Is the absolute best book about David Bowie that has ever been written and although it only covers a short period of time in his life I wish that it covered every part of his life maybe the author could be convinced to write another book? ( )

Low was a seminal album for me. I think I knew it at the time, but it somehow didn't really register for a year or two.

By the time I got to Low, I'd already gone through the Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs, and Young Americans albums, and thought I knew what I was getting into.

Then I heard the second side of Low. I didn't know what to think. I'd literally never heard anything like it before. Then, within a year of listening to that, I discovered Roxy Music and, more importantly, Japan's stunning Quiet Life album, and they both changed how I listened to music.

So, I really looked forward to this entry into the sometimes fascinating, sometimes dull 33 1/3 series. I loved that the author chose to really set the period, focusing almost as much on Bowie's Station To Station and Iggy Pop's The Idiot as much as the Low album.

He set the tone, made us understand the key players in Bowie, Brian Eno, and Tony Visconti, as well as the character of both Berlin and The Chateau where some of the album was recorded.

Great insight, great book. ( )

An extra half-star for inspiring me to listen to the album a couple of times while reading. Low was the first album I bought with my own money -- not as a shared investment with my sister. She hated it, but I played it over and again, dreaming of romantic artistic despair -- weltschmerz and sturm und drang. Wilcken's most successful argument is that this was Bowie leaving America, embracing Europe, and inventing the strange blend of artist and rock star which he inhabited for the rest of his career and life. ( )

I have read several of the books in this series and, to be honest, it's a pretty mixed bag. Hugo Wilcken's contribution, however, is one of the best yet. The author analyzes David Bowie's personal life in the mid-1970s - chaotic - and the circumstances in which the album was made. Each track is given a chapter of its own, and although Wilcken refers to other albums made around the same time (e.g. Station to Station; The Idiot) and the music that influenced Bowie (e.g. Kraftwerk; Neu!), it enhances rather than distracts from the creation of Low. Wilcken's writing is lucid and easy to understand for a non-musician like me, and I finished the book with an even greater appreciation of Bowie's masterpiece. ( )

Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.
-- Brian Eno [101, as quoted from an unspecified book in Wilcken's bibliography]

Eno produced, performed, and wrote a good deal of the songs on Low, he oughta know. Wilcken lets us know how that came about, along with a good bit of the circumstances leading up to and into Bowie's album, from Bowie himself as well as various other contributors, and popular culture generally. As he puts it, "I'm going to talk around Low almost as much as I talk about it." [3]

It's a solid mix: in depth on individual tracks, whether lyric or sounds or production, and then on activities at the time of writing or recording. Musicians on the album, and so on. There's a bit of interpretation attempted, delivered in a conversational tone along with descriptions of the music, parallels among tracks or to other Bowie compositions. Precisely what I look for in this series. ( )