David Bowie - Best of Bowie (2002)

CD1: 1) Space Oddity; 2) The Man Who Sold the World; 3) Oh! You Pretty Things; 4) Changes; 5) Life on Mars?; 6) Starman; 7) Ziggy Stardust; 8) Suffragette City; 9) John, I’m Only Dancing; 10) The Jean Genie; 11) Drive-In Saturday; 12) Sorrow; 13) Diamond Dogs; 14) Rebel Rebel; 15) Young Americans; 16) Fame; 17) Golden Years; 18) TVC 15; 19) Wild Is the Wind
CD2: 1) Sound and Vision; 2) “Heroes”; 3) Boys Keep Swinging; 4) Under Pressure (with Queen); 5) Ashes to Ashes; 6) Fashion; 7) Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps); 8) Let’s Dance; 9) China Girl; 10) Modern Love; 11) Blue Jean; 12) This Is Not America (with Pat Methany Group); 13) Loving the Alien; 14) Dancing in the Street (with Mick Jagger); 15) Absolute Beginners; 16) Jump They Say; 17) Hallo Spaceboy (Pet Shop Boys Remix); 18) Little Wonder; 19) I’m Afraid of Americans (V1 Remix); 20) Slow Burn

Rating: 8/10

About as good a job as you can do with an attempt to shrink an iconic discography into a compact collection.

Key tracks: Are you really expecting me to single out individual songs on something like this? 

Allow me this chance to talk about David Bowie in general whilst ostensibly reviewing a career retrospective.

Most classic rock stars do nothing to me. The vast majority of 70s rock music sounds technologically badly dated and otherwise, well, bland to me and all these legendary acts that people always mention as musical idols – your Dylans, your Zeppelins, your Stones, et al – at best make for mediocre background music and at worst plain irritate me. But I feel differently about Bowie, and quite frankly it feels wrong to even group Bowie alongside his peers. Where the others stagnated or died off after the supposed golden era, becoming dinosaurs endlessly stuck repeating their glory days like a pub cover band, Bowie kept going to new directions. He adapted, he evolved and he experimented, and he thrived in doing so – you can find amazing things in each of Bowie’s decades and each upcoming album always had the potential to be worthy of canonising. If his old fans felt his new sounds weren’t much cop, Bowie shrugged and moved on, continuing to do whatever he was in the mood for.

The oft-used descriptor of him was that he was a chameleon but really, he was just himself – fearlessly doing exactly what he wanted. Sometimes it sounded like the ongoing trends and sometimes it was out of this world, but it was always completely, absolutely Bowie. Everybody loves focusing on the seventies works and that’s alright, even if not quite fair – there’s a lot of wonderful material to be found in the glam alien years when the man genderbent the entire genre and looked as out of the world as his music purported to be, but it feels criminal to just simply stop there. In the 80s he decided to utilise his talents for a full-on pop approach and created a number of legendary tunes which finally had the chart success to match the man’s talent. In the 90s he took the day’s sounds and moulded them into his own tools: he flirted with drum and bass, industrial rock and hip-hop beats and made them sound like he had invented them all along. In the new millennium he accepted his position as an elder statesman of rock, producing a number of solidly suave rock albums dealing with age and mortality. Each era had its own kind of Bowie and none of them tower over another. It’s the kind of consistent fearlessness that’s downright enviable.

For that I have a humongous respect for Bowie. It was always about the music first and foremost and creating something new, and instead of becoming just a nostalgia recycling machine like his original peers, he kept finding new peers. That’s something I personally put a great value on in an artist. And yet, I’ve never actually become much of a true fan, conflicting as that may seem. Bowie had the gift of creating immortal music: songs that shined bright and loud and touched your soul and heart, ones that would easily rise up high to reach a classic status in a heartbeat. He also kept consistently pushing them out throughout his career right to the very last years and had his whole discography been filled with that same high quality, we’d be talking about potentially the greatest discography in music. But frustratingly Bowie’s albums rarely kept their consistency. You could always count on most of his albums featuring a handful of brilliance scattered throughout their running time but you can count the albums that are excellent throughout with one hand. Bowie, as great as he was, was also rather scattershot and for every golden classic you’d have a couple of good ideas left half-baked and the occasional complete dud here and there. Bowie was a heavily conceptual artist and as great as that is, sometimes that concept came before the actual songs.

This is probably a sacrilege then, but in my opinion Bowie is the kind of artist who suits a compilation perfectly. When you have to deal with inconsistency the overall experience becomes underwhelming: line up all those immortal moments in a row however and suddenly you have a stunning journey through time and music waiting ahead of you. Best of Bowie has actually become my go-to Bowie album. That it spans nearly a little over three decades and the quality never drops is a testament to Bowie’s strengths, and its downsides are largely individual quibbles you always get with big career-spanning compilations. The balancing act between all the different eras is always a delicate job and everyone has their own ideas on which years to emphasise over the cost of others: I’d have personally removed some of the lesser 70s tracks (”Sorrow”, really?) in order to shed more light to the underrated 90s, and it would have been nice to have “Thursday’s Child” here so the token great bit of the otherwise dull Hours could be enjoyed more comfortably. The unfortunate necessity of including radio edits has a slightly damaging effect on some songs, especially “Heroes” which really deserves its glorious six minutes instead of the three and a half it has here.

The other great thing about Best of Bowie is that is also brings together a number songs of his you can’t find on any of his albums normally. Any Bowie best of retrospective requires the likes of “Absolute Beginners” or “Under Pressure”: the former is one of his very, very greatest pieces of work - firmly in his top three greatest songs in fact - while the latter, while more a Queen cut than a Bowie one, is an immortalised meeting of giants that seems to get even greater every time you come back to it, which is rare for such an ubiquitous song. You’ve also got the Pet Shop Boys remix of “Hallo Spaceboy” which is vastly superior to the album cut, similarly but not as powerfully remixed "I’m Afraid of Americans”, the sublimely enchanting moodpiece “This Is Not America” and, to a slightly lesser extent, the quirky 70s single “John, I’m Only Dancing”. On the flipside though, the inclusion of all these non-album cuts also means that “Dancing in the Street” is included here, even though no one wanted to hear it again in the first place due to being so atrocious that you can only really enjoy it once you remove the sound. It’s the compilation’s only actual blemish and a sad reminder that not everything that Bowie touched was gold.

It’s not like it’s a perfect compilation, don’t let my gushing make you think otherwise: not everything is a four or five star song, and in particular the first disc has a couple of cuts that feel like they got lost in the wrong crowd. But it’s hard not to gush over a 39-song compilation which frequently sweeps you off your feet, from the opening dramatic sci-fi operatics of “Space Oddity” to the chillingly gorgeous “Slow Burn” that closes the long journey like a cinematic curtain call. The tracklist runs through countless styles, sounds and productions and yet nearly everything sounds like a winner right from the first-go. Bowie was a special kind of talent who could take any form and still produce songs with a spark of something special and if there’s a monument that celebrates it, it’s not any of his studio albums but any compilation that spans through his career. Best of Bowie isn’t the ultimate example of this anymore, not after the 3-disc Everything Has Changed was released, but it does the job pretty marvellously nonetheless. As far as artist retrospectives go, this is one of the most essential ones.