Discovering David Bowie's Vast Legacy of Music

In my January 11 article this year, I paid tribute to rock music legend David Bowie, who had passed away, at age 69, the previous day after suffering through cancer.  Everything in that article still stands, except for the statement I made that his song Changes, which I loved, said it all.  Turns out I was wrong about that, for Mr. Bowie has left a vast legacy of interesting music over the years, and has had quite a lot of things to say...

It was late one night a few weeks ago and I was channel surfing TV, my remote finally resting on Palladia, a fantastic channel oriented to music performances (in Gainesville it's on Cox Channel 1098).  A tribute show to David Bowie was ending, and at its conclusion they played his video to Blackstar, the title track to his final studio album...released just before his death.  Full of mysterious symbolism, the Blackstar video, along with the music and lyrics of the song itself, sparked my interest in further investigating Bowie's career as a recording artist.  By the way, Blackstar is currently by far my favorite song of 2016, but you might need to set aside a little time to hear this ten minute long masterpiece...I also suggest that you listen to the song without the video since its lyrics seem to carry an entirely different meaning from the visual presentation...

Beginning in 1967 with his eponymous debut album and concluding with 2016's Blackstar, David Bowie recorded 27 studio albums.  I have been listening to 13 of them and am trying to get hold of some of the remaining in order to get a better sense of this extraordinary artist.  Each album has its own characteristic personality, and as is the case with any other musical act, I like some songs while thinking a bit less of others.  But I have yet to listen to a David Bowie album that doesn't contain at least a few really good tracks.  So far I've been listening to the following: Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans, Station to Station, Low, Lodger, Heathen, Reality, The Next Day, and Blackstar. If you know the chronology of these albums, you'll discover that I have most of his early works and the last four he recorded...but I still completely lack the albums he made in the eighties and nineties. So there's still a big gap as far as the span of Bowie's musical expression is concerned, although I know well his singles hits from the eighties...

Of the albums I have listened to so far, my favorites are The Man Who Sold the World and Blackstar.  Unlike so many other musicians, be they solo or group projects, whose quality of output suffers over the decades, David Bowie maintained his high standards up to the very end.  I can't yet say at this point of time that he is up there with my all-time favorite acts (such as the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Regina Spektor, or Radiohead), but I can say that his music over the years is very listenable and a lot of it is excellent...