Artist: David Bowie · Album: Hunky Dory · Year: 1971 · Label: RCA · Rank: 88 / 500
Before the lightning bolt, before Ziggy, there’s Hunky Dory – an album that feels like flipping through Bowie’s sketchbook and finding, to your shock, that every sketch is already a masterpiece. Piano-led glam cabaret, folk whispers, proto-punk, Beatlesque pop: it’s all here, held together by that elastic, theatrical voice.
“Changes” – An Overture to a Career
It opens with “Changes,” which basically calls its own shot. Stuttering “ch-ch-ch-changes,” Bowie lays out a manifesto for reinvention, generational turnover, and refusing to fossilize. Rick Wakeman’s piano dances around him, turning existential anxiety into something you can sing in the mirror.
Decades later, it still sounds like the thesis statement for Bowie’s entire life.
Between Berlin and Broadway
The album pivots constantly, in that very Bowie way. “Oh! You Pretty Things” is a jaunty apocalypse, warning about the rise of a “homo superior” over tea-time chords. “Life on Mars?” takes a melodramatic chord progression, strings, and that outrageous key change, and turns cultural overload into cosmic heartbreak.
Listen to how he leans into each syllable on “sailors fighting in the dance hall” – it’s cinema in four minutes.
Intimate Oddities and Folk Shadows
Amid the big statements, there’s tenderness. “Kooks” is a sweet, off-kilter lullaby for his newborn son. “Quicksand” drops into a folk-psych murmur, full of occult references, self-doubt, and one of the most haunting choruses he ever wrote.
Bowie’s voice shapeshifts to fit each mood: crooner, cabaret diva, alien prophet, awkward dad.
Pointing Straight at the Future
The back half of the album is stacked with signals of what’s coming. “Queen Bitch” is a straight-up love letter to The Velvet Underground, all clipped guitars and street-level swagger – basically proto-Ziggy. “Song for Bob Dylan” and “Andy Warhol” sketch out Bowie’s artistic pantheon, placing himself in a lineage of shape-shifting icons and pop-art tricksters.
Legacy
Hunky Dory is the record you show people when they think Bowie is just about the costumes. It’s a songwriter at frightening peak form, using melody and harmony as laboratories for identity. You can hear the blueprints for glam, Britpop, indie, and art-rock all quietly humming in these grooves.