Review #88: Hunky Dory, David Bowie

Karla Clifton
2 min readMay 22, 2021

--

#88: Hunky Dory, David Bowie

Usually, I take these first few sentences to talk about the artist or album, but the things I have to say about David Bowie are slowly running out. So right now I want to take the time to talk about something else that I’ve been thinking about for a while now.

I have an “album spreadsheet” and I recently noticed something interesting. Here are links to the last several reviews I’ve written, along with what year they were released:

#82: 1971

#83: 1969

#84: 1970

#85: 1970

#86: 1967

#87: 1970

#88: 1971

That’s a five-year span (1967–1971). Three of the top ten were released within that five-year span. But seven of the top ten were released in the 60s or 70s.

I went further and looked at ALL the albums I’ve reviewed so far, putting them in chronological order. Guess what? Fifty-one of these top 88 albums were released between 1960 and 1979. Twenty-three of those were released between 1967–1971. (I’ve never written a paragraph with so many numbers in it.)

Interesting. No comment on that — yet. Let’s get into this David Bowie album.

FAVORITE SONGS:

“Changes” — This is my favorite David Bowie song, maybe because it’s the first one I encountered. Remember when Butterfly Boucher covered it for Shrek 2?

“Oh! You Pretty Things” — I love that David Bowie is such a goof.

“Life On Mars?” — But he’s also so lovely. Remember when Jessica Lange covered it for AHS: Freak Show?

“Kooks” — This makes me believe that DB was a blast to hang out with.

“Fill Your Heart” Yeah yeah yeah! Yeah yeah yeah!

“Andy Warhol” — This sounds like it could be a Radiohead song.

“Queen Bitch” —Sounds like a Velvet Underground song.

“The Bewlay Brothers” — Fade-out ending is terrifying.

LEAST FAVORITE SONGS

“Quicksand” — Boring.

IS RS FULL OF IT?

I’m not going to punish my favorite David Bowie album for coming out in 1971.

Review #87: Bitches Brew, Miles Davis

Review #89: Baduizm, Erykah Badu

--

--