David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972)

Hunky Dory was a great continuation and realization of what David Bowie had created up to that point. However, for as many times as we've said that Bowie's career takes off, I do honestly see what they mean with Ziggy Stardust.

Bowie was always able to capture the strangeness of others, of people, and particularly of rock stars. He lived as an artist, a musician, and Ziggy Stardust is no less the capturing of that persona. The ideas presented here are what we feel echoed in other masterpiece albums, such as Pink Floyd's The Wall.

I want to make clear, I have enjoyed David Bowie up to this point. However, Ziggy Stardust is the first album in this discography in which every song feels like it captures the tone correctly for the whole album. It has few outliers, it has a direction and composition that is nearly perfect, and I have not felt the same level of struggle and appreciation in the lyrics, the guitar, the piano, the band as I have from this album. This is a landmark, this is a canonized album, and this is deserving of the title of Masterpiece.

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.

David Bowie: The Man Who Sold The World (1970)

Continuing our examination of Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World (1970) represents what some critics call the first true Bowie. While to me this reads as pure showmanship, I think perhaps it's important to recognize the musical significance of a new guitarist, but to say that out loud is to admit that I had to look to a Rolling Stone article to even notice.

The Man Who Sold the World is definitely a continued change, experimentation, and evolution of Bowie, but I believe, as we go through his and other band's discographies, that whether we like it or not from a critical perspective, every artist is always evolving. Perhaps that's unfair considering I haven't hit the backend of Weezer's discography yet, but we'll start with evolution as the primary thesis of these analyses.

Let's go, track by track, through Bowie's third strike, and in many ways, the one that would define his public persona more.

David Bowie: Space Oddity (1969)

Space Oddity (1969) is actually titled David Bowie, much like his first album. This is interesting because it goes to show the degree to which that first album from last week was relatively unheard. The first track, "Space Oddity" takes the title because it is without a doubt the standout track on the album. Even I had heard the song before even knowing that David Bowie was the mind behind it.

Beyond that this album features so much more jamming than the previous album did. Songs often last a minute longer than their run time, and Bowie isn't afraid to drop his lyrics and voice out to let the music carry the song.

So we will once again go track by track to examine not only the obvious masterpiece, but the evolution of Bowie's sound. Here the Beatles have fallen away and something more rock and folk has taken root.

David Bowie: Introduction & David Bowie (1967)

Introduction

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David Bowie is one of the most influential English musicians in the world. His career spanning from the late 60s to the release of Blackstar just this year, he produced masterpieces like "Space Oddity", "The Man Who Sold the World," and albums like The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. He was a man genre-defiant and stuck with nothing for long, he experimented with pop, rock, folk, electronica, dance, grunge, and bandstand songs throughout his career.

Despite his popularity, my exposure to David Bowie would come later in life. I knew he was a major musician of significant popularity. When I did listen to his discography, it surprised me how many recognizable tunes he had made.

The twenty-seven studio albums of David Bowie represent a wide variety of musical styles. We will see, even in his earliest albums, that Bowie was an experimental musician at heart.