Bowie in the '90s

The new Bowie box set, with the official release of Toy, has gotten me thinking of the overall quality of his '90s work. Over the course of this week, I relistened to each of his '90s albums in order, followed by Toy. Since I'm a fan of lists and rankings, here's how I'd rate the albums from best to worst:

1. Hours
2. Black Tie White Noise
3. Buddha of Suburbia
4. Outside
5. Earthling
6. Toy

Toy has 3 songs that I'd revisit. The rest aren't so great IMO and were unreleased (officially) until now for good reason. You could probably say that Earthling only has 3 good songs as well, but it's a stronger album overall. None of the albums really come close to Hours, IMO. Black Tie White Noise is a distant second.

What do you think?

1. Buddha Of Suburbia
2. Earthling
3. Hours
4. Black Tie White Noise
5. Outside

I've not heard "Toy"

I avoided Bowie solo after the singles from the EMI years. I was all in on Tin Machine, but that's a different thing. I was wary about "Black Tie White Noise." I bought the Jump CD-ROM out of curiosity since my first computer was top of the line and that was a CD-ROM I saw in Costco. I found that I liked the music on that so after it had been out for about a year, I got "Black Tie White Noise." I liked the first seven tracks, but it petered out after that. "Night Flights" was the standout track - a Scott Walker cover.

"The Buddha of Suburbia" appeared soon after that as a TV soundtrack and was not released in America; making me very wary. As I felt that it might be "leftover" material, I passed at the time [to my great detriment].

"Outside" was a birthday gift from a friend and I was very keen to hear what Bowie and Eno would do years later. But I hate that album. There are some great songs on it, but the conceit of the album is dead in the water. It would have been edgy in 1979. Not 1995. The invasive "storyline" ruins it. Good tour though! I liked seeing Mike Garson with him again and I thought Reeves Gabrels saved Bowie's bacon.

I disliked techno and didn't buy "Earthling" until I got tickets to a Bowie show in Ft. Lauderdale, so I figured I should hear it. One play told mw what I already knew. It was full of stress-inducing music in the techno style. The show was amazing! Bowie played three sets of 35 songs and over three hours in a small club 30 feet from us! After that show I had those songs in my head and I then listened repeatedly to the album. Apart from "Telling Lies," which I still dislike, I now think it sound great.

We immediately bought "Hours" and it was the first Bowie album in ages where he wasn't chasing trends, and therefore, gratifying. It was almost a "Hunky Dory" throwback [albeit less classic, of course]. We played that one a lot! We liked it so much, we decided to buy the free Bowie albums we had avoided, like the EMI era and "The Buddha Of Suburbia." "Let's Dance" and that ilk was in some ways even worse than the singles I had hated! But "The Buddha Of Suburbia" was what I had been expecting in the 80s from Bowie but had not gotten. A diverse, experimental pop album that ran the wide gamut of styles. Why had it been relatively buried?! It's the big gem for me from the post-1980, pre-2001 era.

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
For further rumination on the Fresh New Sound of Yesterday®



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2021 12:01PM by Post-Punk Monk.

The release of the new Bowie box set has led to my first exposure to THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA & HOURS. From the actual '90s to his death, I thought Bowie's music between SCARY MONSTERS and THE NEXT DAY was pretty minor, but it sounds much better now. But THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA and HOURS both sound like him looking back self-consciously over his older music, while EARTHLING jumps on a trend of the time, as good as all these albums are. The futuristic quality of most of his '70s music had vanished.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2021 05:45PM by steevee.

steevee Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>The
> futuristic quality of most of his '70s music had
> vanished.

I think that all music stopped progressing or sounding "futuristic" once sampling was the thing. "The future" became just remixing the past digitally. I think it was the evolution of tech gear that drove the changing sounds all throughout pop music.

I've never heard The Buddha of Suburbia, so I can't comment on that one, but Hours is probably Bowie's best album between Scary Monsters and The Next Day. I also own Heathen and Reality. Heathen has its moments but is inconsistent, but I never really clicked on Reality; it's not bad, but I can't say there's any song on it I ever get the urge to hear.

And then the final two albums are both fabulous gems, as if Bowie knew he had limited time and stopped just playing around and tried to make a final artistic statement instead.

I actually heard some of Heathen in the car a few days ago and I thought it was all quite good. I never heard hours... but it sounded dreadful from the description. I recall Reality being seen as shameless trendhopping.

Incidentally, Canadian singer-songwriter Emm Gryner, about whom I've written in these pages, toured with Bowie in the 1998-2000 as a singer and appears on Bowie at The Beeb and Glastonbury 2000. She also played on the Toys abandoned album, which also sounds pretty dire from what I've read.

To my ears, Bowie's Nineties work represents the efforts of an artist trying to re-engage with his art, after the diminishing returns of his work during the preceding decade. From reuniting with past collaborators, whether their previously shared inspiration showed up or not (Nile Rodgers on Black Tie White Noise, and Brian Eno on Outside), to trying on a current trend to see how well it might rejuvenate him (the drum-and-bass sounds of Earthling), Bowie was hoping to call the muse back into his corner. Earthling showed that the muse was willing to flirt with him a bit more than she had been doing. Hours sounds too mannered in places, but the songwriting showed that Bowie's muse was indeed getting serious. (Some have suggested the muse's name was Iman ... but that's another conversation.)

Heathen, Reality and The Next Day play like a trilogy to me. The first album is like Bowie's reflective guided tour through his own past; Reality sounds like he's assessing where he's come to, and considering where he can go from there. A decade is an awfully long time to wait for a sequel (cf. The Godfather Part III, Exorcist III, The Two Jakes), so it's easy to miss viewing The Next Day that way. But its sound is of a piece with the preceding two albums, and the songs and mood of the album seem to convey that Bowie feels like he found his way out of that corner.

Blackstar is in a class by itself. It would've been a seismic shock even if it hadn't turned out to be Bowie's knowing farewell album. (One could argue, of course, that without Bowie facing his imminent demise, he might not have pursued the sound and the songs in quite the same way.) It startled his fans because, unlike the preceding trilogy, it didn't score its points by reflecting past glories. Its sound and style reflected a new side to Bowie's creativity ... or perhaps, a sense that his inspiration had fully re-engaged, and he was ready to take his music to newer places with new collaborators.

I'm sure we all would've loved to have heard what was to come next. But of course, nothing did.

If folks haven't heard Black Tie, White Noise, the "single" was "Jump They Say," a dark, swirling piece about suicide. DC-based art rock group The Beauty Bill did the "soundtrack" for a choreographed piece that I've seen here in Washington called suicide.chat.room, called "Sorry You're Here." The record includes a gloomy, abstracted version of that song, as "J.T.S. Study No. 1.," that is worth hearing.

[open.spotify.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/13/2021 09:41AM by zwirnm.