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Aladdin Sane (30th Anniversary Remastered)

David Bowie

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Album Review

The 30th Anniversary Edition of David Bowie's sci-fi, lounge-jazz, glam rock album Aladdin Sane is a treat for those who are obsessed with packaging and extra tracks. In brief, to discuss the original album once more: Aladdin Sane, following the überplanned and calculated Ziggy Stardust, came off as a far stranger recording. None of the high-concept drama and campiness of the former record is revisited in kind. Instead, tougher rock songs such as "Panic in Detroit," "Watch That Man," and "The Jean Genie," as well as a wonderfully and raucously covered "Let's Spend the Night Together," are contrasted with jarring, nearly serial dissonance on "Cracked Actor," the title track, and "Lady Grinning Soul." Here, science fiction à la Phillip K. Dick, freakish lounge-jazz, and cinematic incidental music vie for space in Bowie's articulation. All of it is compressed into a particular glam rock aesthetic that made attempts to conserve a bent, if present, innocence (check "Drive-In Saturday for clues with the doo wop choruses). The result feels like rock & roll fragmentation, ahead of its time. Aladdin Sane might have sounded immediately comfortable alongside the Fall's Live at the Witch Trials or the Teardrop Explodes' Kilimanjaro album, not to mention portions of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures from a few years later. All of that said, as an album it actually has aged better than Ziggy because the listener can never be completely familiar with its shape-shifting elemental constructs and medication-inducing mood swings. As for the bonus material here, it is nothing short of fabulous. Disc two is chock-full: two versions of "The Jean Genie" (including the single mix), the single edit of "Time," two versions of "John, I'm Only Dancing," the previously unreleased "Life on Mars?," the original studio recording of "All the Young Dudes," a different, unreleased version of ""Drive-In Saturday," and live versions of "Changes" and "Superman." The booklet is a book: 42 pages chock-full of color photos, many rare, killer session notes for everything, and an essay that includes quotes from Bowie and virtually everyone associated with the album and band at that particular time. This is fine treatment, along with stellar sound given to one of the most misunderstood rock & roll albums of all time.

Customer Reviews

Love it!

this album is awesome! if you're discovering Bowie for the first time and looking for some of his classics, definitely pick this one up! diamond dogs and ziggy stardust are other really good ones. all of his albums are great.

this 30th anniversary edition has a lot of good stuff in the booklet too, and the extra tracks are a bonus. i love david bowie, the songs he writes are gems.

To think this could infiltrate the mainstream...

Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't sound directionless or weak at all (that being the consensus among critics regarding this album), especially not compared to Ziggy Stardust. On one hand, Ziggy was meant to be performed as well as listened to, which may explain why it doesn't stand on it's own as well as Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dogs (and Diamond Dogs also had a very spectacular, theatric tour and was still a strong album so I'm not sure even that explains it). Whatever the reason, though, Aladdin Sane strikes me as much stronger than Ziggy Stardust. It was probably the most accessable and dynamic presentation of Bowie's characteristic social paranoia and penchant for imaginative 'what if' scanarios up until that point. You could make an argument for The Man Who Sold The World I guess, but Aladdin Sane's conceptual framework and seamless integration of musical anachronisms (the Stones, jazz, cabaret, etc) makes it both easy to swallow and strong.

His sense of humor comes across in a deceptively straight-forward way on Drive-In Saturday. The doo wop aspect of the song had to have been a deliberate attempt at anachronism and also harken to the years at the end of the title track (the dates for WWI, WWII and 197?). There's speculation about social collapse and an ironically upbeat song about having to re-learn sex from porno movies, which seems to largely involve internalizing the poses of media icons ("his name was always buddy, when he shrugged and asked to stay...she sighed like Twig the wonder kid..."). The fact that America's first televised presidential debate wasn't too far in the past at that time (those who watched it said Kennedy, with his flawless appearance, won in a land-slide, those who listened on the radio said Nixon won...) makes the song's uneasiness quite tangible, and the use of poppy, sixties-style doo wop more darkly funny (and Bowie was all about ripping on the sixties back then).

At the risk of sounding pretensious, I really think the combination of jazz, Stones-style rock (recalling the sixties) and contemporary rock constitutes a sense of "place" (no better phrase occurs to me at the moment) that really ties the whole concept together. Watch That Man is so Stonsey that the referrence had to have been glaringly obvious at the time, and that segues into the title track, which marks the beginning of the jazz 40's motif that reoccurrs again in Time (yeah that's more like Cabaret but still references the 40's) and Lady Grinning Soul. The album ends on that note, as if the narrator is rooted in one of the 20th century's turning points and makes only temporary excursions into the sixties, the distant future and the present- the 1970's -and really, what is the present except another subjective island in time, like the one narrator is on? Now I'm really getting pretensious.

And like I said, the other huge strong point is Bowie's sense of humor. The campiness in The Prettiest Star is laid out so think it's...well...downright sweet, as well as funny. Same goes for Lady Grinning Soul. There's a delicate veneer of decadent self-indulgence (also visible in Cracked Actor and The Jean Genie) co-existing with earnest speculation about one's place in history (title track and Time) and mixtures of the two perspectives in which Bowie's humor is largely visible (Panic in Detroit, Drive in Saturday).

So for a re-hashed "Ziggy goes to America" venture...it's suspiciously cohesive and thoughtful. More so than the previous album. It DOES have it's weak points- I rather think the live versions of Cracked Actor and Time on the Ziggy farewell album and the versions of Panic in Detroit and The Jean Genie on the recently released Nassau bootleg are vastly superior to the original studio recordings -but I think it shows a ton of growth, direction and imagination when compared with Ziggy Stardust, and Diamond Dogs took that to a whole new level, and that's a whole other rant waiting to happen.

Biography

Born: January 8, 1947 in Brixton, London, England

Genre: Rock

Years Active: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s

The cliché about David Bowie says he's a musical chameleon, adapting himself according to fashion and trends. While such a criticism is too glib, there's no denying that Bowie demonstrated remarkable skill for perceiving musical trends at his peak in the '70s. After spending several years in the late '60s as a mod and as an all-around music-hall entertainer, Bowie reinvented himself as a hippie singer/songwriter. Prior to his breakthrough in 1972, he recorded a proto-metal record and a pop/rock album,...
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