(Note from management: review is terrible. We estimate that it will be demolished and a better one built by no later than 2039, allowing for cost overruns.)

Here’s where Bowie really gets his shit together. “He already had his shit together on TMWSTW!” Yes, but here he gets his shit even more together. Imagine a 10,000-psi hydraulic shit-compactor that compresses the entire contents of David Bowie’s lower bowel into a one-inch cube. That’s how together his shit is on this album.

Hunky Dory is a lovely collection of music, a classic among classics. Pick a Bowie fan, and ask for their ten favorite songs. I guarantee that at least two and probably three songs mentioned will be from Hunky Dory. (For the sake of sample purity, ignore any female whose answers contains “Magic Dance”.) “Changes”, “Oh! You Pretty Things”, “Life on Mars?”…they just keep on coming, to the point of embarrassment. Damn it, David, you’re supposed give the rubes one good song, and then unload the filler. You’re not supposed to pile up like, four or five classics on each side!

Books could and have been written about why these songs remain listenable and timeless in the face of (ch-ch-)change, bur some of Hunky Dory’s finest moments occur in the the deep cuts. “Andy Warhol” is a song nobody talks about much, and it didn’t place at all in Chris O’Leary’s 2015 Bowie song poll. Yet it contains Mick Ronson’s greatest riff, a jagging, colorful flamenco line that was later borrowed by Metallica for the bridge to “Master of Puppets”. Bowie performed the song personally to Warhol at the Factory in September 1971 – apparently, Warhol completely ignored the song he’d just heard, and commented on Bowie’s shoes!

“Queen Bitch” rips off Velvet Underground and takes them to a new level of violence, pounding the listener into a bloody pulp. But the greatest moment arrives at the very end of the album, with “The Bewlay Brothers”. The song is part acoustic folk, part studio experiment, with a mysterious set of lyrics that fans have spent five decades trying to tease apart.

Bowie would trash the song as portentous nonsense in interviews. But there’s something obviously personal about “Bewlay Brothers”, as if there’s real feelings underneath the fanciful patina of dwarves and rituals. For example, “My brother lays upon the rocks/he could be dead, he could be not” could only refer to Bowie’s schizophrenic half-brother Terry Burns, whose seizures would cause him to collapse in public. Bowie’s disavowals seem like an attempt to cordon off the song, and stop people from looking at it. As a man who traded in identities as much as any spy, did he slip up on this one, and reveal the truth?

Hunky Dory‘s weakness might be the production and presentation. Tony’s Visconti’s absence behind the mixing desk is a pretty big deficit: the instrumentation sounds thin. And although the pacing plays some fun tricks (the unresolved tension at the end of “Oh! You Pretty Things” gets cleared up straight away by the F in “Eight Line Poem”) overall the album seems misweighted, with a foppish, baroque first half and a hard rocking second half.

Although it’s only my fourth favorite Bowie album (behind Low, Station to Station, and Aladdin Sane…or damn it, maybe Diamond Dogs?), it’s the one with the catchiest songs. Bowie ruled the 70s like the Beatles ruled the 60s, but if you were to shave his career to the very finest point, it would start with “I still don’t know what I was waiting for” and end with “…malio”.

Tonight is widely regarded as the album where Bowie musically fell apart. It is widely regarded correctly.

It puts its best foot forward with “Loving the Alien”, which aspires to be next David Bowie Classic. Yes, move over “Heroes” and “Rebel Rebel”, it’s time for “Loving the Alien”. Does it live up to its ambitions? What do you think? Of course it fucking doesn’t! The production is smothering, the arrangement uninspired, the melodies rancid. The pre-chorus tries to build, but there’s nothing to build from, nowhere to build to. Guitars and glockenspiels and xylophones lurch upwards in awkward quintuplets…then the chorus arrives, at which point everything goes crash on the floor.

The lyrics attempt a grand statement about peace and unity but come off as another white millionaire wondering why all those brown people in the desert don’t try not killing each other. Seven minutes later, the song ends. It’s self-conscious, tries too hard, and just isn’t good.

He phones it in for the rest of the album, and the line’s engaged. “Blue Jean” is catchy and comes off well, although the xylophonist deserves a beating. The rest of the songs just suck, unless you like Phil Collins. The only saving grace is that Bowie is barely on it.

Let’s get that out of the way, too. He plays no instruments, the tracks are propped up with backing vocals and guest performers, and only two tracks are solely credited to him. Five covers on a nine track album, if you please, padding it out to a whopping thirty five minutes. This is the second shortest Bowie album ever released (after Lodger). You could put the entire thing on a 33RPM record, and have enough space a quarter of Aladdin Sane, or “Station to Station” in its entirety. Is Tonight a serious release? It feels more like a posthumous album. It’s as if Bowie died in 1983, and his label went fishing through his rubbish bin for tapes.

I have no more words to say. It’s like reviewing a box of empty air. Call me crazy, but I actually expect David Bowie albums to have David Bowie on them.

In my review of Rock & Rule, I stated that it’s an adult film with no adult content.

This is not true; I saw an edited cut. According to the Rock & Rule wiki (??!), a version exists featuring brief nudity from Debbie Harry’s character, Angel. (Described below by an anonymous superfan, who gets way too into it. The Zapruder film wasn’t this obsessively analyzed.)

For most of the film, Angel wears a conservative but stylish red blazer over a black top with matching black pants, boots and a gold belt. After Mok enslaves and drugs her, she is forced to wear a very skimpy outfit for her involuntary performance at his concert. The outfit is a dress with a bare back and a front narrow enough to expose the sides of her bare breasts. The lower half of the dress is two fabric panels in the front and the back divided by slits up to her pelvis on either side, exposing her legs to the top of her hips. Also, Angel is not only going in her bare feet, she also isn’t wearing anything underneath her dress. We can see she’s bare underneath when the breeze periodically causes the fabric panels to lift, exposing her bare tush and the creases of her pelvis. This especially happens when she is singing to the demon and the back panel of her dress flips up, revealing her bare bum.

Can the coast guard mount a rescue mission for this man’s keyboard? It’s clearly drowning in its operator’s drool. Additional credits to society chime in the comments.

Based on her haircut, general appearance, it looks like they actually modeled her at least somewhat on Debbie Harry, who provided her singing voice.

Nothing gets past Sherlock here.

Angel’s brown” fur is actually her skin. After all, “fur is skin” exists according to TV Tropes & Idioms. So her sexy, thick, buxom, toned body is exposed.

A compelling argument, backed by citation. Can I suggest a career as a lawyer? You’ll be spending a lot of time in courtrooms either way.

Yeah, I think she and would get along well to being friends and having fun as girls. Her natural personality reminds me of a lot of the I usually hang out with. You rule Angel girl!!!! <3 :)

You shouldn’t think that, because Angel’s not your friend, or even a real person. She’s a cartoon mouse. Parasocial fixations on fictional characters are unhealthy, and you should make some real friends.

By the way, reading the heart ASCII <3 requires that you tilt your head to the right, and the smiley emoticon :) requires a tilt in the opposite direction. When the two appear back to back, you’d technically have to whiplash your head 180 degrees to read the text. Pretty painful, and if you did it fast enough, it might even prove fatal.

This could be used as an assassination method. Copy and paste “<3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :)” into an email, send it to your enemy, and see if they snap their spine. Or maybe that’s not how it works, maybe you’re supposed to imagine that the smiley is tilting its head. Can smileys be killed this way? Let’s try. :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :(. There. I just rocked and rolled it to death.