David Bowie's discography, 1 - David Bowie


I'm going to have to tackle this at some point. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon...

... Well, now that it's raining through yet another clump of my increasingly rare days off, i guess i might as well start. If i'm going to go album by album through his entire discography, you might as well hop on at the start and take the whole trip with me.

As far as i know, David Bowie's self titled debut is pretty much gone from our collective consciousness. That's a shame, because it's quite enjoyable.

It's a collection of interesting, sometimes strange, stories and character songs, and i suspect it's exactly the context required for understanding his later career. I mean, so many of his albums are actually David Bowie portraying a character, sometimes fictional sometimes pseudo-(auto)biographical.

It's 60s pop pretty much across the board, but highly literary. That's not to say there's a coherent narrative or theme to any of it, but the songs aren't sing along mottos or messages, it's all very much David Bowie singing. David Bowie the performer, here's what he writes, sings, thinks about, for you to listen to. I don't think he's really trying to communicate anything more than the conflict between the individual and the public; the one verses the many, self vs. other. There is, however, a definite post world war mentality, i'm not sure if it's part of Bowie himself, or just intrinsic to his generational Britishness. We'll see more of it though.

Part of this gigantic listening project is to change my own opinion: i like some of his stuff, hate a few specific things, but a lot of it i just haven't bothered to care about. I thoroughly enjoy this collection of early songs, i  love the arrangements and tunes, i like his theatrical vocal style. We've already established that the psychedelic baroque-pop of the Beatles makes me moderately angry because they didn't seem to actually care about what they were making. I get the complete opposite sense from Bowie, he clearly cared that the actual songs were good. They are. I can't single any one out for being great or terrible, they are all great.

2 - Space Oddity

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