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: 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.