Album: Hunky Dory
Artist: David Bowie
Born: Brixton, London
Released: December 1971
Genre: Art Rock
Influenced: Gary Numan, Kate Bush, Talking Heads, Japan, Björk
For me, pop's next great innovator after Dylan was Bowie. A south Londoner by birth, Bowie spent most of his childhood at a school on the London-Kent border (in Bromley) that had an old-fashioned approach to education, involving the house system, school uniforms and an emphasis on tough subjects like languages and science (an experience I can relate to). Aged 15, he was desperate to break free and set off on the road to stardom, and in doing so added elements of physical theatre and the music hall to his unique pop persona. Many of the songs on his early albums, from Laughing Gnome to All The Madmen and Kooks, celebrate the freaks and the outsiders, while Bowie's androgynous looks helped him to blur the lines between male & female and human & alien. Though Hunky Dory wouldn't be Bowie's breakthrough album, it contains many of the seeds of his later success, and on Song For Bob Dylan he almost lays down his manifesto for the future of pop, taking on the mantle from Dylan as the next sonic pioneer and paying homage to him in the process.
Hunky Dory was one of the first LPs I ever bought and it remains my favourite Bowie record. It's a transitionary album (before the stronger Ziggy glam rock and Berlin art rock leanings, but still maintaining traces of his folk beginnings) and also more personal in tone. As well as dealing with his indebtedness to Dylan (but also frustration that he's no longer pushing the envelope), Bowie also pays homage to Andy Warhol. I've read an interview with Bowie in which he expresses in more detail the devastating influence that listening to Velvet Underground & Nico at age 19 had on his musical development ("a degree of cool that I had no idea was humanly sustainable"). Apart from the brilliant singles on the album, Changes and Life On Mars? (the first reference to the Norfolk Broads in pop?), there is just so much more to like on this album, including Oh! You Pretty Things, Kooks and Queen Bitch. The Bewlay Brothers remains a mystery to me and Quicksand deserves a blog all to itself for the array of philosophical ideas it references, from Nietzsche to Alesteir Crowley. Man Who Sold The World has some wonderful moments, but this is the first great Bowie album and it would unleash a long period of creative success. Bowie was (in his own words) "chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature" and, more than any other pop figure, taught the world how to "turn & face the strange".
For me, pop's next great innovator after Dylan was Bowie. A south Londoner by birth, Bowie spent most of his childhood at a school on the London-Kent border (in Bromley) that had an old-fashioned approach to education, involving the house system, school uniforms and an emphasis on tough subjects like languages and science (an experience I can relate to). Aged 15, he was desperate to break free and set off on the road to stardom, and in doing so added elements of physical theatre and the music hall to his unique pop persona. Many of the songs on his early albums, from Laughing Gnome to All The Madmen and Kooks, celebrate the freaks and the outsiders, while Bowie's androgynous looks helped him to blur the lines between male & female and human & alien. Though Hunky Dory wouldn't be Bowie's breakthrough album, it contains many of the seeds of his later success, and on Song For Bob Dylan he almost lays down his manifesto for the future of pop, taking on the mantle from Dylan as the next sonic pioneer and paying homage to him in the process.
Hunky Dory was one of the first LPs I ever bought and it remains my favourite Bowie record. It's a transitionary album (before the stronger Ziggy glam rock and Berlin art rock leanings, but still maintaining traces of his folk beginnings) and also more personal in tone. As well as dealing with his indebtedness to Dylan (but also frustration that he's no longer pushing the envelope), Bowie also pays homage to Andy Warhol. I've read an interview with Bowie in which he expresses in more detail the devastating influence that listening to Velvet Underground & Nico at age 19 had on his musical development ("a degree of cool that I had no idea was humanly sustainable"). Apart from the brilliant singles on the album, Changes and Life On Mars? (the first reference to the Norfolk Broads in pop?), there is just so much more to like on this album, including Oh! You Pretty Things, Kooks and Queen Bitch. The Bewlay Brothers remains a mystery to me and Quicksand deserves a blog all to itself for the array of philosophical ideas it references, from Nietzsche to Alesteir Crowley. Man Who Sold The World has some wonderful moments, but this is the first great Bowie album and it would unleash a long period of creative success. Bowie was (in his own words) "chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature" and, more than any other pop figure, taught the world how to "turn & face the strange".
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