Station to Station (1976)

Hello, cocaine. While most of Bowie’s classic output (plus plenty of non-classic ’80s material) was fueled by powdered refreshment, Station to Station does them all one better by announcing it to the world — in case there was any doubt what the Thin White Duke was running on. “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine, I’m thinking that it must be love.” Young Americans reinvented Bowie as a sophisticated if detached soul-man a year earlier; here he hones in on the detachment, inventing a new persona in his Thin White Duke, and takes a turn for the truly strange. It’s his definitive transitional album, a bridge between the plastic soul of Young Americans and the lightless soul-searching of the Berlin period. Often overlooked in the catalog, Station to Station is a grower bar-none. It’s mutant disco before there was such a thing. Something of a musical contradiction, the record is in turns cold (see: the machine noises driving the epic, lurching title track) but a backbone of skeletal funk keeps things vibrant, warm, and weirdly accessible despite the strangeness of the vocals and instrumentation. Considering none of the talent involved seems to remember recording the thing (again, cocaine), it’s some kind of perverse miracle that it came out so fucking good. “TVC 15” may or may not be about one of Iggy Pop’s paranoid hallucinations … or it might be about a vibrator. Solid gold either way.