David Bowie's Diamond Dogs

David Bowie's concept album "Diamond Dogs" was a dark and difficult exploration of a post-apocalyptic Hunger City populated by post-human mutants. The album featured unique songs that combined lush romantic piano and operatic singing with scratching, grungy guitars, creepy noises, and dark, pessimistic lyrics. Each song on the album shifts the ground under you as you listen, reflecting Bowie's discomfort with the rock star role he had constructed and his desire to escape the constraints of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. Many Bowie fans consider "Diamond Dogs" his richest and most important album of the 1970s.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 168 pages
Publication date: 05 March 2020
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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-apocalyptic Hunger City populated by post-human mutants. Diamond Dogs includes the great glam anthem Rebel Rebel 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 origins in a projected Broadway musical version of Orwell's 1984 and Bowie's formative encounter with William S. Burroughs. In this book, Glenn Hendler shows that each song on Diamond Dogs shifts the ground under you as you listen, not just by changing in musical style, but by being sung by a different I who directly addresses a different you. Diamond Dogs is the product of a performer at the peak of his powers but uncomfortable with the rock star role he had constructed. All of the album's influences looked to Bowie like ways of escaping not just the Ziggy role, but also the constraints of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. These are just some of the reasons many Bowie fans rate Diamond Dogs his richest and most important album of the 1970s.

Weight: 164g
Dimension: 120 x 164 x 11 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501336584