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Welcome to a new edition of the Daily Music Picks newsletter!
Today’s music pick is the Bowie masterpiece no one knows about, a deft blend of electronic and art-rock influences.
Genre: Electronic, Art-Rock
Label: Arista
Release Date: April 5, 1993
Vibe: 🤩
Anyone who questions David Bowie’s status as the granddaddy of alternative craftsmanship and deft genre experimentation should listen to Black Tie White Noise.
For context, this release came on the heels of his pop-leaning 80s output that turned sour after his short-lived group Tin Machine garnered some head-scratchingly harsh reviews. Critics and fans alike pined for a back-to-basics Bowie record, and, in many respects, that’s what they got. Not since Station to Station had the Thin White Duke been so brazen but also meticulous in his stylistic assimilations. He fully embraces electronic grooves on “You’ve Been Around,” “Jump They Say,” and the phenomenal cover of Cream’s “I Feel Free.” There are also odes to funk (the title track), blue-eyed soul (”Don’t Let me Down & Down”), and late-80s jazz fusion (”Looking for Lester”) that play like a greatest hits highlight package, or, at the very least, a reminder that Bowie still had plenty of zip left on his fastball.
Even after all that, he saves the best for last with the one-two punch of “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday,” an anthemic Morrissey cover, and “The Wedding Song,” a smooth, sexy tribute to Iman, whom he’d married shortly before Black Tie’s release. Contemporary reviews that claim, for various reasons, that this record isn’t very “Bowie-like” miss the point entirely. Especially after Black Star, his jaw-dropping 2016 swan song that has more in common with jazz and ambient than it does rock, to knock him for not staying in a single musical lane is more than a little ridiculous. To continuously redefine who he was as an artist and, in the process, refocus popular conceptions around genre and tradition was his greatest asset, and Black Tie White Noise ranks among the most excellent showcases we have of that gift.
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