1001 Albums Bonus Round: 1096. David Bowie – Scary Monsters & Super Freaks (1980) / Let’s Dance (1983)

 

This is the first of the Eighties Bonus Round, albums that I think ought to have been included through a combination of impact, solidity as an album more than simply a collection of songs, and personal taste. 

Do we really need another David Bowie album in the list? Well, I’m happy to trade one of the Berlin trilogy, let’s say Low as in my opinion the slightly weaker of the two included here, if we really want to maintain parity. Or maybe Station to Station. 

I vacillated between which of these to include, but I’m somewhat surprised that at least one of them didn’t make the list. Not least because between them they represent another transition in Bowie’s career. Scary Monsters feels like a culmination of his Seventies work, his last with Tony Visconti for a long time, and continuing collaboration with Robert Fripp. Let’s Dance, meanwhile, feels like the beginning of his Eighties work, here using Nile Rodgers as producer with a much more commercial sound. After John Lennon was murdered, Bowie went into a bit of a slump, with Let’s Dance being an attempt to recover. 

If I had to pick one, I think Scary Monsters & Super Freaks has the edge. It opens with the uncompromising It’s No Game (Part 1) with Michi Hirota (the one on the right of Sparks’ Kimono My House album cover) proclaiming the Japanese translation of the lyrics that Bowie screams out like he’s in pain – a tribute of sorts perhaps to John Lennon’s primal screams of his first album backed by his Japanese wife Yoko. Hirota’s lines are in a very masculine form of Japanese (much like she was saying “Oi, Mate!” in English), a deliberate breaking of convention by Bowie that included that’s like a little Easter egg that would pass the casual non-Japanese speaking listener by.  

Side One is definitely the stronger, with the hit Fashion that seems to liken slavish devotion to fashion with slavish devotion to authoritarianism (“We are the Goon Squad and we’re coming to town”) and Ashes to Ashes which has a unique electronica sound. Here Bowie looks all the way back to Major Tom from his very first album Space Oddity. I’ve always imagined that the Pierrot clown that Bowie uses as his persona in the video is Major Tom fused with some alien intelligence and returned to Earth, like a less volatile Ziggy Stardust not as prone to excesses. I don’t know why. Especially as we are told that “Major Tom’s a junkie”, probably a reference to his own cocaine addiction. I think maybe because there was a TV adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles on at around the same time and something in my brain connected the two.

Side Two is not, perhaps, as strong. Teenage Wildlife sounds like somebody heard Heroes once and tried to recreate it. Because You’re Young feels like a weaker version of a Side One track, and It’s No Game gets a reprise (Part 2) at the end, only in a much calmer mode – no Hirota, no screaming, no Fripp guitar. Which is perhaps meant to signify a return to calm after the catharsis of the preceding songs, but also serves to highlight how much the Hirota and Fripp contribution, and the frenetic vocals, really serve to make the song unique and not mundane. 

Let’s Dance is similarly lop-sided. Side One does have some arguably great Eighties Bowie – the title track itself, Modern Love, and a smooth cover of Iggy Pop’s China Girl that includes one of Bowie’s finest vocals since Wild Is The Wind. Some great funky bass from Nile Rodgers and guitar from the as-yet-unknown Stevie Ray Vaughan round out the sound. Side Two is less memorable, the songs never quite gelling, which is why I eventually plumped for Scary Monsters – it has, I think, one less weak track than Let’s Dance. Both are good, don’t get me wrong, but neither are classic Bowie throughout. 

Tell you what, let’s split the difference, and have Side One from both albums. That way we get one really good compilation that covers the transition from Seventies to Eighties Bowie.