Chris O'Leary

This is so goddamn great. The dude just really liked David Bowie so he started a blog to talk about his songs, start to finish one by one, and at first some of it was meandering personal anecdote stuff (not that I'm one to throw stones on that score), but soon his cultural savvy and ability to pull out deeper themes and influences in Bowie's oeuvre--forget Lou Reed or whatever, the treatment of Scott Walker as Bowie's "secret sharer" unrolling over several essays here really deepened my understanding and appreciation of both--and even more, his command of real music theory and knowledge about recording and production (every song gets a look at its chord structure and its tonal palette, generally illuminating), and also his commitment to picking the right images to go with the essays (most of them photographs from the period and thematically related, less or more obliquely, e.g. Pinochet and friends for "Big Brother," a series of self-portraits from Bowie/Robert Mapplethorpe/Suzanne Poli/Andy Warhol/etc. for "Ashes to Ashes," a rally in support of the miners' strike for "Five Years"), make it a delight and a revelation, and there are still people out there with an eye for quality so he makes it into a book, the end. (Two books, really, this being volume 1.)… (més)