Happy 66th, Bowie! What's your favorite Bowie album/song?
As Greg mentioned in the now listening thread, today is Bowie's birthday and he's celebrating by releasing a track and announcing a new album due in March. I'm pretty sure everyone hear likes Bowie to some extent so I thought it would be fun to share our favorite albums and songs by the Thin White Duke.
I'm a huge fan of just about everything he's done (I could do without the Tin Machine years), but especially love the Berlin trilogy. So when you get right down to it my favorite of his albums has to be Low. His experiments with electronics on that album where simply genius and every time I listen to it I hear something new.
That said, my favorite song comes from his pop years: Let's Dance's "Cat People (Putting Out Fires)". I tend to listen to this song right before big events, because there is no better song to get me pumped up and ready to take on the world. Tarantino was a genius to use it in Inglorious Basterds.
What about you?
Craig
I'm a huge fan of just about everything he's done (I could do without the Tin Machine years), but especially love the Berlin trilogy. So when you get right down to it my favorite of his albums has to be Low. His experiments with electronics on that album where simply genius and every time I listen to it I hear something new.
That said, my favorite song comes from his pop years: Let's Dance's "Cat People (Putting Out Fires)". I tend to listen to this song right before big events, because there is no better song to get me pumped up and ready to take on the world. Tarantino was a genius to use it in Inglorious Basterds.
What about you?
Craig
Comments
My favourate Bowie story was that you could vote for his songs to be played when he played the Milton Keynes Bowl. The NME got a campaign going and the top song was The Laughing Gnome, Bowie did not see the funny side and refused to play it
Song: Heroes. Perhaps it's cliche, but I find the song, both in concept and performance, simply excellent. Regardless how many times it's used commercially, I find it oddly uplifting.
Listening to Station to Station now. It's right up near the top for me too.
I don't know that I've ever actually heard "The Laughing Gnome". Heard of it of course, but not the song itself. It's on Guvera, though, so I think I need to grab it!
Craig
Album - even more difficult, probably another Berlin era album Heroes
A little OT, but Guvera has Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World, and Before and After Science, all of which are excellent. Bowie fans interested in Eno should start there. I'm not into Eno's ambient stuff, though I know it's supposed to be brilliant, but those four are well worth checking out.
Craig
While I adore so many of Bowie's albums, there's usually a song or two on each that I would've preferred he left off.
The silver and bronze go to Aladdin Sane and Hunky Dory. There's a lot of albums that could nab that bronze spot.
For a song, that obviously gets very tough. "Ashes to Ashes" and "Aladdin Sane" both spring immediately to mind, though how tough it is not to say "Rock 'n Roll Suicide" from The Motion Picture. I totally get what AMClark is saying about Heroes being strangely uplifting... I never get sick of it. It's such a sincere tune. I love the live version of it even more than the studio, which is pretty great itself.
Thank you Guvera.
Craig
Otherwise I agree with those pointing to "Heroes". It remains one of the most uplifting songs after all these years. "Rebel Rebel" is another favorite.
I've only recently started to acquire more of his earlier work in album format, so I can't really comment on that side. The new song is pretty cool.
The Sound + Vision box set, released by Ryko, is probably the first important example of the business of repackaging and rereleasing music: archival tracks, liner notes, deluxe packaging, the slow release of groups of albums over the course of several years. It seems that public knowledge of the rereleases prepared the public for other similar efforts to update labels' backcatalogs.