Updated and expanded! A 100-song career retrospective, hitting every phase and album (plus select singles and collaborations), some more than others. My pride and joy. Listen on Apple Music!

1. Liza Jane [Davie Jones with the King Bees, single, 1964]
2. You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving [Davy Jones and the Lower Third, single, 1965]
3. I Dig Everything [single, 1966]
4. The London Boys [b-side of “Rubber Band,” 1966]
5. Love You Till Tuesday [David Bowie, 1967]
6. Space Oddity [David Bowie aka Space Oddity, 1969]
7. Memory of a Free Festival
8. The Width of a Circle [The Man Who Sold the World, 1970]
9. The Man Who Sold the World
10. Changes [Hunky Dory, 1971]
11. Oh! You Pretty Things
12. Life on Mars?
13. Queen Bitch
14. Velvet Goldmine [recorded during the Ziggy Stardust sessions, 1971; b-side of UK re-release of “Space Oddity,” 1975]
15. Five Years [The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972]
16. Moonage Daydream
17. Starman
18. Ziggy Stardust
19. Suffragette City
20. Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide
21. All the Young Dudes [Mott the Hoople, All the Young Dudes, 1972]
22. Satellite of Love [Lou Reed,Transformer, 1972]
23. John, I’m Only Dancing (Sax Version) [single, 1973]
24. Watch That Man [Aladdin Sane, 1973]
25. Drive-In Saturday
26. Cracked Actor
27. Panic in Detroit
28. Time
29. The Jean Genie
30. Hang on to Yourself [Live July 3, 1973; released on Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, 1983]
31. Sorrow [Pin Ups, 1973]
32. Diamond Dogs [Diamond Dogs, 1974]
33. Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise) [edit, iSelect, 2008]
34. Rebel Rebel
35. 1984
36. Young Americans [Young Americans, 1975]
37. Can You Hear Me?
38. Fame
39. Station to Station [Station to Station, 1976]
40. Golden Years
41. TVC15
42. Stay
43. Breaking Glass [Low, 1977]
44. Sound and Vision
45. Always Crashing in the Same Car
46. Be My Wife
47. A New Career in a New Town
48. Subterraneans
49. Sister Midnight [Iggy Pop, The Idiot, 1977]
50. Nightclubbing
51. Lust for Life [Iggy Pop, Lust for Life, 1977]
52. Some Weird Sin
53. Beauty and the Beast [“Heroes”, 1977]
54. Joe the Lion
55. “Heroes”
56. The Secret Life of Arabia
57. D.J. [Lodger, 1979]
58. Look Back in Anger
59. Boys Keep Swinging
60. Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) [Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 1980]
61. Ashes to Ashes
62. Fashion
63. Under Pressure [Queen & David Bowie, single, 1981]
64. Remembering Marie A. [David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, 1982]
65. Cat People (Putting Out Fire) [from Cat People: Original Soundtrack, 1982]
66. Modern Love [Let’s Dance, 1983]
67. China Girl
68. Let’s Dance
69. Loving the Alien [Tonight, 1984]
70. Blue Jean
71. Dancing in the Street [David Bowie & Mick Jagger, 1985]
72. Absolute Beginners [from Absolute Beginners: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1986]
73. Magic Dance [from Labyrinth, 1986]
74. Beat of Your Drum [Never Let Me Down, 1987]
75. Tin Machine [Tin Machine, Tin Machine, 1989]
76. You Belong in Rock & Roll [Tin Machine, Tin Machine II, 1991]
77. The Wedding [Black Tie White Noise, 1993]
78. Black Tie White Noise [feat. Al B. Sure!]
79. Buddha of Suburbia [The Buddha of Suburbia, 1993]
80. Strangers When We Meet
81. The Motel [Outside, 1995]
82. The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)
83. I’m Deranged
84. Little Wonder [Earthling, 1997]
85. Battle for Britain (The Letter)
86. Dead Man Walking
87. I’m Afraid of Americans (V1) [remixed by Nine Inch Nails, single, 1997]
88. Thursday’s Child [‘hours…’, 1999]
89. The Dreamers
90. Toy (Your Turn to Drive) [Toy, recorded 2000, released 2021]
91. I Would Be Your Slave [Heathen, 2002]
92. 5:15 The Angels Have Gone
93. New Killer Star [Reality, 2003]
94. Never Get Old
95. Province [TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain, 2006]
96. The Next Day [The Next Day, 2013]
97. Dancing out in Space
98. Blackstar [Blackstar, 2016]
99. Lazarus
100. I Can’t Give Everything Away

(art by Brian Cunningham)

The 1990s albums reissued here, however, tell the story best. After a period in the pop-music wilderness, this is the decade during which Bowie reasserted his role as the godfather of alternative music, in pretty much any form it took. (The missing link between this box set and its 1980s equivalent Loving the Alien are the two records he recorded with his unjustly reviled rock band Tin Machine; I’ll just say “Justice for ‘You Belong in Rock n’ Roll’” and leave it at that.) Accusations of trend-hopping dogged Bowie at the time, for reasons that now feel increasingly silly—who wouldn’t want to hear him take a stab at industrial or jungle? This is the kind of genre play that paid dividends with his avant-jazz inflected swan song Blackstar, two decades later.

I reviewed the new David Bowie box set Brilliant Adventure—which features all his 1990s albums, including Black Tie White Noise, Buddha of Suburbia, 1. Outside, Earthling, ‘hours…,’ and the previously unreleased Toy—for Pitchfork.

According to many British music publications, David Bowie’s headlining set at the Glastonbury Festival in 2000 is the greatest performance in the history of the legendary event. (NME, ever effusive, called it “the best headline slot at any festival ever.”) But it’s greatest that’s doing the work here, not performance. It’s not individual highlights that make the set so fondly remembered, but the overall gestalt. Like the old saw about climbing Everest, Bowie’s Glasto set mattered because it was there.

By the time he took to the Pyramid Stage, Bowie had spent 15-odd years in the mainstream-music wilderness—first, post-Let’s Dance, making milquetoast megapop no one particularly liked, then rebuilding his reputation with experiments in everything from Pixies-inspired garage rock (Tin Machine) to concept-album Eno-industrial (Outside) to a Nine Inch Nails/Goldie hybrid version of drum ’n’ bass (Earthling). Different people liked these experiments at different times and in different amounts, though never at the level of his 1970s and early-1980s output. (Earthling rules, for what it’s worth.) During much of that period, his greatest hits were largely retired from service in his live sets.

But now, with a generosity of spirit as lush and flowing as his hair—which hadn’t been that long since Hunky Dory—Bowie was back! Resplendently coiffed and backed by a familiar band of musicians (including pianist Mike Garson, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, and guitarists Mark Plati and Earl Slick, all of whom worked with the star for years), the once and future king of art pop was welcomed by the sprawling home-country crowd like Arthur Pendragon returning from Avalon.

I reviewed David Bowie’s Glastonbury 2000 live album for Pitchfork. Giving a mixed review to David Bowie. Hell of a thing.

Moment 12 | Velvet Goldmine

I started bowielovesbeyonce, my first tumblr, in February 2009. I always said that if the two of them ever took a picture together, I’d happily retire the tumblr, my work done. Tonight, searching for header image for the site’s mobile layout, I discovered that they’d taken two pictures together — at the Met Gala a year ago, and on the cover of Vanity Fair fourteen years ago, eight years before I even started this thing. I’m stunned and chagrined that I missed these photos for all this time, but still, I’m so happy to see Bowie and Beyoncé together. I love them both; they mean so much to me.

I’m going to go ahead and keep that promise to myself. It’s a shock to the system, coming coincidentally just one day after I decided to stop using twitter except for very minimal professional upkeep — I’ll have so much free time in my day (and free space on my dash) that I won’t even know what to do with. But this was the plan all along, and I want to see it through. And who knows: If David can come back after a decade of silence, anything is possible.

All thanks to David Bowie and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, my very favorite pop stars of all time. You have given me a better life.

David Bowie’s been looking back at himself in his music for at least 16 years, but this is the first time he’s doing it as an artist who’s actually, legitimately, honest-to-god old. At a dashing-looking 66, he’s hardly ready for the record books as World’s Most Decrepit Rocker, but in the past you’d get the impression that to Bowie, being “old” simply meant wrestling with the reality of no longer being the sexual provocateur he was in the early ’70s, the art-rock innovator he was in the late ’70s, or the world-bestriding megastar he became in the early ’80s with Let’s Dance. Now, on his new album, The Next Day, it sounds like “old” means “Jesus, I could have died on an operating table.”

I reviewed David Bowie’s new album for BuzzFeed.

My David Bowie sketchbook has been showcased at BuzzFeed Music. (The drawing above is by Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio.)

I love this album cover. Barnbrook, the designers, talk about it at their blog.

NEW DAVID BOWIE

A while back, Isaac Moylan and I made a comic called “The Side Effects of the Cocaine”: the true story of the cocaine psychosis that led David Bowie to the creation of his Thin White Duke persona from 1975-1976. The comic now lives at its own tumblr. I hope you enjoy it.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is the Deluxe Edition of Station to Station by David Bowie — between the all-ought breakneck onslaught of the 1976 live performance in my hometown arena of Nassau Coliseum and the simpler, woodier sound of the analog-remaster version of the album itself, it’s a point-blank blast from the European cannon.

Click here to buy it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is A Reality Tour by David Bowie, released by Epic — a double-live retrospective of pretty much every single phase of a career that may well now be over, performed with evident glee.

Click here to download it from Amazon.