The greatest hook in pop music, according to David Bowie
You don’t really think of David Bowie as the kind of artist who looked for the catchiest tunes imaginable whenever he made a record.
He followed his bliss down to his final days, and even though Blackstar is one of the most important farewells in music history, it’s not exactly the best platform for songs to appear on the hit parade. He was far more content to make records with a lot more depth to them, but he did always keep his ears open for when he had a piece of solid gold on his hands as well.
I mean, no one gets into this business not trying to be successful, and looking at Bowie’s track record in the early 1970s, he was coming out with the most oddball hooks that anyone had ever heard. You could sing along to tunes like ‘Starman’ and ‘Changes’, but the chord changes always had a few bizarre left turns in between them. Even the catchiest tune he ever wrote, ‘All The Young Dudes’, has a bar of ¾ thrown in for good measure in between both parts of the chorus.
That’s the kind of approach that Bowie felt most comfortable with doing, but the best moments of his career usually came when he didn’t have the traditional rock and roll setup. The glam rock period is still untouchable, but when he started to dissect what it meant to have a pop hit, things started to get a lot more interesting when he started toying with song construction on Station to Station.
‘The Thin White Duke’ might have been a little too sinister for most people to take in, but when Bowie travelled to Berlin, he had one person in mind to get the sounds he wanted: Brian Eno. Tony Visconti and Bowie were meant for each other when they began working together, but after listening to Roxy Music, Bowie knew there was something there that no one had ever touched on before.
Eno may have been happy to be breaking new ground, but Bowie was more interested in what he could with only a few notes when working on Roxy Music’s first few records, saying, “He’ll hate me for saying it but the person who is better at hooks than almost anyone is Brian Eno, and the solo on ‘Virginia Plain’ is probably one of the greatest three-note hooks in the history of pop.” But that kind of simplicity has always been Eno’s strong suit whenever he gets into the studio.
He wasn’t claiming to be one of the greatest keyboardists in the world whenever he made a new record. The whole point was to help create a vibe in the room that translated onto the tape, and even if a little riff that he played only lasted for a few seconds, he was the one harnessing those few seconds and put it in just the right place when it came time to construct a song from the ground up.
And that kind of mentality continued once he moved on to make his ambient albums. Music for Airports isn’t meant to be an album that people listen to for the hooks, but if you hear the subtle intricacies of what he’s doing behind the scenes, it’s all about letting the music dictate where the piece is going, whether that means staying on the same chords for the right amount of time or having that one note come in to change the dynamic of the entire tune.
So while Eno doesn’t claim to have a master’s degree in what rock and roll songs should sound like, Bowie always saw him as a fellow adventurer whenever they worked on a project. Neither of them knew where the piece was going every time they performed, but half of the fun was being able to track it down in the studio and see what they could bring out of each other in the studio.
