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.

Scary Monsters and Super Creeps is Bowie’s Except Album, meaning it often appears along with the word “except”. “Bowie sucked in the 80s, except for Scary Monsters“. “Bowie was never good when he tried for mainstream success, except for Scary Monsters“, and so forth.

It’s also often spoken about in the same sentence as “scary” and “monsters”. Though that’s less surprising, since that’s the name of the album. It would be strange to talk about the album without mentioning its name, although it would be a fun challenge to do so (and also without identifying it another way, such as “the Bowie album from 1980”). Kafka led a man to the executioner’s block without ever mentioning his crime. Could you arrange words in such a fashion that a reader understands the music, without ever actually being made aware that the album exists?

Scary Monsters is about decay. Not decomposition, not morbidity, just…things falling apart, in a general sense. It’s an album about the crack in your ceiling, and the verdigris embroidering your bathroom floor. All the things you’ve been meaning to fix, even as they advance to an event horizon where it’s not worth the bother.

Bowie assembled some of the finest guitarists to ever set plectrum to string, and made them play sloppily. Vocals are deliberately flat, or mangled oddly in the mixing room (the heavy tremolo rattling the chorus of the title track both disturbs and fascinates). The lyrics discuss fashion and aging, yet they all seem to be about the House of Usher. The building is tumbling down, we’re caught inside it, and we can never leave. Bowie sings about disillusionment and weariness, his voice cracked and broken. None of his albums – not even Aladdin Sane or Outside – evoke this kind of genteel neglect.

“It’s No Game, Pt 1” opens the album in thuggish fashion. Someone took the song, punched it around, and gave it a black eye. Fripp’s guitar part swirls like stagnant water, the drums kick out at you, and it’s interrupted by outbursts of Japanese female vocals, as though someone spliced in the hourly Harajuku traffic report. Although this is the closest solo Bowie ever went to punk rock, it’s cerebral and calculated beneath the blood: more like Public Image Ltd than the Sex Pistols.

Other tracks document various vanishing trends in Bowie’s music. One of the last great Bowie epics (“Teenage Wildlife”) can be found here, as can shorter but equally memorable cuts like “Up the Hill Backwards”. Be sure to get the version with the bonus track, “Crystal Japan”, which was written to score a TV ad for a sake company (of all things) but dredges up strong memories from the Brian Eno years.

“It’s No Game, Pt 2” is a slower and less enthusiastic reprise of the first part. There’s an old Hollywood joke: at eight in the morning you’re shooting Citizen Kane, at eight in the evening you’ll settle for Plan 9 From Outer Space. This song captures that kind of exhaustion and weariness, freezing it under glass.

This album has a reputation as a Bowie threw away most of his artistic pretensions and went fishing for hits. Happily, he caught one (“Ashes to Ashes”). Even more happily, the reputation is wrong: he didn’t throw his artistry very far after all. There’s louche experimental moments all over Scary Monsters. This is the rarest thing: an artistically successful commodity. It’s also one of his most consistent and listenable works. Clearly, the future was bright. He would not put a foot wrong in the 1980s.