David Bowie: Hunky Dory (1971)

David Bowie's next album was considered by some critics to be the time when the "real" Bowie had finally arrived. Stop me if you've heard that before. In this type of retrospective, while the compositions of Bowie's songs become clearly more masterful as time goes on, I think we've seen that Bowie's heart has been there since his first album. Hunky Dory, however, cannot go without being underlined as one of Bowie's finest pieces so far.

Part of the benefit of a mostly blind study like this is that we run into certain songs that resonate through the eras, that you've heard as pop culture, and you don't get to learn what its really like to experience those things for a first time. For instance, it was one thing to hear, on the last album, the riff for "The Man Who Sold The World" but I cannot imagine what it must've been like listening to the Grunge Overlords themselves break it out on MTV for a crowd of people who were probably too young to appreciate or recognize the original composition.

That is to say that appreciation is everything. And Hunky Dory is worth appreciating.

So let's look at each song, one by one, as we do.