1001 Albums Summary

I'm a sucker for this stuff, 60s singer-songwriter. I remember being a kid and coming to understand that there was this whole world beyond Dylan and getting into Dave Van Ronk and Phil Ochs and Woody Guthrie and the Anthology of American Folk Music. I get the critique of it all and laughed my ass off at A Mighty Wind but I still fall for it again every time. I want songs that say something, and these guys never fail. Yeah his voice is an acquired taste and yeah there is an awful lot of mouth harp. But most of the tracks transport me to another time and place and make me think about what the heck I am doing in my life. I love the social critiques of "The Partisan" and "Story of Isaac" and "The Old Revolution" and how you could adapt them to any time or place if you want to. But "Bird On a Wire" is still the fav. I think it looks forward to his future, more contemplative stuff. I came to know it through the Johnny Cash version on American Recordings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eY7bGaccWI ... but I think that unlike his famous cover of "Hurt," which made the song his own, Johnny is still just commenting on Leonard's statement of his worldview. Which is maybe just a long way of saying there's only one Leonard Cohen.

The essence of hardcore. Couldn't love it more. I wanted so bad to be a punk in high school but at best came across as a latter-day hippie. But the kids gave me credit for being "straight edge" AKA too scared to do drugs. "You think you're the only one? Think again... think again... think again..."

A subreddit user recently asked us to provide our 100 favorite albums. I knew Bowie would need to be in the top five, so I put in Low at number 3. Hunky Dory ended up at 17, which in retrospect seems like a mistake. There are plenty of days in which it is my favorite Bowie album and even my favorite album of all time. Why? The same explanation everyone has: this is the album where Bowie becomes Bowie. But it might be more accurate to say it is the album where he most clearly demonstrates the process of becoming Bowie 1.0. Bowie 1.0 (before Berlin) was the changeling who became Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, and all the less developed characters in between. Bowie 2.0 (Berlin and after) was David Bowie, the man, sharing what it was really like to be him (while also donning occasional costumes). If Bowie 1.0 is Major Tom, Bowie 2.0 is “We know Major Tom’s a junkie.” But David Bowie wasn’t a known quantity before Ziggy Stardust. People still thought he was a novelty artist, a one-hit wonder, a theatrical freak dabbling in rock and roll. He covers a Tiny Tim song on Hunky Dory; listeners wouldn’t have been crazy to group the two together. Looking back, we can see the genius of his earlier output, but very few people were paying that much attention in 1971. (Since I got this one over the weekend, I also listened to Divine Symmetry, a four-disc set that explores the process around “Hunky Dory,” including demos and live performances. You can tell from those sets that while the songs were great, the story of the album or the artist or the band is far from worked out.) So when Bowie sings about “ch-ch-ch-ch-changes,” he isn’t yet referring to his protean public persona. He’s talking about what it is like to be him, or the people around him, or the contact high formed by the connection of the two. There is so much “thou” in this album, whether it is the angelic rising generation of “Oh! You Pretty Things,” his newborn son in “Kooks,” or the grabbag of name checks: Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Churchill, Himmler, Greta Garbo, Aleister Crowley. Bowie was such a chameleon that he was always afraid of becoming of whoever was around him, yet here he seems to have no shame around it yet. Why not write a song about Bob Dylan the same way Dylan wrote a song about Woody Guthrie — isn’t that just what we artists do? And yet. Dylan’s first album was an unabashed tribute; Bowie is up to something different here. Would you really want to be the object of “Queen Bitch,” “Song for Bob Dylan,” or “Andy Warhol” (which apparently made Andy leave the room the first time he heard it)? Each of these songs shines a spotlight on the difficulty and tension of worshiping other artists. “Andy Warhol, Silver Screen, Can’t tell them apart at all.” It was Warhol’s whole deal, of course, but are you comfortable with someone calling it out so clearly? As others have observed, these references to the pseudo-reality of film are the throughline of “Hunky Dory,” showing up in most of the songs. Bowie is aware that he is seeing, experiencing, projecting, critiquing, all at once, without ever quite making it into a film school seminar (thank God). It’s this detachment that make things like the flirtation with fascism tolerable. This used to bother the shit after me, but the best explanation I’ve read is that Bowie is shocked by the extent to which he is fascinated by the same set of ideas as Himmler and others. He wants to be as pretty as “the coming race” of “Homo superior” yet also frightened about what that means. And eventually that all congealed into the much more accessible character of Ziggy, the self-loathing starman who can’t quite save us. But for now, it’s just Bowie being weird as shit and making it sound like chamber music. I still have no idea what a tactical cactus is, yet the phrase gets stuck in my head all the time. That’s Hunky Dory to me, the crazed hidden notebooks that foreshadow everything yet also refuse to be any one thing themselves.