could not stand for what he heard on ‘Too Dizzy’.
When looking through the track listing of the final record, Bowie loathed this version of the song and pushed for it not to be included on the final album. Even though it scraped its way onto the tracklisting, you can hear what Bowie was talking about, sounding like a disused radio from a production standpoint, and the snare sounding like a shotgun whenever it goes off.
In retrospect, Bowie professed that these were his ‘Phil Collins years’, which explains why some of the songs featured a lot more style over substance. When Collins went for the sounds of pop, he got ‘Sussudio’, but Bowie’s stab at being contemporary took him straight into a ditch.
8. ‘China Girl’
Many people bring up Let’s Dance as the beginning of Bowie’s sell-out phase. Since he was writing music that was designed to get on the charts, it looked like Starman had abandoned everything that made him interesting in the first place. Though Bowie got the right team in for the job and made a great album by the end of things, ‘China Girl’ was the first sign that things started going wrong.
Released as a promotional single for the album, ‘China Girl’ has aged the worst out of Bowie’s mainline songs, especially when you hear the random sound effects added in for good measure. Despite the questionable sound design choices, the melody is one of the weakest of Bowie’s singles, sounding much more suited to Iggy Pop than Bowie’s disembodied croon.
Since Bowie had all of the greatest producers in the world working with him at the time, how this got onto the final version of the album is anyone’s guess. And since Pop has his own version of this song, this feels like Bowie being a bad karaoke rendition of one of his friends.
7. ‘If I’m Dreaming My Life’
David Bowie has always been known for his eccentric flavors of rock and roll. Across multiple decades, Bowie has shown us different versions of what rock could be, using krautrock, blue-eyed soul, and even dance textures to translate what he’s trying to say. Out of all the adjectives used to describe Bowie, ‘boring’ should never be one of them.
Across most of the album Hours…, Bowie gets in touch with a more mellow style which doesn’t suit him in the slightest. While most of the record has its drawbacks, ‘If I’m Dreaming My Life’ is one of the greater slogs of the record, going on for seven minutes and never getting out of first gear across its runtime.
Though there is a sort of breezy feel to the final version of the record, an easygoing version of David Bowie doesn’t sit well coming from the man who invented the glam rock scene. Bowie was always best at opening our minds to new possibilities, and this song feels like him intentionally kneecapping himself.
6. ‘Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family’
When talking about the best that Bowie has to offer, it goes without saying that his glam period was excellent. After years of honing his craft, everything clicked when Ziggy Stardust fell to Earth, beginning a hot streak that sustained him through the first half of the ‘70s. Towards the end of Diamond Dogs, though, the glam period ends with a bit of an odd snap.
Throughout this album, Bowie notched up one classic track after another, like ‘Rebel Rebel’ and ‘Sweet Thing’, only to have a strange sound loop carry us out at the very end. While the title about the skeletal family certainly warrants a horrible feeling, the whole song is comprised of a solid minute of cutting room floor material before Bowie brings things home with a random looping section.
Since the second half of the album was informed by Bowie’s desire to make a musical about 1984, this could have been a piece of how that album would have been realised. As it stands at the end of Diamond Dogs, it’s the right kind of sound for the wrong situation.
5. ‘Please Mr. Gravedigger’
The early ‘60s were still Bowie’s green period. Before he had written classics like ‘Space Oddity’, Bowie was a relative unknown with an acoustic guitar hoping to write something that resembled a hit. While he was still in the beginning stages of his musical career, the sound of his voice acapella wasn’t how anyone envisioned him starting.
Closing out his technically first album, ‘Please Mr. Gravedigger’ feels more like a scene from a one-man stage play than a song. With the rain serving as his instrumentation, Bowie paints a morbid picture of what will happen when he passes on, advising his gravedigger to take good care of his body. Though the song is meant to have a dark humour to it, it just sounds uncomfortable when you hear it towards the end of what was supposed to be a lighthearted album.
It also doesn’t help that Bowie was nursing a stuffy nose when this song was recorded, which is made abundantly clear towards the end of the song when he starts to get his vocal lost in his nostrils. This may have been intriguing at the time to see what Bowie would go next, but the rest of the song feels ominous coming from a man on his debut album.
4. ‘God Only Knows’
Bowie has always kept a decent track record as a covers artist. Outside of his own warped mind, The Thin White Duke was known to stretch his wings across any artist, covering people as diverse as the Velvet Underground, George Harrison, and Nine Inch Nails over the course of his career. When he started to go into his artsy pop career, though, his take on the Beach Boys didn’t work in his favor.
As opposed to the original Brian Wilson masterpiece, Bowie sounds cold and stoic here, making the whole song seem like an uncomfortable situation between a woman and the stalker who’s looking over her shoulder. While there’s an added sense of drama in Bowie’s voice, this is the polar opposite of what people would have expected from this song.
The Beach Boys original is Brian Wilson breaking love down into its purest form, and Bowie’s version feels like the alternate universe version of that where the narrator trades in love for aggressive lust. While Bowie may have been aiming for something a bit more offputting, it doesn’t make the end results any easier to listen to.
3. ‘Shining Star’
Of all the David Bowie albums, Never Let Me Down is usually reserved for last place. After years of playing up his commercial persona, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, with Bowie going on a world tour sponsored by Pepsi and turning his act into a sideshow parody of itself. Though the singles might not have been that impressive, ‘Shining Star’ is almost shocking in how much of a mess it is.
Coming at this song from a hip-hop angle, Bowie takes a few liberties with his usual songwriting technique here, having a laid-back demeanor in some places and then trading that in for some of the questionable vocal performances of his career. And outside of Bowie’s performance, Mickey Rourke comes in at the last second to sabotage the rest of the song.
While you call what Rourke does rapping if you wanted to, he more or less talks his way through most of this song before Bowie comes back in as if nothing happened. Most of Bowie’s best work has two or more genres working in unison with each other, but this is a car crash of bad creative decisions smashing into each other.
2. ‘Rubber Band’
In a perfect world, the world would have been introduced to David Bowie the minute that ‘Space Oddity’ hit. The song was one of the first perfect songs he ever wrote and set him up perfectly for the space theme he would hit upon when thinking of the Ziggy Stardust character. Before we got in touch with Major Tom, though, Bowie had one album to work through.
Although Bowie’s self-titled record has a few bright spots, ‘Rubber Band’ is one of the most baffling songs to come out of the ‘60s, sounding like the soundtrack to some vaudeville show where the narrator talks about his girlfriend leaving him for another man. While Bowie always went for an unorthodox angle with his music, every decision here just feels weird for the sake of being weird, with a vocal delivery that sounds like he’s giving a recital rather than an authentic performance.
In the years since its release, Bowie would go on to say that he was embarrassed by the album, saying that it just didn’t work and would have preferred if it never came out. Bowie had a lot of growing up to do before he reached prime time, but if this was the only taste of what a young Bowie could do, we would have lost out on some of the best rock music ever recorded.
1. ‘Dancing in the Street’
Everything surrounding ‘Dancing in the Street’ seems like it’s going to be one of the greatest collaborations in the world. After years of rumours about their relationship, David Bowie was finally guesting on a song with Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. The world was waiting with bated breath for two rock giants playing off each other, and the results were…hilarious.
While both Jagger and Bowie had grown up listening to the song ‘Dancing in the Street’, their choice to redo it with an ‘80s flair is one of the most misguided choices of their career. Though both of them bring their A-game in the studio, the production and over-the-top manner of the song is too much of a dose of ‘80s fashion for anyone’s diet.
The song only got worse when they decided to make the music video, making for some unintentional hilarity as they strut around each other and play around in what appears to be an abandoned industrial complex in the middle of Hollywood. ‘Dancing in the Street’ was always meant to be about the innocent side of rock and roll, but this is the kind of music that sounds like it was made by a bunch of dads trying to sound cool.
