Q is out of sight and out of sounds…
(Ooops, this item should have gone live on the 6th…but due to a technological burp… Oh well, still worth posting. Better late, etc.)
The February edition of
These polls are kind of becoming meaningless, if they’re not already, as many publications have realised that this annual nonsense shifts copies and starts healthy debates on the state of rock music.
However, as stated in the headline, three Bowie albums make the list so I’m duty-bound to report. The albums are as follows: 41 Ziggy Stardust; 46 Hunky Dory; 80 Low.
I’m sure I don’t have to point out David’s involvement with two other albums that make the grade, Iggy Pop‘s Raw Power (95) and Lou Reed‘s Transformer (97), the latter helping DB to the position of fourth best producer in the list, behind George Martin, Nigel Godrich and Scott Litt.
Anyway, despite my earlier comments, I think it’s still cool to be recognised in this way, and here follows excerpts from the comments on all three albums…
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41 = The Rise And fall Of Ziggy Stardust And the Spiders From Mars
Ziggy Stardust’s flimsy saga of a band that made it and then fell apart was rock’n’roll’s first morality tale. Embracing both life’s big picture (the knowing swagger) and minutiae (Suffragette City’s “Wham bam, thank you, ma’am!”), the music was sensational and for all the ’70s trappings, it’s quality is timeless.
This was the sound of an artist shedding his quirky past in order to discover both style and substance. Bowie never looked back, while Ziggy spawned glam rock, Queen, multi-hued sexuality and the sense that rock could be dirty, flash and enormously popular at the same time.
46 = Hunky Dory
Multiple aliases followed, but Bowie’s fourth album was where he became Bowie: The Rock Star. From here on he’d pick and mix high and low art, gender bending, glam, kitsch and space-age woo-woo. It remains a firm favourite of fans, musicians and the artist himself.
80 = Low
Glam space cadets Bowie and Brian Eno were never going to make a conventional album. On Sound and Vision the Thin White Duke invented the “pop” end of new romanticism; on Warszawa and Weeping Wall, the “art”.
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So there you have it. If you want to find out what else made the Top 100, buy the magazine or try and work it out from the image above.