I listened - by coincidence, I only heard about his passing this morning - to his new album Blackstar as well as the one before (The Next Day) over the weekend. Blackstar is the kind of album you listen to 15 seconds of and it dawns on you that you are some lowly bass strings mangler while Bowie was an artist. Huge Loss. And a great performance to go out on, Blackstar is among his strongest works. He must have spent the last years playing a lot of saxophone, while I always liked his sax playing, I've never heard him as fluid and "note-ambitious" as on Blackstar.
I first heard Bowie in 1975, a Cassette with the Diamond Dogs album on it. I was immediately transfixed by the dystopian aura of the music, his voice and the lyrics, that haunting Future Legend intro ...
And in the death
As the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare
The shutters lifted in inches in Temperance Building
High on Poacher's Hill
And red, mutant eyes gaze down on Hunger City
No more big wheels
Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats
And ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes
Coverting the highest of the sterile skyscrapers
Like packs of dogs assaulting the glass fronts of Love-Me Avenue
Ripping and rewrapping mink and shiny silver fox, now legwarmers
Family badge of sapphire and cracked emerald
Any day now
The Year of the Diamond Dogs
"This ain't Rock'n'Roll
This is Genocide"
I only saw the cover of the album some time later and was again fascinated by his appearance, Bowie as that half-dog creature was both unsettling and immaculate, androgynous and rebellious, stylish and outrageous ...
The next album I bought was the vastly different Station to Station. Where Diamond Dogs had seen him on the way from having been Ziggy Stardust to becoming The Thin White Duke, Station to Station saw The Thin White Duke in full (space) flight.
The music was nothing like Diamond Dogs had been and it took some time to get used to it, but I noticed immediately - as a kid back then listening to mostly Status Quo and Deep Purple - that Station to Station was something very special as well. To this day, they are my favorite albums of his though the much derided Let's Dance hit album was a masterpiece too, defining the whole era of the early 80ies.
I have all Bowie albums in my collection, even the not so great ones have sufficient moments of magic. And I always adored his work with Tin Machine (the only time I saw him live, in a half-empty hall, as no one back then seemed to know what to make of his work with Tin Machine).
