David Bowie
Hunky Dory (1971)
RCA Records
Side one
1. "Changes" – 3:37
2. "Oh! You Pretty Things" – 3:12
3. "Eight Line Poem" – 2:55
4. "Life on Mars?" – 3:53
5. "Kooks" – 2:53
6. "Quicksand" – 5:08
Side two
1. "Fill Your Heart" (Biff Rose, Paul Williams) – 3:07
2. "Andy Warhol" – 3:56
3. "Song for Bob Dylan" – 4:12
4. "Queen Bitch" – 3:18
5. "The Bewlay Brothers" – 5:22
Possibly the most ambitious songwriting effort of his career thus far, David Bowie’s
Hunky Dory is a commanding and impressive canon of the golden years of glam. While not as iconic or recognizable as 1972’s
Ziggy Stardust,
Hunky Dory is nonetheless a gross genre-bending accomplishment. Employing a dynamic tone and a consistent depth, it traverses the boundaries of pop music with stifling audacity and undeniable charm.
From its commencement,
Hunky Dory pursues a direction not traversed by Bowie in any of his prior work. Gone are the bland, derivative songs which make his first few albums so immeasurably difficult to digest and replaced with imaginative bravado. In a sense, the opening track, “Changes,” crafts a mantra for which Bowie’s songwriting was to follow for years to come: “Time may change me / But I can't trace time.” And it doesn’t stop there.
Bowie wastes no time before he ushers forth the well-constructed, dynamic melodies which distinguish the majority of his works. Glorious refrains such as the chimerical “Oh! You Pretty Things” and equally vibrant “Life on Mars?” explore fantastic themes that habitually rise to the surface during his radiant age of glam. As anyone that’s ever listened to his music can attest, David Bowie rarely achieves heights as dizzying as the climax here:
Hunky Dory later eschews the bombastic fanaticism for a more subtle form of songwriting, from his exhibition of helplessness in “Quicksand” to his dense collage of wordplay in the mournful closing ballad “The Bewlay Brothers”. And through it all Bowie’s backing band performs admirably; Wakeman’s piano is present through all of it, while Mick Ronson’s cathartic riff on “Andy Warhol” is just one testament to their skillful attack:
And while
Hunky Dory never really attains the far-reaching exposé that culminated during the Berlin era, there’s plenty that can be said of Bowie’s ballad-laden kaleidoscope of pop ballast, none of it bad. It remains today a standing example of glam perfection, a depiction of the young man who took the best of pop music and transcribed it into a formidable and lasting incarnation. Perhaps not the best work of his career,
Hunky Dory is nonetheless one of David Bowie’s expansive masterpieces and one of the greatest pop records in music history.
10/10