Black Tie White Noise by David Bowie: classic or dud?

I forgot Pin-Ups - never really saw the point of that(presumably "Let's Spend The Night Together" inspired the idea; either that or writing block, or he heard Ferry's These Foolish Things and wanted to try it)

Heroes would be my number 6. STS doesn't knock me out - it's very good, but has never fully engaged me. I don't like Hunky Dory much.

Here's my marks out of ten.
David Bowie - 8 (this is great stuff!)
Space Oddity - 5
The Man Who Sold The World - 6
Hunky Dory - 5 (meh!)
Ziggy Stardust - 10 (but the BBC versions would rate 11 - for Ronno's guitar sound alone)
Pin-Ups - 8 (great songs, mad delivery)
Aladdin Sane - 7 (I could be being unfair to this)
Diamond Dogs - 9 (widescreen beauty)
Young Americans - 6 (but it's fun)
Station To Station - 7
Low - 10 (the new music)
Heroes - 8 (side 2 is maybe better than Low's side 2)
Lodger - 9 (instinctive brilliance - Bowie feeding off the new wave and splurging ideas back out)
Scary Monsters - 7 ('She could have been a killer if she didn't walk the way that she do/And she do')
Let's Dance - 6 (but a good 6)
Tonight - 5
Never Let Me Down - 8 ('You are my moon, you are my sun/Heaven knows what you are')
Tin Machine - 6 (ha - I like it!)
Tin Machine II - never heard it
Black Tie White Noise - 1
Buddha Of Suburbia - 6
Outisde - never heard
Earthling - never heard
...Hours - 6 ('People boys all snowy white/Razzle dazzle clubs every night)
Heathen - 6
Reality - never heard

1. Low
2. Ziggy
3. Heroes
4. Hunky Dory
5. Scary Monsters
6. Lodger
7. Aladdin Sane
8. Station to Station
9. Earthling
10. Diamond Dogs
11. Heathen
12. 1. Outside
13. Man Who Sold the World
14. Let's Dance
15. Space Oddity
16. David Bowie and other early odds n' ends
17. Young Americans
18. Never Let Me Down
19. Tin Machine
20. Tin Machine 2
21. Pin Ups (I can see it being higher, since it pretty much created the covers album as we know it, but ehh...)
22. Buddha of Suburbia
23. Black Tie White Noise
24. Reality
25. Tonight
26. ...Hours (what a boring album...and it came out at the height of my teenage Bowie obsession too)

I'm finding myself rather obsessed with "Jump They Say" at the moment.

There are worse things to get obsessed about :)
Song and video are fantastic.
Got to be/lieieieieieieve some/bo/dy

Love that song. And Lester Bowie solos!

"Jump They Say" made my Bowie ballot.

I suppose I'm biased b/c BTWN was the first new Bowie album I owned and it pales only beside later achievements but it's half a fantastic record.

the title track was one of the troll votes on my Bowie ballot

Al B Sure!!!

yes i'm sure!

album is at least half classic. really one that got unfairly maligned.

It got terrific reviews at the time.

"It's not Tin Machine! *****" - Rolling Stone

pretty much. The main review too.

It was a pretty big step up from Never Let Me Down and Tonight though, no? RS likes to go nuts for so-so records that follow awful records.

RS awarded the first Tin Machine album a good review for the same reason.

It's better than Tonight, NLMD, TM (except for TM's title track), and TM2 (except maybe 'Baby Universal' which I liked at the time, being 17 and stupid). But that's not really saying much. Half of the tracks on BTWN are still disposable. The title cut is listenable despite or maybe because of the lyrics. The Morissey cover is yet another example of DB doing a crap overblown cover devoid of the original's emotion and human scale (see also 'God Only Knows').

And 'Jump They Say' is great, an absolutely bang on target pop song of it's time.

The first three tracks, all killers: The Wedding, You've Been Around (underrated as hell), I Feel Free. I'll also take Jump They Say, Miracle Goodnight (great video too), Nite Flights, and Pallas Athena.

"I Know It's Gonna Happen" isn't great but it's far wittier than "God Only Knows."

Well the one thing that can be said about GOK vs IKIGHS is that on the latter at least DB sounds like he's awake.

BTWN is not his most focused record, necessarily, but it's definitely not boring. The production is a little obvious and big-bam-boomy in places, but for the most part the record has a classy, high gloss contemporary (or whatever passed for contemporary in 1993) sound.

Someone upthread, I think, lamented that Nile Rodgers was involved bc in his absence Bowie would have been more free to experiment. But like a lot of his post-TM record, BTWN feels like something Bowie made for himself -- sort of a meditation on how different parts of his history and legacy coexist when they sit next to each other.

It doesn't always work, but I'm not sure it's totally supposed to. Regardless, I kind of like how, say, the vocoder on "You've Been Around" and squiggly filter processing on "Jump They Say" results in this sort of mashup of commercial and avant.

The Bowiesongs blog has been going into this one big time:

http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/category/black-tie-white-noise-1993/

yeah, bowiesongs gets to his nite flights, goes into the whole scott v bowie thang - http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/nite-flights/

genuinely tempted to listen to black tie white noise again for first time since hearing a friend's copy once twenty years ago. the obv classic 'jump they say' aside i remember it being dire, a notch above never let me down maybe but nothing compared to outside or earthling, comparable to hours maybe. dire. it's made much much more interesting reading than the tin machine stuff though.

Keepers:

The Wedding
You've Been Around
I Feel Free
Jump They Say
Nite Flights
Pallas Athena

I prefer Bowie's cover of "Nite Flights" ftr

you CRAZY

haha if these days Bowie's vocals annoy me in a way they didn't when I was 18 what makes you think Scott Walker has a chance?

I agree with Alfred's keepers list and it's a pretty good ratio of good to bad (I like his Morrissey cover too and Baby Can't Dance).

Maybe Bowie needs to do a Scott Walker, go away for ten years then hit us over the head with some wild liminal thang

whoa

I think I've figured out what baffled me about this album, the first Bowie album I bought at the time of release: it's a much-deferred sophisti-pop mood. The doublebreasted suits, the perfect hair, Al B Sure!, Lester Bowie, Sinatra moves in the sleeve photos. Nothing could've been more out of time in late spring '93 than sophisti-pop.

mood = move

if anyone wants to think Bowie stopped being Karma Chameleon in the nineties, play him the first singles of his solo albums: "Jump They Say," "The Heart's Filthy Lesson," "Little Wonder," "Thursday's Child."

oh yeah it's very out-of-time sophistipop, especially "don't let me down & down." there's a lot of tension running through this record, between pop and avant, between modern and classic forms.

surprising no one, it's one of my favorite bowie records

i think i know its gonna happen, and dont let me down are the keepers on this.

haha rong but I love you

have you got any keepers for this?

the one with al b sure is good too :)

i love this album so it's almost all keepers for me. only the title track seems like an unfortunate miscalculation

lol xpost

Jump They Say
The Wedding
You've Been Around
Pallas Athena
I Feel Free

what about "miracle goodnight"

oh right

I like Miracle Goodnight too. I'd rather listen to this than Tonight, Never Let Me Down or the Tin Machine albums.

Oh and I also like the Nite Flights cover.

First time I heard "I can't give everything away" I found it very reminiscent of BTWN.

id like a mix without quite so much of the of-its-time kitchen sink 90s production

aw that's part of the appeal for me

you've been around is one of my very favorite bowie songs.

That sawtooth synth, the loud drum thwacks, the way Bowie and Rodgers mix Gabrels guitar down to this petulant growl, Bowie's processed vocal -- nice buildup

you've changed me
ch-ch-changed me

Possibly his most Scott Walker track. Vocoder, bgd vox and histrionic melody to nowhere could be off Nite Flights or Climate of Hunter.

Look back in anger is v v Scott too

The first new Bowie album to be released since discovering him as an early teen and therefore a huge sentimental favorite for me. It does't quite sound like anything else by anybody.

^^^ my boy

I'm sick and tired of telling you.

Apart from 'Jump They Say', I really don't like this record. Outside is where he "got it back", for me.

In fact, if you ignore the fact that hours... unfortunately exists, then Outside, Earthling, Heathen, Reality, The Next Day and Blackstar isn't that bad of a series of albums.

Big dud.

David Bowie didn't release anything listenable between some tracks off of 'Tonight' and 'Earthling' imo.

In fact, if you ignore the fact that hours... unfortunately exists, then Outside, Earthling, Heathen, Reality, The Next Day and Blackstar isn't that bad of a series of albums.

i agree wholeheartedly with this statement.

Maybe Bowie needs to do a Scott Walker, go away for ten years then hit us over the head with some wild liminal thang.

― Humberto C. Antunes, Tuesday, March 21, 2006 12:42 PM (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Only The Next Day wasn't some wild liminal thang, it was Bowie picking up where he left off. Only once he'd got that out of his system could he produce his final masterpiece.

As for BTWN, it's mediocre Bowie at best.

There were a couple of bits of The Next day which were more along those lines - but yes, I'm talking about Blackstar.

this album is ok. it does have a bit of a cheap feel to it in the production and the packaging though. like Pallas Athena is fine, I don't mind it, but it's wholly unnecessary and generic. But I really love his version of Nite Flights, as good as the Walker Brothers'.

I had the cassette version and the packaging seemed fine, perhaps a step above most new albums on cassette at the time. 'Miracle Goodnight' seemed a bit tinny, but I thought it was a stylistic choice rather than cheap production.

i meant the artwork in general. it's just kind of ...cheap looking. maybe par for the course for those years, they were not the best years for graphic design and amazing album covers, but it's just boring looking. Miracle Goodnight is another one...great song, but it sounds so thin. Anyway, the album certainly isn't 'bad'.

Bowie wore more face powder on the sleeve than my grandma.

I guess there's an early Photoshop feel to the packaging, especially as there was a uniform look to the different formats the album was released in, as well as video packaging and in-store displays. There's also the release around the same time of the Singles Collection, whose cover used a picture of Bowie in a hat singing into a 50s style mic that seems to have been taken at the same photo session as the pictures for BTWN. Overall there's the feeling of a lot of promotional material all being created at the same time in a blizzard of copy & paste and image filters.

they used that mic image in the rolling stone article at the time too (one of a series of 'next album is his best since Scary Monsters and back to the Bowie we knew!) articles that started showing up with NLMD and never stopped)

Photoshop?!

More like Corel Draw '93.

Never Let Me Down is simply fantastic - one of Bowie's best 5 records.

Just seen this at the top of the thread, from 13 years ago. Holy christ.

The sentence that immediately preceeds that, about 'Tonight' having two good singles, is right if you can stand 'Loving The Alien' (I can't). If you remove 'Blue Jean' from the tracklist, then arguably 'Tonight' is worse than 'Never Let Me Down'.

(but every other Bowie studio album is better than NLMD, even 'hours')

I can see why hardcore Bowie fans would dislike Loving The Alien, but in the context of his largely awful 1980s it sounds like manna from heaven.

It's mad that he somehow managed to come up with Absolute Beginners, one of his very best songs, in the middle of easily the worst creative trough of his entire career.

The sentence that immediately preceeds that, about 'Tonight' having two good singles, is right if you can stand 'Loving The Alien' (I can't). If you remove 'Blue Jean' from the tracklist, then arguably 'Tonight' is worse than 'Never Let Me Down'.

otm

(but every other Bowie studio album is better than NLMD, even 'hours')

― Being cheap is expensive (snoball),

not otm

Was there any kind of consensus reached about the remixed version of NLMD?

I was excited to see that Nico Muhly was involved (I"m a big fan), or could it not be revived from the operating table?

All three albums are terrible. 'hours' at least sounds like Bowie had a clearer idea of what he wanted the album to sound like, even if the songs individually are worse then anything on Tonight or NLMD. I appreciate a songwriter with an overarching ambition for a record, even if the result falls totally flat. Trying and failing seems better to me than calculated attempts at Phil Collins arena audience blandness. That's why I rate both Tin Machine albums highly even though I'd probably never want to listen to either of them again - Smashie & Niceie Backman Turner Overdrive LET'S ROCK is NAGL but it's preferable to trying to fit into a late 80s yuppie record collection.

The poor songwriting and shoddy design (that sleeve! those sandals!) reduce hours into his worst album since NLMD. No Jacket Required has vim, production adequate to its songs.

the remixed version of NLMD is an improvement for the most part, yes, but it's still not great.

hours is his worst since NLMD yes. I actually fault the arrangements and production more than the songwriting; I think something better could have been made of those songs. It was just time for Reeves Gabrels to leave.

Dud, but "Jump They Say" is all right and the Morrissey cover's a gem.