Word: albums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wherever it travels--and it wanders far--Scary Monsters seems to carry an ominous touch of fire and brimstone. Even the one cover track on the album, Tom Verlaine's "Kingdom Come," though more upbeat than Bowie's compositions, also has the touch of the prophet. It's as though, after the technical experiments of his recent albums. Bowie has let his personal obsessions re-enter his music, and he's now better equipped to animate them. Those obsessions appear with a clarity here that far exceeds any of Bowie's past work, obsessions with violence, with anger, with decay...
...been tinged with some of this Victorian opprobrium: Bowie the musical chameleon, the masquer, just doesn't seem to have the stamina to stick to one style and wring out its musical worth, but must nomadically migrate to a new brand of music and a new "persona" on each album to amuse his audience. This kind of analysis, aside from its off-hand assumption that a popular musician always changes for commercial and not for evolutionary reasons, also treats with bland ignorance the musical development of Bowie's last three albums. With Brian Eno's aid. Bowie built a triptych...
THIS LATEST ALBUM from the author of "Changes" should convince even the most skeptical that Bowie is governed by more than just restlessness--that there is synthesis as well as contradiction in his progress. Scary Monsters miraculously harnesses the techniques Bowie picked up from Eno--how to layer musical textures, how to manipulate odd rhythms--to a murky vision of a world without order or hope. Bowie last peered into this world on Diamond Dogs, where more conventional music illustrated a post-apocalyptic desolation. Diamond Dogs was a desperate album, the kind you might not want to listen to unless...
...Game" (which opens and closes the album, first in an English-Japanese duet and then in a stripped-down, relentless solo) takes Bowie on a journey through the poverty-ridden sinkholes of the world--not for the adventure as on his last album's "African Night Flight," but as an exercise in wide-eyed horror...
...Down Beat Critics Polls; of a bleeding ulcer and bronchial pneumonia; in New York City. Asked to join the Miles Davis sextet in 1959, he replaced Red Garland in a band that included John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. After a six-month collaboration that resulted in the classic jazz album Kind of Blue, he formed his own trio and recorded such albums as Conversations with Myself and Affinity...