It's funny how sometimes something is in the air and you just pick up on it. I've never been a huge David Bowie fan, but two weeks or so ago I decided that I wanted to see "
The Man Who Fell to Earth". I am pretty sure I hadn't seen it since it since it was originally released in 1976, but it must have made an impression; it was as familiar as a remembered dream. Mr. Bowie has a new recording coming out, but I doubt that I'll buy it. For a long time the only Bowie side on my shelves was "Hunky Dory", and that's still what I go to if I want to hear him, mostly. It's a pretty good record, but it is not, I think, terribly typical of his work, and the same can probably be said of the other albums of his that I've picked up along the way. I'm not sure where I acquired my copy of "Station to Station", although it looks battered enough to reasonably conclude that it was spun at quite a few parties. I like "Low", too, but saying that is tantamount to admitting my core Bowie problem: the Ziggy Stardust stuff, it always seemed to me, was really Mick Ronson; "Low" was really an Eno record, and so on. Notwithstanding his influences it seemed to me that he barely cast a shadow on his own work.
I was wrong. People talk about musical artists "reinventing" themselves, and now over the arc of a long career I can see that Bowie was always more than the sum of his influences. My initial evaluations were made when I was still thinking that "commercial" and "sell-out" were terms of opprobrium. Back then I thought it was odd that Mick Ronson's "
Slaughter on 10th Avenue" was such a flabby piece of work, but now I know that it took a special insight of Bowie's to make Ronson's style work properly. You couldn't ever say that Bowie was ahead of the curve exactly, but he was always riding the wave, and I now see that he was doing it all in his own way. That's impressive, even if I don't care to ever hear "Space Oddity" again.
UPDATE: I'm listening to it now--
it is streaming free here. It's pretty good.
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