david bowie

Record #831: Iggy Pop – The Idiot (1977)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Iggy Pop lost himself for a while in the mid ’70s. His heroin addiction had proven too large a beast to manage, leading to the breakup of The Stooges in 1974. He tried his hand at a few musical ventures, auditioning to replace Jim Morrison in The Doors and to join KISS. Both were as unsuccessful as his stints in rehab.

In 1976, he reached out to his friend David Bowie, battling his own addictions, for help. The two moved in together into a Château near Paris and Bowie offered to produce an album for him. The resulting record, The Idiot, stripped away the proto-punk fury of Pop’s previous band in favor of Krautrock-influenced electronic textures—a sound that Iggy would describe as “James Brown mixed with Kraftwerk.”

In that way, The Idiot isn’t just a great record in Iggy’s catalog, but it’s also the spiritual prequel to Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy.

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Record #752: David Bowie – Lodger (1979)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I received a great kindness the other day.

Some months back, my friend Billy commented on one of my posts about David Bowie and we got to talking about his Berlin Trilogy. I mentioned that I had never been able to find a copy of Lodger, the third (and perhaps oddest) in the run and put the conversation out of my mind.

But not Billy.

A few days ago, he showed up at my wife’s shop with a copy for her to give me. That is generous enough, but it went even deeper. As it turns out, many years ago, he had given away his record collection when he came to faith, and when he found out that I was missing this record, he tracked down the friend to whom he had gifted his records so that he could fill the gap in my collection.

That’s a rare gift, and in most cases, the music itself would be overshadowed by that generosity. But Lodger is just as odd and meandering as the tale that brought it to me.

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The Worst Debuts From Great Bands

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

There’s a certain art to a good debut.

On the one hand, the debut has to be captivating enough that it can stand as a self sufficient statement on its own. On the other, there has to be enough untapped potential to keep future releases from getting stale. It’s generally a bad idea to just keep releasing the same record over and over again.

But sometimes, even great artists whiff it at their first at-bat. In fact, some of the artists responsible for some of the most gorgeous music ever started their careers with albums that barely have even have a glimmer of what they would go on to create.

Disclaimer: not every album on this list is bad per se. They just fail to offer any sort of representation of what the band would be capable of.

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Record #480: David Bowie – Let’s Dance (1983)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

let's dance.jpgBy the beginning of the 80s, David Bowie had been through enough career turns to make the most accomplished musicians dizzy. He had cut his teeth with Dylan-esque space folk before moving onto theatric art pop, glam rock, plastic soul, sci-fi disco, and harrowing Krautrock.

There wasn’t a lot of space that Bowie hadn’t already explored. So he set his sights on the best dang pop a man could create.

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Record #359: David Bowie – Blackstar (2016)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald
black star

Death has a funny way or altering an artist’s work. Often when a musician dies close to the release of an album, listeners pore over the lyric sheets as if with a magnifying glass, instilling even the most circumstantial phrases with a sense of gravitas the artist didn’t intend. Joy Division’s Closer will forever be heard through the filter of Ian Curtis’ suicide. Johnny Cash’s American V: Hundred Highways will forever feel like a sage elder handing down his last piece of wisdom.
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In the same way, it is impossible to separate Blackstar from Bowie’s death.
 In this case, however, that’s by design. David Bowie knew he was dying. He knew this would be his last album. And it is just as mercurial and forward thinking an album as the man was himself. Nearly fifty years after releasing his debut, it would have been perfectly acceptable to release a sort of retrospective sounding disk, echoing any of his past versions: Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, The Man Who Fell to Earth, or even the blue-suited dancefloor master that dominated the 80s. But Bowie has always been one to sidestep expectations, and releasing a genre-stretching magnum opus two days before his death is the perfect Bowie move.
The sounds on here run the gamut from dark jazz with ominous saxophones and skittering drums to to frenetic rock and roll, coated with the occasional Broadway dramaticism. Girl Loves Me pairs industrial bass thuds with one of the strangest melodies Bowie has ever sung (and the most surreal lyrics–“where the fuck did Monday go?”). I Can’t Give Everything Away waxes melodramatic over an electronic pop beat. There are shades of Berlin’s fierce adventurism and Ziggy’s theatricality, but this is largely new territory for Bowie. And if anyone can use their impending death to usher in a new period of their work, it’s David Bowie.

Record #121: David Bowie – Low (1977)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

low

The way the story goes, after years of commercial success and a crippling drug addiction, Bowie left L.A. and moved to Berlin to get clean and make weird music with Brian Eno (the three albums would come to be called the Berlin Trilogy).
And in the face of Young Americans and Station to Stations’ plastic soul, Low is entirely unprecedented and off-kilter.
On Low, The Man Who Fell to Earth strips off any pretense of humanity and indulges in the song of his people. Synthesizers beep and blip in jarring patterns, angular guitars stab jaggedly, and Bowie sings multitrackedly with himself, all Bowies singing with an exaggerated vibrato that swells and crescendos in inhuman rhythms (see: “Sound and Vision”).
Brian Eno’s presence is strongly felt, whether in his contributions or in his influence on Bowie. The songs on side one are avant-garde free-for-alls with obtuse arrangements free of the tyranny of the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure, where side two is filled with “more” experimental, mostly voiceless, electronic pieces.
The most notable of these pieces is the eastern-tinged droning “Warzsawa,” with a theme written by a four year old and a vocal segment featuring one hundred and ten David Bowies. There’s also the electronic wash of “Art Decade,” the minimalist staccato pound of “Weeping Wall”, and the ambient “Subterraneans,” all of which were described by Bowie as attempts to show the despair of a post-war Europe (which might explain why my wife asked, “Why’s David Bowie so sad?”).
Combined with the angular chaos of the first side (which, amazingly, was made while he was getting OFF of cocaine), side two creates a record that, while critically acclaimed, was clearly NOT David Bowie as usual. In fact, my old roommate once told me that Low was the only David Bowie album he liked, to which I responded, “then you don’t like David Bowie.”