Look, it's Bowie, it's classic: what more do you want?
(The album is not really worthy of 4 cookies, but it's a Bowie classic, so it earns one extra just for that.)
Artiste: David Bowie
Nationality: British (English)
Album: Aladdin Sane
Year: 1973
Label: RCA
Genre: Art rock/Glam rock
Tracks
Watch that man
Aladdin Sane
Drive-in Saturday
Panic in Detroit
Cracked actor
Time
Prettiest star
Let's spend the night together
The jean genie
Lady grinning soul
Chronological position: Sixth album.
Familiarity: “Ziggy Stardust”, “Diamond dogs”, “Low”, “Heathen”, “Let's dance”, “Never let me down” and of course the greatest hits packages. I know, I'm ashamed: I should know a lot more Bowie than this!
Interesting Factoid: For anyone who hasn't figured it out years ago, the title is a pun on “a lad insane”, and Aladdin Sane was the extension of Bowie's character Ziggy Stardust as he moved out across America.
Impression: Hey, it's Bowie, it's the seventies, what more do you need to know!
Best track(s): Aladdin Sane, Drive-in Saturday, Time, The jean genie (obviously), Lady grinning soul
Worst track(s): How could you say such a thing about Bowie? Though I admit I could have lived without the cover version of the Stones'
Let's spend the night together, fun as it is.
Intention: I need to hear more Bowie!
Comments: Like I say, I haven't listened to enough Bowie, and this album proves it. The mad piano solo on the title track is itself worth the price of admission. After the monster success that was “The rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, Bowie needed to follow up that groundbreaking album with something really special. And he did. “Drive-in Saturday” puts me in mind of “Five years” from the previous album, and was one of the three singles released, while there's even a preview of a far later hit, “Absolute beginners”, in “The prettiest star”. As with most Bowie albums, it's a mixture of styles: soul, rock, doo-wop, blues... the Thin White Duke was never one to restrict himself to one genre. And as with many Bowie releases there are stories in the songs, with cautionary tales and morbid visions of the future. I particularly like the dates in brackets after the title track --- 1913, 1938 and 197? --- where he noted the year before each of the two World Wars, convinced another one would break out in the seventies.
There's little bad you can say about a classic Bowie album, just as you would be hard-pressed (and brave, if not foolish) to give “Dark side of the moon” or “Led Zeppelin IV” a bad review, but I don't get the same feeling of immediacy from “Aladdin Sane” as I do from “Ziggy Stardust”. Maybe that's because I know the latter album much better, and this is my first time to hear this one. Still, an impressive follow up to an album I'm sure many thought could not be followed. It doesn't outshine or even match the glory of Ziggy, to be sure, but neither is it left languishing in its shadow.