My Picks for Some of David Bowie's Most Important Songs
I saw a thread on another platform about people's choices for most important David Bowie songs. Many important songs were mentioned. I added some that hadn't been. I mentioned additional songs too, but this is already really long. These were my choices:
"It's Gonna Be Me": A song that Tony Visconti speculated was too personal for Bowie to include on Young Americans. "That’s one of the best things [on The Gouster]," Visconti argued. "I think he left it off because...well, I don’t know the story, but he said it was just too personal. He didn’t want to live with that song on that album, coming back to haunt him." It's also one of the most incredibly passionate Soul/R&B performances and masterpieces of the genre songwriting I've ever heard in my life. Plus, having once myself been left to weep over a hotel breakfast tray, it just hits really hard.
"Word on a Wing": "It was the first time I'd really seriously thought about Christ and God in any depth and ‘Word On A Wing’ was a protection. It did come as a complete revolt against elements that I found in the [TMWFTE] film. The passion in the song was genuine. It was also around that time that I started thinking about wearing this (fingers small silver cross hanging on his chest) again, which is now almost a left-over from that period." https://bowiegoldenyears.com/press/80-09-13-nme.html…
"Always Crashing in the Same Car": “That night everything came to a kind of a spiritual impasse, you know? And I really was down in a hotel garage, and I started going round and round, just like a movie I’d seen. I thought, ‘Oh, this is so Kirk Douglas in that film [Two Weeks In Another Town] where he lets go of the steering wheel.’ [laughs] You can tell what kind of condition I was in. Or what condition my condition was in. So I started going round and round, faster and faster. And then I let go. And as I let go I ran out of petrol. I just slowly came to a stop! I thought, ‘Oh God, this is the story of my life.’ As it happens, things picked up after that! [laughs] —David Bowie, BBC Radio Theatre, 27 June 2000
Neuköln: I read that Bowie said he felt it was his finest saxophone playing on record. https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/neukoln/… I'm not a musician but I can't imagine any professional sax player could do it better. "I found I didn’t have a very good relationship with the sax and that lasted right the way through. We’re sort of pretty embittered with each other. It lies there waiting for me to touch it. It defies me to (laughs). I really have to go through traumas to get anything out of it that has anything to do with what I want it to say. So it’s not a steady relationship; it’s not a good one." - David Bowie, 1983 (“Bowie’s Saxophone Struggle,” Steve Weitzman, Musician). In my view, Bowie must have infused his sax with a whole lot of trauma in "Neuköln", either his own trauma, or that of the "isolation of Turkish immigrants in a harsh city that used them solely for labor, or a musing on Islam in the West (Bowie’s sax does appear to imitate a muezzin call at times), or the fate of a faceless, nameless individual living in the cradle of the Cold War", according to Chris O' Leary, or both.
It's No Game (Pt. 1): I picked this one because of how Bowie enlisted Japanese singer Michi Hirota and encouraged her to defy cultural and gender norms by delivering the song lyrics with fierce intensity. Her unsettling vocal style sets the tone for Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and what he does with his own voice thereafter is unlike anything he'd done before. How to categorize his vocal style? It's not exactly shouting, shrieking, screaming, wailing, howling, or caterwauling. I don't think there's a word for it, except for what Bowie apparently himself called it, which was 'Bowie Histrionics': "He told Hirota to say the words like a Samurai from a Kurosawa film – SAY IT LIKE A MAN! She got it! Afterwards she came back into the control room, her cheeks flushed with empowerment. Later David matched her prose, singing in what he called ‘Bowie Histrionics’". https://bowiebible.com/songs/its-no-game-no-1/2/…
The Motel: I chose this song because it's so emotionally raw, moving, and courageous, and because one of its inspirations may have been related to Bowie's and Brian Eno's visiting the Guggin psychiatric hospital in Austria in 1994. https://bowiebible.com/songs/the-motel/… "In early ’94, for example, we went to the Guggin mental hospital just outside of Vienna, where some of the famous old outsider artists lived and worked. Some of them have been in the painters’ wing for, like, thirty years, as an Austrian experiment to see what happens when you allow people with mental disabilities to give free rein to their artistic impetuses. Before you get to the outsiders’ wing, there’s this other wing you pass through where all the psychos and murderers live, and the only thing written on the wall is THIS IS HELL. But the painters’ wing is coloured with graffiti everywhere. They paint all the trees surrounding their wing – everything is painted! To see it against the starkness of this other wing next door is really hard-hitting. We were both very affected by this experience."
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