4 - Hunky Dory
It's still very much character driven, but those characters aren't really related to each other except in the context of "kids" vs "adults." That's what it's all been about so far.
I still don't think there's much subtext here, because the overriding sentiment is "the fact that your generation had to have the fight with the Nazis at all is pretty good evidence that we're garbage animals in general" and it's explicit.
Forget your mind and we'll be free.
This is my wife's least favorite Bowie album, but i think it's fine. The silliness is maybe a little more obvious than before, but i think that's to be expected. Bowie's on record as saying this is the first album he actually got public feedback on; people actually told him this is good stuff. No wonder he kept this lineup and worked the reluctant messiah theme up to a fully coherent concept for the next one. It certainly does seem (even if it is in hindsight) that he'd been doing the same thing the whole time, he just couldn't figure out how to package it up to crack the public consciousness. Who would have thought that actually being a cohesive, straightforward rock band would connect with people? That's real crazy talk.
Ah crap, bottle the curmudgeon woke up. Isn't it possible, seeing as this is your first major label record, that maybe more than 120 people have heard it now. Maybe they saw your albums in actual shops and said "oh i guess he's famous now, i should at least give it a listen" ? It doesn't matter how many critics say this is pretty good stuff if no one can actually see it sitting on the shelf. I don't like being sarcastic and grumpy about it, but yeah it costs millions of dollars to make music available to the masses. Somebody has to have those millions to spend, and they inevitably want it back with interest.
The irony, of course, is that's exactly what Bowie's previous 3 albums have railed against, and he's right on the cusp of becoming the rock idol he's been criticizing and saying he doesn't want to be. We're still miles away from the sellout music he publicly regretted making in the mid to late 80s, but we've finally reached the point where i can't tell if he's doing it on purpose or purposefully not noticing that he's doing it. Still all good songs though. I like all this stuff, even if i can't point to anything in particular. Changing his style and appearance is an integral and intentional part of every one of his albums, probably because the underlying concept is the same: i don't want to find the thing that makes me super famous, but i'm going to keep searching until i do, so here's album number 4.
5 - Ziggy Stardust
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