I was just watching the great live clip of David Bowie performing the industrial album version of Hallo Spaceboy in a club (above). I think it’s super-excellent; physical industrial music up there with the best Nine Inch Nails tracks. And yet I keep reading things that tell me Bowie’s ’90s were full of gross, esoteric records that nobody liked. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I’m gonna say it anyway; Bowie’s ’90s albums are amongst my favourites of his.
It might be because they were coming out as I was getting into him and Earthling’s drum and bass vs metal sounds weren’t far removed from some of my other teenage-gothic-phase records like the stuff on the Spawn/Matrix/Crow soundtracks. But I can’t dismiss this just as nostalgia for a naive appreciation of shit music; when I’d rather watch disc two of his chronological greatest hits dvd than disc one and when I posted the aforementioned video to Facebook, it got a LOT of likes. So let me talk you through his work from the ’90s onward. When I say talk, you know I mean rant, right? Good? Good. Let’s go.
TIN MACHINE - TIN MACHINE 2 & TIN MACHINE - OY VEY BABY
OK, OK. I wouldn’t touch these albums with a barge pole. Everything you have heard is true. But he had just done Labyrinth. That’s gonna take some recovery time.
BLACK TIE, WHITE NOISE
Yeah, OK, so I can’t listen to this as a whole album. The production is very much of it’s 1993 time; lots of bad keyboards, new jack swing influenced beats, that kind of shit. But really, if I was in 1993, this would sound OK in the same way that Justice’s album sounded OK two years ago but now every time I go to play it my ears bleed preemptively. The singles are great though, which isn’t surprising, because this is a commercial pop album and they were pretty uniformly full of filler during this period.
Miracle Goodnight is my favourite off this and the clip is fantastic (they won’t let me embed it so you’re stuck with Lucy Can’t Dance, which is painful). It’s all the things I love about early ’90s pop videos; vague aspirations to being dance music, awful clothes and wanky underdeveloped arty pretentions. Plus a cowboy girl! This album isn’t going to be for everyone, but if, like me, you can find amusement in spinning a Peter Andre record, why not extend that thought process to this?
THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA
OK, it’s a boring album. But it was just a soundtrack, give the guy a break. The TV movie adaptation was crap anyway so he didn’t have much to work with. Great book though.
OUTSIDE
This has a few of my favourite Bowie songs EVER on it. The Pet Shop Boys’ remix of Hallo Spaceboy was the first time I’d heard one of his songs outside of spinning my parents’ record collection - up until then my favourite song had been Breaking Glass from Low. Plus it featured the Pet Shop Boys, who I was obsessed with as a teenager.
There’s so many other great songs on this album though. My favourite of all time is The Hearts’ Filthy Lesson. It’s a dirty, swampy funk track that combines the things I love about Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode and the swagger of Beasts Of Bourbon into one awesome thing, with bonus wierd narrative lyrics. I love it. As for the rest of the record, it’s worth listening through to so you can find some tracks you like as it is very patchy, but there’s tracks like the The Motel and No Control that floor me.
EARTHLING
For years, you could walk into any cashies anywhere and get a copy of this for a dollar. You probably still can. But if you aren’t a technophobe, it’s actually his best album of the period. All the tracks are favourites of mine; he’s not just putting on drum and bass as a style, the songs are all written to take advantage of the musical form. It’s a bit leftfield for the mums and dads part of his audience though. But still, check this shit out:
This is Little Wonder. It’s powerfully wierd songwriting; the way the vocal moves around the slo-mo piano chords utterly rocks me. I won’t throw the other singles at you, but I’m Afraid Of Americans is definately worth a listen. OK, OK, here it is. I think if you listen to this record, you’ll pick up quite a few things that have made their way into influencing my act.
HOURS
This album is Bowie doing his best to turn into Phil Collins and is obviously a reaction to the public perception that he had become a bit too “wierd”. It’s not bad; there’s some really trite, cheap songwriting on here, but in amongst that are some great individual tracks.
Something In The Air is arranged in the Phil Collins style of the record, which kind of ruins its’ kitchen sink drama. At it’s best, that’s the feel of this record; taking quite unbearable 80’s pop sounds and applying them to the actual realities of his by then quite middle aged audience.
Then there’s this, in which Beck and Timbaland redeem one of the albums’ absolute stinkers, Seven:
HEATHEN
This is an absolutely amazing record. This carries on with some of the kitchen sink themes from Hours…and borrows the warm analogue synth sounds of Low to just come off as pure class. If you’re into Bowie and you haven’t heard this, you need to get onto that now.
This is Sunday. It is amazing. But it’s not as good as later in the record where Bowie is talking like the old dude that he is about death and family. I was very surprised to hear him singing about that and with such rad lyrics. Heathen: The Rays is a really, really powerful song for me and a possible contender for my funeral music.
REALITY
People like this album. I don’t know why. To me, it’s all the things people said about his 90’s period. Bloated songs, dated production full of crappy sounding keyboards, awful MOR 80’s commercial pop-rock guitars… listening to this makes my head explode.
Anyway, thanks for letting me rant at you about this. It’s been a very self indulgent blog tonight.
If you want to check this stuff out before you hunt it down, I thoroughly reccomend hitting up Grooveshark, which I think is pretty much the future of how you’re going to listen to music anyway. You can stream whatever you like, though you don’t actually own any copies of anything. It’s basically all I use now. And yes, you can stream a selection of my tracks on there, just search for my name.
