Diamond Dogs (and PinUps too, I guess)

I’m listening to all of David Bowie’s studio albums while we’re all mostly staying inside. My thoughts about David Bowie and Space Oddity are here. The Man Who Sold The World is here. Hunky Dory is here. Ziggy Stardust is here. Aladdin Sane is here.

Before I start with Diamond Dogs, I suppose I may as well get PinUps out of the way. I did not enjoy listening to this record. I understand these are probably songs that Bowie was in to during his formative years in the 1960s. It sounds very garage rock. It includes covers of songs by The Yardbirds, Pink Floyd, The Who, The McCoys, among others. But it was just so nondescript. They were just songs, one right after the other. Nothing that I would go back to. The weakest track on the previous album, Aladdin Sane, was a cover of a Rolling Stones song. Perhaps not the wisest decision to make a whole album full of mediocre covers.

But on to better things! Diamond Dogs is the first album in this exercise that a) I haven’t listened to yet and b) unconditionally love. It’s a change from the full-on glam rock of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane to something that’s familiar, yet different. The glam rock elements are there — “Rock ’n’ Roll With Me” and “Diamond Dogs” — but there’s songs on here that are also more theatrical. And Bowie started to incorporate some soul and funk influences as well. It all culminates into one of my favorite listening experiences.

One thing I’ve noticed through this point in Bowie’s career is how he’s drawn to dystopian themes. Ziggy Stardust is a rock god would-be savior of a doomed world. Space Oddity dreamed of a better world while quite literally singing about everyone’s impending destruction (“Planet Earth is doomed and there’s nothing I can do”). Diamond Dogs contains fragments from a planned musical/rock opera based on George Orwell’s 1984 (thanks Wikipedia and Genius!), and Bowie launches right into the post-apocalypse in the spoken-word first track “Future Legend”. “Diamond Dogs” describes dystopian ultra-violent Mad Max hooligans.

From there the record goes into one of the best things I’ve heard so far, the “Sweet Thing”/”Candidate”/”Sweet Thing (Reprise)” triptych. It’s epic and hazy, quiet and loud.

That goes into the (relatively) weakest track on the album, “Rebel Rebel”. Looking back at the album as a whole, the song stands out as an obvious “oh shit we need a single on this thing”.

The back half of the album shows off Bowie’s funk and soul influences, but being Bowie at this stage of his career, the songs still have a backdrop of dystopia and doom. These songs are more obviously cribbed from the abandoned 1984 musical (If you don’t think “Big Brother” and “1984” as song titles are dead giveaways, well I don’t know what else to tell you).

All of this makes for an incredibly fulfilling listen. This album definitely will definitely get repeat listens for me.

Next up — 1975’s Young Americans.