Hunky Dory

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.

My wife is astounded as “Changes” starts playing. This is somehow the same artist who put together “Let’s Dance” and “China Girl.” Her experience with David Bowie started with Let’s Dance, and she had little to no familiarity with Bowie’s 70s output. I was the opposite — I knew Bowie as the Ziggy Stardust guy and the guy who Nirvana covered for Unplugged, but I think I heard “Let’s Dance” a thousand times before someone told me that it was a David Bowie song.

It’s striking to hear an artist do something completely different than what you’ve conditioned yourself to expect. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and sometimes it does. But it is always memorable.

Hunky Dory takes another hard turn away from what Bowie had done in his previous work. The Man Who Sold The World is a blunt heavy instrument. Hunky Dory trades in guitar riffage for piano ballads, a couple of early 70s Neil Young-like meditations (“Kooks”, “Quicksand”), and one where Bowie imagines he’s fronting the Velvet Underground for a spell (“Queen Bitch”).

There’s a lot of highlights here. “Oh! You Pretty Things” makes the pending obsolescence of the human race sound more fun than it should. “Life On Mars?” makes it sound more sad than it should. I hadn’t heard “Life On Mars?” before now, and I’m noting how much I can relate to its narrator, with their wounded idealism and wondering if there’s a better life on a different planet somewhere else.

I probably won’t listen to Hunky Dory all the way through again. There’s songs that I’ll keep in my own personal rotation, but I’m ok with not hearing “Song for Bob Dylan” the rest of my life. But I respect that Bowie had the courage to not put out the same-sounding record over and over again. I wouldn’t have started this fun little project had I not listened to Blackstar a while back and was floored by a) how good it was, and b) how it sounded nothing like the Ziggy Stardust songs or “Under Pressure”. It’s been fun so far to hear how an artist ch-ch-ch-ch-changes over time. (And on that note, I’ll see myself out.)