David Bowie - Black Tie White Noise (1993)

1) The Wedding; 2) You've Been Around; 3) I Feel Free; 4) Black Tie White Noise; 5) Jump They Say; 6) Nite Flights; 7) Pallas Athena; 8) Miracle Goodnight; 9) Don't Let Me Down & Down; 10) Looking for Lester; 11) I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday; 12) The Wedding Song

Bowie starts his 1990s with a smooth jump to a new sound, and makes it his own so well that he's actually created a consistent record. 

Key tracks: "Jump They Say", "Pallas Athena", "Miracle Goodnight"

The 1990s were a reset for Bowie. Much has been made out of his 80s albums - probably too much - but it's clear that towards the end of the decade his magic had started to wane for the first time during his career. After taking a break from his day job while focusing on Tin Machine for a few years, the table was clean for Bowie to return in any way he pleased: for a man so keen to reinvent himself at any given turn, the start of the new decade after a small hiatus was a perfect time as any to begin anew.

Bowie's 90s are characterised by him falling in love with the electronic, club and hip hop scenes that were exploding at the time, and Black Tie White Noise is the careful first toe dip into those waters. It nods particularly towards house and hip hop, and while it's still more hesitant about fully merging those genres into Bowie's repertoire in comparison to how far his later 90s embraced their respective inspirations, they lend a clear and identifiable sound for the record: flourished with the iconic house pianos, loop-like drum processing, deep synth pads and the ever-present saxophone (played by Bowie himself, who rediscovered his love for the instrument during the studio time). It's obviously incredibly of its time, but its dated nature has sincere warmth to it in its big budget early 90s studio flashiness, which I admittedly have a big soft spot for. It's all incredibly smooth (to the point that when going through my first draft of this review it turns out I had described nearly every song as 'smooth'), in the way that many rock icons of yesteryear approached the 1990s. It's clear though that Bowie was genuinely curious about the new ideas he was tuning into at the time rather than just following the crowds, and he was eager to experiment with how he could best take these sounds forward on his own - you know Bowie's particularly inspired when he's writing instrumentals, and there's a grand total of three on Black Tie White Noise, albeit "The Wedding" is largely just an instrumental version of "The Wedding Song". In contrast "Pallas Athena", the centerpiece dance anthem, is so far removed from typical Bowie fare that it was even re-released under a different name to see if anyone would be fooled. For most parts though, in comparison to some of Bowie's earlier (and later) chameleon acts, Black Tie White Noise is more of a rejunevation than a drastic re-invention: from a songwriting perspective it's by and far what you'd expect from a Bowie record, with the old dog playing with tricks he knows that works, just with a new coat on.

The other facet that characterises Black Tie White Noise is just how positive it is. It's among Bowie's most upbeat albums: even the songs about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots ("Black Tie White Noise") and his brother's suicide ("Jump They Say") are filled with creative joie de vivre. Part of it is down to just how excited he was about these new influences, but in general, life was good for Bowie. His recent marriage had him still floating in a state of blissed out happiness and that kind of glossy-eyed enamourment is all over the record: particularly in "The Wedding Song" which he had literally composed for his wedding, and the light-footed and unabashedly lovefool "Miracle Goodnight". Black Tie White Noise is a record made by someone who's in a great place in his life and who directs that energy into their music, which translates to a particular sharpness in songwriting. In fact, the only thing that lets the record down is not even his own song, but the Morrissey cover "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday". It's not only in the wrong crowd in tone and aesthetic, but Bowie intentionally hams it up to the point of it being at times unbearable; in particular there's this vocal run that Bowie sometimes does which sounds like a bizarre take on Krusty the Klown's laughter, and this song is full of it, and it breaks me away from the song each and every time. On the other hand, the Cream cover "I Feel Free" is a perfect fit to the album's mood and aesthetic, and among the more successful Bowie covers.

The singles are almost always the cream of the crop with Bowie's albums and this time it's the boisterous synth-rock "Jump They Say" that's the big Bowie classic of the album, and among my favourite songs of his catalogue. It's a subtly dark lyric matched with one of his most charismatic vocal performances, has a chorus that glides so effortlessly into such majestic heights, the futuristic production that even today sounds like a sci-fi utopia and it's rife with bountiful arrangement details (with the filtered backing vocals being a particular personal favourite). Like many of Bowie's best songs it's bombastic and attention-grabbing (or seeking) yet it's thoroughly sincere in its delivery, and while clearly indebted to a particular period in time it's still somehow timeless and immortal through how Bowie sells it. The two other singles - the title track and "Miracle Goodnight" - are also incredibly infectious in their own right and really highlight how Bowie was at his most excited and exciting when trying out new sounds. "Miracle Goodnight" and its bubbly slap bass and ridiculous effect-laden production is so sugar sweet you'd have to have a heart of stone not to smile when it's on: it's a silly song and openly so (the spoken word bridges are absolutely in on the joke), but it sidesteps its corniness by being so flirtatious and charming you end up falling head over heels for it. "Black Tie White Noise" is, appropriately, the album in a nutshell from a sonical perspective, though amusingly  Bowie almost takes a backseat to Al B. Sure's ever-present vocals. It's the least of the three, but the lush cooldown of a chorus and the oh-so-Bowie "noi-oi-oi-oise" vocal hook ensure it sticks with the other two.

The sound and the singles being great is nothing new to Bowie, but what makes Black Tie White Noise worth a special mention is that it's among Bowie's most cohesive and continuously strong records throughout its length. My hot take (which I'll probably repeat across my Bowie reviews ad nauseam) is that Bowie very rarely made consistent records because of his up-and-down songwriting, incoherent and oft ill-fitting cover songs, and the frequent and obvious focus on the deemed singles of the project at the expense of deep album cuts that could stand up next to them. Yet, those aspects almost all but absent from Black Tie White Noise and many of its album tracks stand out positively just as much as the more famous songs. The wonderfully frantic "You've Been Around" (one of the few times the album moves away from its constant positivity to somewhere a little darker) and the atmospheric "Nite Flights" in particular could have slotted comfortably in a singles collection in their own right, and they show how Bowie's chosen production style for this record truly amplifies what he was going for - with songwriting and sound working hand-in-hand from the start. Sometimes the (intended or not) emphasis on the production gives way towards unexpected joys: the instrumental "Looking for Lester" with its rising horns and gliding piano parts remind me so much of the first Sonic Adventure that I love the song just because of that. But in terms of the instrumental, it's "Pallas Athena" that comes up the strongest. It's such a swerve for Bowie, but it's a little wonder of an arrangement with the increasing layers of strings that drive the tension that the saxophone and synth pads try to combat. It's such an excellent, transcendental piece of 90s dance music and the idea that it's on a David Bowie record is still wild.

It's not quite a perfect record and its issues are largely relegated towards its end. We've already covered "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday" which really shouldn't have been covered to begin with, and as much as I like "The Wedding Song", at the end of the day it's largely the same song as the version that opens the album, just with vocals, and it probably should have opened the album while the instrumental version was relegated to a single b-side. If you'd have swapped "Looking for Lester" a place further up the tracklist and had the record be closed by the suave last dance of the night "Don't Let Me Down & Down", it would've been a great finale for the record; better than the way it fizzles out now, certainly. But even that blemish is barely enough to raise when discussing the record because of all its other accomplishments. I have a strange track record with Bowie, but my favourite kind of Bowie nearly always happens when he's reassessing his place in pop culture and sets a plan to move forward in his own way. Black Tie White Noise is one of his most emblematic in that regard: a rejuvenated Bowie putting wheels in motion for the next decade after getting a scent of a new well of ideas to take inspiration from, and then turning those sounds so identifiably into his own. It worked out so well, it started off one of Bowie's strongest decades.

Rating: 8/10

 

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.