Low and Ziggy Stardust - Music - Forums : Best Ever Albums

Kiki

So I relistened to an album recently called 'Low'. It is one of hundreds released by David Bowie and one in which my first listening was less than good. I left it alone for a good year before I relistened to it. Didn't remember much of the songs even.

Going back to this hailed "classic" of David Bowie's collection, I found myself enjoying it a lot. Really, everything felt like it clicked. 'Speed of Life' and 'Breaking Glass' start the album. Two completely different tracks with distinctive hooks. More distinctive than almost every other Bowie album opening song/s. Not long after there is 'Sound and Vision' which is like a stop start cardboard robot party in an awesome way. It's as crisp as his look on the album cover. While he knows there iscut copy of 'Heroes' on here, he stares off across the sand dunes of pop wastelands like man on a mission. Guy knows he has something to give here! 'Be My Wife' only carries on charming by the bucket full and 'Always Crashing in the Same Car'... can't be denied. It can't be denied.

However towards the end this one becomes a totally different fish. It falls like a puddle of mercury, the lights dim and you are left to deal with it. I'm not going to single out parts of the second half because it all sort of becomes one. All I will add is that I really enjoyed it.

However all this 'Low' listening got me thinking about another album by David Bowie. One I shall call 'Ziggy Stardust' for simplicity. An album by him I also enjoyed. Yet I find it is for entirely different reasons than 'Low'. They are completely different in every way. More different than 2 Bowie albums being different... and Bowie albums can be different! I mean you can call 'Hunky Dory' the Ziggy Stardust with country air and 'Aladdin Sane' is... well the retread of it. 'Heroes' is all clunky while 'Diamond Dogs' is angry Ziggy Stardust and 'Let's Dance' is Dance Dance Ziggylution. 'Low' is David Bowie prancing about some... distant astral prairie while modern art serenades from the sky. Whereas the lyrics appeal to me in Ziggy Stardust, in 'Low' it is more of a ride. A ride which I am enjoying more and more. Ziggy Stardust had 'the end of the world as we know it' and 'The Power Of Rock' (two themes that will get me on board) and 'Low' has none of that. I haven't even learned the lyrics to the songs with them but it has something the former doesn't. A vibe. A little jitterbug of golden goodness.

Basically, '5 Years' got to me immediately on first listen. 'Speed Of Life' fell into 6/10 territory and is climbing with each new listen. The lyrics and subjects in 'Ziggy Stardust' appealed to my interests. 'Low' doesn't have that benefit but I'm starting to enjoy it as much on sound alone. I may find myself listening to 'Low' a lot more and enjoying it more than 'Ziggy Stardust' in the long run... and it was one of my harshly rated 'Bowie' albums too! Shocked

Rather than saying what you think is the best, let's have a look at the merits of both albums. How do you think they compare to one another? Do you see what I am saying? Or do you disagree and consider them very similar in sound?

revolver94

professional dilettante

Gender: Male

Age: 31

Location: Washington, D.C.

I got into Ziggy Stardust before I got into Low, but that's most likely just because I owned Ziggy first.

I agree that they're completely different albums; that's one of the reasons I love Bowie, he's such a dynamic artist. So many groups just stagnate on a certain type of music, or change for the worse, but Bowie was always so fluid; his entire 70's career is one of the most beautiful musical tales ever told.

Ziggy, I think, is probably a more solid album as a whole, but lately I've found that Ziggy doesn't have the same appeal to me that it used to have... I'm nervous I might have burned it out. I listened to Low just a few days ago and it was better than ever. So who knows, my opinion could change.

Guest

The best tracks are all on Low, but Ziggy Stardust is much more consistent as an album. Overall I'd say Ziggy Stardust is the better of the two.

The two really are pretty difficult to compare, though.

Hayden

Location: Vietnam

Hunky Dorey is his best.

Low is lame.

Ziggy Stardust is aight.

Those are my opinions.

*leaves*
_________________
Doubles & Conch

Bork

Executive Hillbilly

Location: Vinson Mountain, GA

Agreed and agreed. Vastly different albums and that's one of the reasons he is one of the greatest of all time.

Yourselfisntsteam

Bowie's "eclecticism" and changes in style are not so much artistic evolution but a calculated and artificial hopping on every trend he could. Clever marketing, fabricated image. But that might be a talent in itself. And in the end he had capable songwriting skills, even if they only surfaced occasionally.

Low and Ziggy Stardust are the two peaks of his career I think, and probably his only consistent albums.

Ziggy is impressive because because of its ability to be quite an emotional force despite its generally run of the mill sound and really silly concept. Its stands as a rare great strait forward rock album.

Low, strikes me as a moodier version of Brian Eno's pop ambient mixture on Another Green World, no doubt because of his production. The 2nd side is wonderfully dark, and that works for me because I often like depressing music. I'm listening to it now, and I think I forgot how good can be, it might actually be the better of the two, but it really comes down to mood.

lancashirearab

A Porky Prime Cut

Gender: Male

Age: 60

Location: Too Far South!

David Bowie is rightly praised as an incredible artist who has achieved a great deal in music. He has been an innovator who is not prepared to keep turning out the same style throughout his career. he even tried to use Drum n Bass in one of his later albums!
Low has to be appreciated in this light. It was such a risky album to make. The second side alone was not appreciated by his record label and could have seen him cast into the musical wilderness. But he believed in what he was doing and gave the world his masterpiece. It is a fantastic album drawing together many of his influences. If you can find another album with a better opening sound, I would love to hear it.
Ziggy Stardust is a great album too. It was the second Bowie album I bought and sealed my love of his music. The album is full of great songs. Lady Stardust, Five Years, Starman (Which I recently bought as a 7" picture disc), Hang on to yourself, suffragette City, Rock n roll suicide, ...
_________________
Hey look, there at the back
a wooden tree
isn't it a pretty one?

hairymarx1

Gender: Male

Location: London

Yourselfisntsteam wrote:

Bowie's "eclecticism" and changes in style are not so much artistic evolution but a calculated and artificial hopping on every trend he could. Clever marketing, fabricated image.

I agree wholeheartedly with the above but would take the argument one step furthur. Along with The Beatles, Bowie is, in my view, one of the most overrated artists in rock history.

hairymarx1

Gender: Male

Location: London

lancashirearab wrote:

David Bowie is rightly praised as an incredible artist who has achieved a great deal in music. He has been an innovator who is not prepared to keep turning out the same style throughout his career. he even tried to use Drum n Bass in one of his later albums!
Low has to be appreciated in this light. It was such a risky album to make. The second side alone was not appreciated by his record label and could have seen him cast into the musical wilderness. But he believed in what he was doing and gave the world his masterpiece. It is a fantastic album drawing together many of his influences. If you can find another album with a better opening sound, I would love to hear it.
Ziggy Stardust is a great album too. It was the second Bowie album I bought and sealed my love of his music. The album is full of great songs. Lady Stardust, Five Years, Starman (Which I recently bought as a 7" picture disc), Hang on to yourself, suffragette City, Rock n roll suicide, ...

The notion that Bowie is an innovator is the stereotypical 'set in stone' view. But does it stand up to close scrutiny?

As was the case with The Beatles, I would suggest that rather than being a trend setter he cynically appropriated the latest trends. Fundamentally Bowie was a marketing phenomenon whose 'ideas' were subsumed behind a superficial mask.

The commodity was the central aspect of his 'art' as a result of his subversion of Warhol's message into something fascile. It was undeniably clever but but great art it wasn't.

Bowie was virtually all show and pastiche with no substance, whether that was imitating Lou Reed's decandence, recycling theatrical/Sci-fi stereotypes or updating the crooners of the 1950s. His early style was particularly heavily choreographed and overly melodromatic to the point of kitsche, crudely designed to appeal to a teen audience.

Stripped of his costumes and derivative concepts, Bowie's music was almost always banal rather than innovative or challenging and, contrary to legend, he almost always followed fashions.

The exception to the rule was his afro funk-rock stage of his career that was a forerunner of kinds to what Talking Heads went on to do.

But even then, he turned something initially interesting into self-parody and frivoulsness that in many ways undid what went before.

Even the new-wave and electronic/ambient genres which many people misguidingly think was invented by Bowie, was in fact a mishmash of Eno and Neu without ever reaching the heights of either.

That's not to say his two best albums, 'Heroes' and especially 'Low' from this period are not good albums because they are. But revolutionary or groundbreaking they are not as many critics and fans insist they are.

Guest

hairymarx1 wrote:

Bowie was virtually all show and pastiche with no substance, whether that was imitating Lou Reed's decandence, recycling theatrical/Sci-fi stereotypes or updating the crooners of the 1950s.

Isn't that what all artists do? Take the groundwork that was already laid by other artists and find new ways to mix and match it? Find new ways to develop it? Take what's been said a million times and twist it to create their own sound?

If your definition of "innovative" is creating something that is completely alien and unlike anything that's been created thus far, then I'm sorry to tell you that nothing that's ever been created in all of recorded history is actually "innovative". Everything recycles something. It's what it does with the recycled material that makes it unique.