And we go from a day of songs for the true 'heads... to maybe the two most well-known songs Bowie ever recorded!Changes - #36 Too much overexposure, too much radio play, to the point that it's really tough to hear this one with fresh ears. (I feel like it used to even pop up in commercials for a while when we were all younger?! I might be wrong....) "Changes" must've been the first Bowie Seventies track I heard, almost definitely by accident. I knew it long before Changesonebowie, so it must've been floating in the ether, and would I have even recognized this as the same person who also made "Modern Love" and "Let's Dance"? Doubtful. Kids tend to take things on face value, so there's no way I could have connected the Hunky Dory persona several artistic lifetimes removed from the pop star dancing under the Serious Moonlight. And yet... "Changes" is absolutely a pop song, and a fantastic one, and even as a child I must've picked up on that earworm chorus: "Ch-ch-ch-ch-CHANGES!" Man, that's fun to sing! I'm singing it right now! (Despite Herbie Hancock currently playing on the stereo...)
Since we all know this song inside and out, a couple minor details: Is Bowie dueting with himself? Plenty of artists sing their own background vocals, from MJ to Sting to Prince to T-Swift. But none of them mix those backgrounds as loud as "Changes" does during that chorus, where it's impossible to tell where the lead begins and the harmony begins. It makes for a truly unique sound (and also a song impossible to pull off correctly as a solo performer). And then there's the disappearance of drums, not unlike other Hunky Dory tracks: They basically only surface on the choruses, mainly for punctuation--"TIME may change ME!" [Rat a tat a tat]--as the piano drives the song forward. (A similar trick happens on "Oh! You Pretty Things," another one where I remember the drums being more prevalent than they really are.) And finally, it's (strangely) fascinating to observe Bowie already playing with masks and perceptions: "So I turned myself to face me/ But I've never caught a glimpse/ How the others must see the faker/ I'm much too fast to take that test." Foreshadowing the next four decades of restless reinvention? Or just Bowie warning/promising you, early on, that pinning him down to one era or genre was a fool's errand?
Ziggy Stardust - #14 Is this now the most famous Bowie song ever... Despite never being released as a single? Or, more precisely: Is this Bowie's most famous opening line? Because even non-fans who wouldn't know Ziggy Stardust from Aladdin Sane will still perk up with the glow of recognition when they hear those three sung words: "Ziggy plaaaayed guitar..." Do they know the rest of the lyrics, or even the chorus? Do they know how the fly tried to BREAK our BALLS, or how we bitched about his fans and should we CRUSH his SWEET HANDS?? (Oh!) Probably not. But they all know that opening line: Indelible, eternal, mythology in miniature. It's Bowie's own version of "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," the opening that overshadows the work itself. He begins and ends "Ziggy Stardust," the song, with those same three words; in between lies an entire story saga, the somewhat-confusing concept of Ziggy Stardust (the album) smartly condensed down to 3:13.
Decades of overexposure hurt this one too, which is my only excuse for placing "Ziggy" outside the top 10. Because, objectively, this is easily a top 10 track, probably even top 5 if we're judging it on pure cultural impact. In America, where the album was more cult curiosity than youth phenomenon, "Ziggy Stardust" still looms large: Bigger than The Rise And Fall..., bigger than the official singles, bigger than the actual top 40 hits Bowie would have later in the decade. I've heard that opening riff--three chords, and if you can add and subtract a G to an open-strummed D major, you're done--played in countless dorm rooms, and around campfires, and (unfortunately) on stages in loud bars by lunkish cover bands who wouldn't recognize glam rock if you kicked them in the butt with a glittery six-inch heel. Boys and girls, I witnessed Hootie & The Blowfish cover "Ziggy Stardust," six months before Cracked Rear View blew them into the stratosphere. And, to steal someone else's joke, about the only thing David Bowie and Darius Rucker have in common is that they're both carbon-based life-forms. But they both know how to play "Ziggy Stardust" on acoustic....
And here's the brilliant, hilarious, so very Bowie wrinkle in the "Ziggy Stardust" phenomenon: This isn't another "Wonderwall," where the lyrics are aural wallpaper that sound deep when drunk people sing them, loudly. This is a deeply twisted--and funny--song about the perils of rock idolatry, where the kids raise Ziggy up to the level of a god before sacrificing him on the altar of his own hubris. The line after the Famous Opening Line is "Jamming good with Weird and Gilly," and does anyone singing along know who they are? (Nicknames for Trevor and Woody, the bassist and drummer in the Spiders, and yes I had to look that up to make sure.) There's a line in the chorus that inspired an entire (fantastic) Metallica song. (The second thing on Master Of Puppets that Metallica swiped from early-70's Bowie, if you're keeping score.) Good Lord, there's a verse that ends with the lyric "well hung and snow-white tan," and I laugh every time I hear it on terrestrial radio, not least because David delivers it with the perfect amount of sly, subversive, "can you believe I'm getting away with this?" wit.
And of course, there's the immortal way Bowie hits his deep register to growl "with God-given ass," stretching that one-word profanity out to three syllables, somehow. And there are some days I think that single line was enough to start a revolution. Did Ziggy change the world or just make love to his ego? Did every misfit kid who discovered a scratchy record or dubbed cassette of Ziggy Stardust go on to kill the man and start a band? Was Bowie's greatest trick managing to turn a gender-bending pseudo-love song to an androgynous rockstar into an open-mic standard? Maybe, maybe not, but one thing's for sure: Boy, could he play guitar.
