Is THE LODGER David Bowie's best record?

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).

also it has a lot of bowie's FUNNIEST writing: he's a fairly humourless sentimentalist usually

george's idea that it's an 80s blueprint is interesting: i don't specially hear that — i think it's a real anomaly record, across the board, not glossy, not BIG, not painterly, not conceptual, not quilt-poppy even — but if GG's right i'd still take that as a plus rather than a minus, since i don't at all buy george's general line on "pop" anyway, esp.80s pop

"adult"? i have no idea what this means in this context

specifics could convince me otherwise perhaps: vague sociological generalisations will (as usual) affirm my prejudices

... except it's savage lure, not savage jaw. (my favourite misheard lyrcs are from Lodger: "Don't say nothing's wrong, 'cause I've got a love of cheese, a beard"

I don't know if Lodger's my favourite Bowie album, probably not, but I do think it's brilliant and it's the last truly great Bowie album (Scary Monsters has some great songs but it's a mixed bag and marks the end of Bowie trying to do off-the-wall innovative things). There's something not quite right about Lodger, the song sequencing is off-kilter, the songs don't quite hang together, but this jarring effect makes it more not less interesting an album. It's the prototypical late seventies art album of modernist alienation; I like the fact that it's jokey and yet serious at the same time. I mean, the lyrics to Fantastic Voyage or Move On (Africa is sleepy people, Russia has its horsemen...), they're sort of ironically childlike, but in the end you find yourself moved anyway. I read somewhere that the cover was a take on a Picabia portrait, is this true?

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/picabia/picabia18.html
the Cyclope

"so the glass trilogy, the pyramid on the cover in the classical section we'll never see"?

what?

Of course, the good easily outweighs the bad on this album. I particularly love the mad violins on "Boys Keep Swinging".

HAHHAHHAHAAHAHA

(tho i think glass when he started might have tried something this quick)

THE HINTERLAND
THE HINTERLAND

I'M GONNA SAIL TO THE HINTERLAND