Black Tie White Noise
by David Bowie

From lightmyway TOP 100 COMMENTER 05/13/2012 20:58 | #42240 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

I don't know when I started listening to Bowie, probably not until college. I was aware of him before that though, I knew about Tin Machine and I knew about this album and I remember people talking about it. Can you blame me for not caring about him based on this though? This is just so boring. Fortunately eventually I was motivated to hear his old stuff.

From Onater 01/04/2017 04:51 | #181669 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

Contrary to the other comments, I see this as where Bowie starts to get himself together again after the failures that were Tonight, Never Let Me Down and Tin Machine. It's not particularly good, but at least it's better than what he had been doing at the time.

I'm a massive Bowie fan but for me this album is one of his worst.Bowie lost his way after his incredible run of albums from Space Oddity to Let's Dance. Tonight,Never Let Me Down and Black Tie White Noise in my opinion are his worst period. Bowie started to recover after this album and went on to make great 90's work.If you are just starting to listen to Bowie please don't start with the 3 albums I listed above as they may put you off before you hear the truly great music.

Some people said this was a return to form by David Bowie, especially since he teamed up again with Nile Rodgers who had produced Let's Dance. However, for me it's a more of a miss than a hit. Bowie was never particularly good when he was trying to capture the zeitgeist: he was much better at driving the zeitgeist, and Black Tie White Noise smacks too much of him having cast around with what's popular with "the kidz" and then trying to Bowie-fy it.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a disaster (that honour belongs to Never Let Me Down), and there are some interesting moments on this album. Jump They Say is the most Bowie of all the tracks on this album, especially with its lyrical references to outsiders and mental illness. Musically, though, it sounds too much like he and Nile Rodgers have tried to make a 90s dance track - and they were really both too old for that nonsense by then.

From Crumpet 01/06/2018 16:18 | #204733 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

Very much in the lowest echelon of Bowie albums, Black Tie, White Noise has only two songs that stand out as good and only one that is great. The good songs are the titular Black Tie, White Noise (which is catchy enough to be one of the only memorable songs on the album) and I Know it's Gonna Happen Someday (a cover of a Morrissey song which Bowie changes just enough to make the cover necessary, but the original song is worlds better than this rendition, much like Bowie's cover of Across the Universe, it is worth a listen, but it is no where near the level of brilliance of the original) and the great song being Jump They Say, a song about his brothers suicide (I believe).

Jump They Say is the only thing that makes the album worth owning, but it's on many best of collections, so just get one of them instead.