Last night marked one year that I’ve been streaming DJ sets on Twitch. To celebrate, I played a 4-hour set of (nearly) nothing but songs from David Bowie. With the exception of a song from the Labyrinth soundtrack that I played from an MP3, everything else was played from an actual David Bowie vinyl record. Most of the night was conversational, as the audience and I reminisced about the career of a man who is, in my opinion, the quintessential pop star. Elvis, who coincidentally shares a birthday with David Bowie, may be the King of Rock & Roll, but Bowie had a universal appeal to him that even Presley didn’t. I’ve met people who claim to dislike Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Smiths, Wham!, and other greats, but I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t like Bowie.
I went more or less chronologically, though I jumped around a bit. I played my two favorite David Bowie albums in their entirety. The only non-Bowie songs I played were a track from Brian Eno’s Ambient – Music for Airports, and Seu Jorge covering “Rebel Rebel.”
Though my earliest memory of David Bowie is a PBS special about Ziggy Stardust that I watched as a child sometime in the mid-to-late-’70s, I was too young at the time to really become a fan, and I didn’t really dig into Bowie’s music until he released the Tonight album. I ended with the song from that album that was all over the radio and MTV when I first got into Bowie, which made for a nice loop from Bowie’s first hit single to the single that was a hit when I became a fan; from first to first in a sort of Möbius strip of music, if you will.
Here’s the full playlist:
Space Oddity
Cygnet Committee
Five Years
Soul Love
Moonage Daydream
Starman
It Ain’t Easy
Lady Stardust
Star
Hang on to Yourself
Ziggy Stardust
Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide
Changes
Life on Mars
Friday on My Mind
Queen Bitch
The Bewley Brothers
Drive-In Saturday
Panic in Detroit
Cracked Actor
Rebel Rebel
The Jean Genie
Station to Station
Golden Years
Word on a Wing
Music for Airports 1:1 – Brian Eno
Wild is the Wind
Beauty and the Beast
Heroes
Sons of the Silent Age
Speed of Life
Breaking Glass
What in the World
Sound and Vision
Always Crashing in the Same Car
Be My Wife
A New Career in a New Town
Warszawa
Art Decade
Weeping Wall
Subterraneans
D.J.
Fame
Young Americans
Rebel Rebel – Seu Jorge
Fashion
Ashes to Ashes
Cat People
Modern Love
China Girl
Let’s Dance
As the World Falls Down
Under Pressure
Blue Jean