Young Americans (Collector's Edition) Shelbyville TN

Young Americans (Collector's Edition)

David Bowie

EMI, 2007

REVIEW BY: Kenny McGuane

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 05/14/2008

I wasn’t around to see David Bowie at the height of his career. For most of my childhood I only knew Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King in Jim Henson’s classic “Labyrinth.” There have been worse abuses of Spandex, I suppose. But that film, its music, and Bowie’s performance made me want to know more about him. I remember thinking, “God, who the hell is David Bowie?” I’d find out later that everyone else had been asking themselves the same question for decades. It wasn’t until I was given the 1990 compact disc reissue of the classic Bowie compilation Changes Bowie that I really began to understand how incredible—and varied—his work truly was.

I’m mostly unfamiliar with any post-eighties Bowie work and not especially interested in exploring it. Given his historically bizarre persona, it’s hard to imagine Bowie getting any stranger…but that’s the sense I get from his most recent work. It’s stranger, almost un-listenable. Even though I was barely ten years old, listening to Changes Bowie, it always seemed to me that the music of David Bowie was some of the most unique sounding pop music I had ever heard. Yes, his music is unique, eccentric, scary, unsettling, and insane, but Bowie’s music is also extraordinary. My baby sister’s interest in Bowie was sparked in the same way mine was, she saw “Labyrinth” and wanted to hear more. I bought her the newer of the Bowie compilations and she practically melted her CD player because she played it so often. It seems even today’s young women—even my 11 year-old sister—are as turned on and fascinated by Bowie as they were 30 years ago.

By the mid 1970s, David Bowie had already undergone several musical and theatrical (and sexual???) transformations, but nothing as sharp and drastic as his departure from lipstick-glitter-glam-rocker to full-blown Philly Soul wannabe. 1975’s Young Americans transformed the Bowie fan-base. Some fans defected, but he made up for those and then some with the new ones he gained. Young Americans marked a total exodus from anything Bowie had done before and by thrusting his first U.S. #1 single “Fame” onto their radios, he convinced the American skeptics that he was an artist worth loving. The importance of this record with respect to Bowie’s career and the music of the seventies in general is perhaps the motivation for this redundant and altogether useless reissue: Young Americans (Collector’s Edition).

Recorded both in Philadelphia and New York, Young Americans boasts an impressive (and surprising) personnel listing, namely a 30 year-old David Sanborn on sax who would later become an architect and super-star of one of America’s worst crimes against humanity, smooth jazz. Also on staff is a 24 year-old Luther Vandross who co-wrote one of the album’s better tracks, “Fascination,” and lends his pipes to a few others.