David Bowie's Diamond Dogs

After his breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust and before his U.S. pop hits “Fame” and “Golden Years” David Bowie produced a dark and difficult concept album set in a post-apocalytic “Hunger City” populated by post-human “mutants.” Diamond Dogs includes the great glam anthem “Rebel Rebel” along with one of Bowie's best piano ballads, a Moog-centered tune that sounds like Emerson Lake and Palmer, and a cool funk groove. But it also contains grinding discordant guitar experimentation, a noise collage, a weird repetitive chant, and utterly unique songs that combine lush romantic piano and nearly operatic singing with scratching, grungy guitars, creepy, insidious noises, and dark, pessimistic lyrics that reflect the album's origin as a projected Broadway musical version of Orwell's 1984. In this book Glenn Hendler reveals Diamond Dogs's connections to the larger world of 1973-4, including the neoliberal vision of urban decline registered in the album's setting and the shifts in the meanings of gender, sexuality, and race that David Bowie both reflected and contributed to through his writing, his music, and his persona. These are just some of the reasons many Bowie fans rate Diamond Dogs his richest and most important album of the 1970s.