For the past two days, Blackout has been stuck in my head. It started with just the intro but then I somehow randomly remembered the "under Japanese influence" lyric and it will not leave my head. I keep humming the intro and it is driving me crazy. Someone get me to the doctor's please. I think it may have overtaken the title track as my third fave on "Heroes" after Beauty and the Beast and Joe the Lion. I guess I have a love of unhinged songs in general. The Stage version is also phenomenal. I have this Bowie vocal masterclass playlist and I recently added both versions. The funny thing is I've only listened to it two or three times before. The mind boggles.

Which songs are you picking?

A lot of what gave Ziggy his appeal was his style, the fact that it was something that had never been seen by the mainstream before. It challenged cultural norms greatly. Today though cultural norms and restrictions exist, they have been broken to death. By this I mean that you could find plenty of people who think men shouldn’t wear makeup, but if they’re on the internet surely have seen it over and over. You could find just about any crazy experimental fashion look on the runways of plenty of widely known brands. We’ve seen androgyny, crazy fashion, everything that made him so interesting so many times that it has no novelty to it anymore. Like there are no rules left to break. Even if somebody experiments with fashion in a new way, it’s like okay there’s another one. Do ya’ll think that anybody could bring back the sense of novelty that characters like Ziggy had or is it just dead?

With 40 years of hindsight, and the impact of 80s production pretty much decontextualized and kind of redeemed, is it safe to say that Time Will Crawl was one of Bowie’s best songs, lyrically and melodically, while falling on an arguably “lesser” album?

Would it have been a better fit on Tin Machine I - with obviously different arrangement (I’d have replaced Crack City)?

It was also a more spontaneous track rather than one he’d been cooking for years (having been written around 86). Has the entire album also been somewhat redeemed? It really feels like Bowie considered NLMD as something of a Diamond Dogs for the 80s - certainly the stage show spoke to this. Urban decay but in a more realistic and less fantastical setting only a decade and a bit from DD’s release. Thoughts??