The 100: David Bowie, LOW

I’m not sure when I heard David Bowie for the first time. I imagine I heard “Space Oddity,” which was one of those songs that was always in the air, floating through radio airspace and embedding itself in the carpet even if you weren’t going out of your way to find it. I also have a clear memory of seeing Tin Machine perform on an old episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Macaulay Culkin. (Like the rest of the universe, I was unimpressed.) I was aware of Bowie and what a towering figure he was, and I had seen him on screen in Labyrinth and The Last Temptation of Christ, but if I’m being perfectly honest the first time I really engaged with David Bowie was when he was interviewed next to Trent Reznor on MTV.

As I have written about before, I was an absolute Nine Inch Nails obsessive in my teens. (I still am—in August I’m going to see them in concert in what will likely be my only show of 2025.) In the fall of 1995, Nine Inch Nails and David Bowie did a co-headlining tour as a coda to Trent’s promotion of The Downward Spiral but mostly to plug Bowie’s brand new album Outside. Both Bowie and Reznor were guests of Kennedy on an episode of Alternative Nation, and I re-watched my VHS copy of that interview over and over again. Bowie came across as so charming and droll—really the exact opposite of Reznor, but still somehow they seemed sympatico. If Reznor loved Bowie this much, I reasoned, then surely I would love Bowie too.

It also helped that Outside was a record that borrowed a little bit of the cinematic dread I so loved on The Downward Spiral (and that I later found Bowie had basically invented). I liked Outside a lot, largely because of the glammy industrial grind of “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” but I also dug the techno thump of “Hallo Spaceboy” and the moody acid jazz of “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town.” Outside was produced by Brian Eno, and the Rolling Stone review of the album noted that it was the first time the two had collaborated since Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy,” and I immediately sought out those albums.

Which brings us to Low, still a staggering triumph and my favorite Bowie album. Released in 1977 and followed by “Heroes” and Lodger, Low found Bowie decamping to Germany alongside synth fetishist Eno to deconstruct and reinvent himself again after the tepid reception to the coked-up robo rock of Station to Station. It’s often remembered as a moody electronic piece, but Low tries to filter a couple of different Bowie sounds through Eno’s ambient maximalism. It opens with a glam track, then incorporates some of his American soul schtick and flirts with Krautrock posturing until hitting the first side climax “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” which is my favorite Bowie song of all time. It sounds like a robot trying to decommission itself, gradually removing elements and going haywire and forever distorting itself. I also adored the imagery of a perpetual car crash and the way Bowie sort of floats above the idea, as though he is at peace with the kind of devastation his everyday life entails. It always reminded me of that image of a boot on a face from 1984.

The back half of Low is primarily electronic instrumentals, but even there Bowie can’t help but build narrative and zig when the book says zag. The closing piece “Subterraneans” is an all-timer, a pocket cyber-symphony with a haunting humanistic core, all delivered in under six minutes. Every time I put on Low, I am always shocked when it is ending, not just because it’s a taut 39 minutes but because I get so thoroughly ensconced in the glitchy digital world it produces. It’s wild to think how ahead of its time Low was, but even out of context it remains a definitive statement on the end of the century. Low, along with “Heroes” and Lodger, predicted the digital future. How I wish he had been wrong.