CHANGESBOWIE
-David Bowie-
Changesbowie is a CD greatest-hits collection
that revamps the original CHANGESBOWIE by adding selections from David
Bowie's late-'70s and early-'80s albums. Consequently, it functions
as a definitive single-disc introduction to Bowie, featuring all of
his major hits from "Space Oddity," "Changes," "Ziggy Stardust," "Jean
Genie," and "Rebel Rebel" to "Heroes," "Ashes to Ashes," "Let's Dance,"
"Modern Love," and "Blue Jean." One complaint: It wasn't necessary to
substitute the "Fame '90" remix for the original to hook completists,
since it is inferior and was already issued as a separate single.
Ever since I could remember, I spent a lot of my summer and school breaks at my grandparents. This really meant hanging out in my uncle’s room and playing video games, listening to music, and watching MTV. My uncle’s room was about a third of the whole house, a walled in porch with it’s own living room and bedroom. I’d beg to stay over at my grandparents as often as I could. I’d spend time with my friends in the neighborhood, or getting food for my grandmother. Mostly, I spent the days alone in my uncle’s room, listening to his CDs, reading comics, and playing videogames. Doing nothing. My uncle pretty much acted as my really cool older brother. Looking back it’s amazing how patient he was with my stupid kid stuff and how cool he was with letting me hang out with his friends. He had a CD player back when they were still relatively new and ultra-expensive. His collection grew pretty quickly, at this time it was at least a hundred or two hundred CD strong. Without that collection, I’m pretty sure my musical tastes would be much narrower now. When he was at work, he’d let me go through his CD collection. I was already a strange little collector kid, so I’d sit there and alphabetize them by artist name or album name. I think a few times by the color of the CD cover. I remember seeing the CHANGESBOWIE CD plenty of times, but it took me awhile to pick it up. I can’t remember the exact age, but I was pretty young when I found this album. My uncle is about 8 years; I’m guessing he was 19 or 20, that’d place me around 11 or 12. I picked up the CD and really looked at it for the first time. I had had heard of Bowie, I had seen that movie with the Muppets peeing in a maze, but I didn’t really know anything about Bowie. I was curious, I popped it in. I remember the reaction being pretty immediate. The whole album felt completely alien to me. I had heard a few of the songs before, but hadn’t really connected them with the same artist. It’s funny how insane it sounded to me at the time, considering that these are some of Bowie’s most accessible tracks. Of course, Bowie doesn’t sound like anyone else. The songs had multi-layered productions, insane sci-fi lyrics and unusual phrasing, wrapped around some perfectly constructed pop songs. I think one of the main things that caught my attention was that I never knew what was coming next. When I was very young, 6 or 7, my grandmother gave me a little green boombox with a microphone built into it. Of course I’d use it to record my voice, and to play around with, but mostly I used the microphone to record audio form my favorite cartoon shows. I filled up tape after tape of cartoon music. I loved how random the music was when it was separated form the image. The good cartoons, like Looney Toons still had an over-arching structure to the music and sound effects. Very rhythmic. The badly produced ones, like transformers, were more random and harder to listen to, but had a wider variety of sounds. I started taping cartoons without watching them, then picturing them in my mind. I still haven’t grown out of listening to music this way. There’s plenty of great music out there I can’t stand because it’s too predictable or it doesn’t evoke imagery in my mind. (the reverse of this is true too, a lot of horrible music I like because it is unpredictable and image evoking, like METAL MACHINE MUSIC). Up to this band there were a lot of bands I liked a lot, but only two that I really loved. The Beatles and U2. Both bands gave me colors and images in my mind I couldn’t get anywhere else. Both were pretty unpredictable, especially the Beatles, but Bowie trumped them both. The songs on CHANGESBOWIE swerved all over the place in form and style, but they still cohesive as the work of one artist. This was music that challenged and pleased all at the same time. I didn’t have any scope of the length of Bowie’s career or the time periods in which the songs were formed. I knew that this was unlike a lot of bands my uncle listened to who didn’t seem to vary much album to album. More importantly, within each song Bowie was changing things up. He never seemed to deliver the same line, verse or chorus the same way twice. Where he did, it seemed to be done for deliberate effect. Even the more straightforward songs had unexpected musical lines and so many layers of music that I would notice something new each listen. The lyrics were oblique, strangely mysterious, and yet always just right for the song. In short, I never got bored. Bowie seemed to influence everyone, and he seemed to be influenced by everyone. It’s because of Bowie that I discovered countless bands earlier than I Thought I would. It’s because of him that some of my first CD’s included Talking Heads, Brian Eno and Iggy Pop. CHANGESBOWIE started my obsession with Bowie, and probably cemented my obsession with music in general. (c)-Steven Mangold
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