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David Bowie - “It’s No Game (Part 2)” (1980)

I said to Hendrik in my proposal for this week that I wanted to “free these albums from the chains of ‘his best since Scary Monsters’.” It’s important to note how the album Scary Monsters was a colossal shadow over Bowie’s head for the rest of his career. At the time, people went apeshit over it, giving it ratings like “7 out of 5 stars” and heaping the sort of insulting ‘return to form’ kind of praise to it. Insulting because Scary Monsters was really just the ‘next Bowie album’ at the time. It’s got the same backing band, half of the same producers, mostly the same approach to songwriting.

The difference was that Scary Monsters was the perfect distillation of everything Bowie had been doing on record for the past four years. The friction between manic and devoid-of-humanity that Low and “Heroes” mixed with ground-breaking pop music led to the more water-treading Lodger, an album that was trying to put more ‘pop’ in the avant-garde. With Scary Monsters, he found the perfect mix of ‘catchy’ and ‘experimental.’ “Ashes to Ashes” is one of the most bizarre number one singles ever put out. David Bowie proved to himself and everyone that he could be himself and still relate to everyone else in the world.

But then for some reason, he decided to switch tack completely and follow Scary Monsters up with it’s polar opposite: Let’s Dance. Thus, David Bowie in the 1980s began.