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David Bowie
When this album was initially released at the start of the seventies, it was difficult to say if David Bowie was a chameleon or a lost soul. There was virtually no continuity from project to project, making it impossible for fans to get a hold on him. For this reason, The Man Who Sold the World disappeared from record store shelves rather quickly, sending it to cutout bins, at least until his Ziggy Stardust persona renewed interest in his previous careers and forced the reissue of this album. From a contemporary perspective, it’s not at all hard to hear the ‘classic’ elements of Bowie’s style emerge in various places on this album, but at the time, it must have been a bit of a hoot.
Can you imagine a Bowie album that, stylistically speaking, would attempt to compete with Black Sabbath? Well, that pretty much explains the musical thrust of The Man Who Sold the World . With songs like “Running Gun Blues” (“I’ll slash them cold, I’ll kill them dead, I broke the gooks I cracked their heads, I’ll slice them till they’re running red…”) and “She Shook Me Cold” (“I had no time to spare. I grabbed her golden hair and threw her to the ground. Father, she caved. Oh Lord, the things she said…”), Bowie manages to cover every early seventies heavy metal cliché without ever sounding quite so ordinary. “All the Madmen” enriches the stereotypical mix, by celebrating insanity as a means of uniqueness, something that Ozzy could have written a book about (OK, maybe somebody could have ghost-written it for him).
Still in all, The Man Who Sold the World rises above its most pedestrian pursuits with some songs that are not only artistically credible, but have since proven to have shelf-lives well beyond even their creator’s expectations. Nirvana’s cover of the title song is fine, but not any better than Bowie’s original, and Width of a Circle is an eight minute travelogue of heavy rock weirdness, aided and abetted by the intense guitar and rhythm work of Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey and Tony Visconti (the producer took the role of bass player for this record). For the most part, it’s a solid four-piece unit that portrays these songs, and it is one of Bowie’s most direct musical presentations ever. In coming years, Bowie would revisit this side of his creativity, albeit in a different manner, with his band Tin Machine. Much earlier, though, it is The Man Who Sold the World which captures Bowie and his band mates helping to invent ‘hard’ rock.
Grade: 
 
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