40 years ago today, on September 12, 1980, David Bowie released Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), the LP that would serve as the closing bookend to a five year period of musical exploration and be oft cited as the creative pinnacle of his career. This journey started in 1975 with the recording of Young Americans. That was the point at which he broke from his Ziggy Stardust persona and invented the “Thin White Duke”. He pushed off the lipstick & shock-wig trappings of glam rock and dove headlong into “blue-eyed soul” (well, one blue eye at least). From that plateau of cocaine fueled decadence, he’d delve into increasingly darker shades of sound, eventually shifting from LA to Berlin where he’d go spelunking into the looming caverns and hidden corners of humanity's darker nature. These dives would reach their ultimate depths with Scary Monsters.
While he’d hit the charts at the beginning of this arc with his collaboration with John Lennon (Fame, 1975), as he traversed through the so-called “Berlin Trilogy” (Low, “Heroes”, Lodger), commercial success slipped somewhat off the mat and, with this being his final LP for RCA, his vision was refocused to find what would turn out to be a much better balance between the serrated edge of avant-garde creativity and mainstream accessibility. Central to this effort was Bowie concentrating on songwriting and lyrics before recording, rather than relying on so much improvisation in the studio. Brian Eno’s production skills had helped craft his previous few releases, but he co-produced Monsters with Tony Visconti this time around and Robert Fripp was back to lend his distinctive guitar sounds. This would also be the last album to feature the core rhythm section of Dennis Davis, Carlos Alomar and George Murray, which had been together since Station to Station.
Mastering the art of the emerging new medium of the music video didn’t hurt things either. He’d got his taste for it with the elegant simplicity of the “Heroes” video and pushed the cultural limits with the gender bending Boys Keep Swinging clip, but things really came to the fore with Ashes to Ashes. The song turned out to be a sequel to his first major hit, Space Oddity (1969), and the second part of a trilogy which would be completed years later with his final album, Blackstar (2017). Since it was perched on the precipice of the emergence of MTV, it managed to give the art form a much needed injection of credibility and gravitas such that, when MTV launched in August of 1981, it was one of the critical, ready-made products which gave the fledgling network some buoyancy.
After this album, Bowie would turn to some new collaborators and spend the rest of the 1980s plowing an entirely different field, in a sense coming full circle to the R&B music which had kicked off the latter half of the 1970s, while setting aside the sonic confrontations which had largely defined the period. Taken together, from Young Americans through to Scary Monsters, Bowie left a legacy of six of the most remarkable, challenging albums conceived by any artist working in the pop music arena. He may have found greater commercial success outside of this era of experimentation, but most would agree that he rarely attained greater creative heights after it.
