Is THE LODGER David Bowie's best record?

You seem like a good guy and all but I strongly suggest you never say this again unless this is actually true for anything and everything in your life.

it's a bit of a mixed up mess to me, esp. those almost anti-popular songs on side one, but i remember as a kid seeeing it in the record stores on the shelf and thinking "what is that ?"

i was used to seeing all his other albums thumbing through the record bin (wasn't thumbing through records as the usual browsing method of the time in bins an interesting visual activity, even if it felt like you had to wash your digits afterwards), but the front/back of that album left me mystified -- and none of the songs off that album got played on the radio, so i wasn't able to place it (whereas so many bowie tracks got played on the radio from most of his other albums that his weirdo career trajectory to that point seemed straightforward) -- so this was the point where I got that "what's the guy up to & gonna do next ?"feeling, i suppose

looking back, it seems a very convincing demonstration of eno's oblique strategy thing -- the whole this way then that way non-flow of the album -- with weird jerks like 'repetition' or 'red money' or even 'fansatic voyage'(which really threw me as the first track of this strange looking record)

so to me it's a proper normal album as collection of songs, which is creepy, given how bowie is meant to produce 'concept' albums, and even if that just meant to me that his albums had this unifying cohesion (i suppose if evry album adopts this new style, then each album will seem relatively cohesive compared with other bowie albums), well this albums only cohesion was some thematic cohesion

like a series of short stories adding up to a book -- quite w.s. burroughs like (ie you put the pieces together, you make sense of this as one statement)

and it's haunted me more than most, this record, because it does cohere in this place slightly beneath consciousness, it all seems to fit, even if the music isn't pretty or majestic (in fact i think the settings and vocal-stretches make it very mock-majestc)

and then there's the sound of the record, kind of flat -- the songs don't bounce out, don't pull all the irregular rock'n'roll tricks i expect from albums involving eno -- it is like something to be read and thought about, rather than enjoyed as a series of songs

and if he hadn't been a superstar, would bowie have been able to produce this rather introspective personal, almost literary thing -- yeah, other posters have alluded by their lack of interest in this period and their opinion of it that it lacks the flash of other bowie, lacks the o.t.t. pomp and ceremony of rock and roll (that bowie returned to on the special effects and "i'm a weird guy" packaging on Scary Monsters)

maybe lacking the stylistic cohesion of similarly introspective stuff like Station to Station, it maintains the same stranger than fiction feel (as does Aladin Sane, i suppose -- funny how these albums get mentioned in 2003 so much more here than seemingly straight-forward rock, stuff like Ziggy Stardust which i presume like Let's Dance or Diamond Dogs everybody is well sick of)

did Ronson benefit from arranger royalties from these albums that he did have all that input on ?

just wondering, didn't Bowie "sack" the spiders from mars at some gig in the early '70s ? where does that leave guys like Ronson if he had been a major contributor ? anyone know the story here ?

should we have a Ronson thread ?
(what was said about Ronson having so many creative ideas, and contributing so much to albums etc.. not enough to be credited as writer for any stuff ? i don't have some of the really early albums, but didn't B. suck off R.s guitar all the time when B. was ziggy ?)

when I saw this thread title I thought "whoever wrote this is on drugs" and then I read, and behold, EVERYBODY's high! Even though I f'n hate "Rebel Rebel" (not through overplay - I just never liked it) I still say "Diamond Dogs" has 'em all beat for the following reasons:

1. better title
2. the Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family
3. "We Are the Dead" = "Fantastic Voyage" minus age + imagined age - ennui + dread = beauty, truth, truth beauty, y'all know the drill
4. the strings on 1984 are better than the strings on "Lodger"
5. "When You Rock and Roll With Me," a song title sure to chafe the balls of the ILX Massive, has one of Bowie's best vox EVAH
6. also, because I say so

I'm convinced that Bowie's glam period (Hunky Dory through Diamond Dogs?) is overrated. I just don't think it has aged well. There are many moments on Ziggy that make me cringe. I truly prefer the postdisco period: Young Americans through Scary Monsters, and I really believe that Lodger is the most coherent, sustained, catchy, and innovative of all those records. I love it. I'm listening to it right now!

"Yas-ssa-sin!
I'm not! A MOOdy guy!"

i remember the house and the couple, and just two records carefully singled out for culling -- nick mason guesting on [otherwise weird carla bley fictitious sports] art rock prompts a "pink floyd had their moments" -- Blue Oyster Cult tyranny and mutation -- silence, and "out the door" price

eno made noise -- for roxy, cale, devo, and many more, and then bow-bow-booie, .. even has striking noise texture -- yet lodger is so straightforward in sound character as to count eno's contribution as his most truly ambient presence from those years

was bowie's attitude guided by eno's rand-y selection systems ? "all here, but no responsibilty" ? a work-to-rule project ? scary monsters and super creeps is the sound of genuine new paranoias unleashed yet with none of the finesse of the more vaguely self-conscious Aladin Sane .. as though bowie finally got away from the hitchcock-esque eno presence, something from which "uh-to" have not had the balls to do themselves .. they sure sound like he breaks their balls regularly

so the lyics are less narrative, more 'scene' i suppose, the textures and feel are very "rock band that's to be taken seriously heavily, pal" -- this relative safety zone in pub rock robs the duke of the quaint ambiguities and musical oddness that always distinguished for me the good bowie albums -- cocky quips /cut anthony newley fails, incompatible with each other and with cock rock

songs like "jean genie", "rebel, rebel" and "watch that man" are all testamount to how finely bowie felt he had to at least acknowledge blues-derived rockers, and so even prefering the stooges to the stones does not translate to easy testosterone, as the more-convincing stooges discovered

yet for me, bowie (qua a better bryan ferry) is great pop music response to frank sinatra and bing crosby, adding kubrick's 'alex' twiggy camp-- he's a first generation dandy warhol -- soul, r'n'b, songs calling for "mannered" emotions that are intense enough for esapism, for alien sex, for extremist-weirdo fashion -- rock'n'roll on the other hand is too human for bowie -- he's never sounded comfortable in it without fashion trappings, his burroughs knife badly plotted sci-fi alibis or the ambiguities of a mime as presented living and breathing and weird (like Marceau or Les Enfants du Paradis) -- holding the crowd like this curious hamlet /hitler)

"John, I'm Only Dancing" and "Suffragette City" are places he'd rather joke about than live -- Lodger is a high water mark for international playboy camp-outs, very much the Warhol m.o. -- he's running away to this and that exotic bunker, but he can't get away from himself -- Lodger is his finest seventies presentation of controlled poise, of something perhaps slightly close to real bowie emotions

i find i have to remind myself that Lodger was considered avant garde music since itso accurately preceeded and inspired both duran duran and the associates -- eighties music, the flash and glam re-channelled via important technical developements like the invention of the compact disc, the shrinking of the mass production enabled by certain synth technology suddenly feasible with new chips, suddenly less than a roomfull of equipment -- Lodger properly treats synths as just other instruments, not key experiments shaping and distinguishing features to run like 'non-continuity' as an actual mechanism of weirdness, as on Low or Scary Monsters

a very ordinary suburban adult rock record, and hey mark, it's virtually an eighties blueprint -- a radical move for mr. weirdo

(and of course man who sold .. is standard issue rock in the fashion of a decade earlier -- the pretense of this mars stuff and new-sex non-musical werido elements in this case)

Forgive me if this point has been mentioned in this 15 month-old thread already, but it's also Eno's least favorite of the Berlin Trilogy -- apparently, he thought it was a mess and the least disciplined of the three. Of course, with all due respect to His Royal Baldness, that's exactly why I love it.

Lodger (most mature without being too mature, hence also funniest & most paradoxically 'human')

or

Station to Station (most perfect)

or

Diamond Dogs (the falloutcharred feverdream floodplain at the absolute center of the Bowieverse, aka Dave's darkest finest hour).