Artist Spotlight: David Bowie’s Top 10 Essential Tracks 🌟
Brixton's David Bowie changed music forever. His top 10 tracks from Major Tom to Ziggy to the Thin White Duke, five decades of fearless reinvention revealed.
The Brixton-born shapeshifter who spent five decades proving that reinvention itself could be an art form.
Most artists struggle to define themselves once. David Bowie did it a dozen times, and made each identity feel like the only truth that mattered. Born David Robert Jones in Brixton on January 8, 1947, he spent nearly five decades morphing from Major Tom to Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke to the Goblin King, leaving a trail of masterpieces that redefined rock, glam, soul, electronic music, and everything in between.
10. “Rebel Rebel” (1974)
Album: Diamond Dogs
Bowie strips glam rock down to its raw, riff-driven essence. That iconic guitar line, played by Bowie himself after Mick Ronson had left the Spiders from Mars, is one of rock’s most recognizable openings. Lyrically, it’s Bowie’s most direct celebration of gender fluidity and nonconformity, delivered with swaggering confidence rather than theatrical distance. The song marked his transition from the Ziggy era into something harder and more American-influenced, written during the Diamond Dogs sessions that originally aimed to adapt Orwell’s 1984. It remains his most straightforward rock song, proving Bowie could deliver a killer riff without the conceptual complexity.
9. “Ashes to Ashes” (1980)
Album: Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
Bowie brings Major Tom back, but this time as a “junkie, strung out in heaven’s high, hitting an all-time low.” Released in August 1980, it was his fastest-moving UK single to date, hitting #1 in just two weeks. The song marked Bowie’s closure on the 1970s, acknowledging his own struggles with cocaine addiction through Major Tom’s tragic fate. Musically, it’s an art-pop masterpiece featuring Chuck Hammer’s guitar synthesizer creating symphonic textures and a complex three-bar piano loop that defied standard pop structures. The accompanying music video, costing £250,000 and featuring Bowie in a Pierrot costume with Steve Strange and other Blitz Club New Romantics, was the most expensive ever made at the time and helped define MTV’s visual language.
