David Bowie - Legacy

Bowie Legacy is a compilation album by British singer-songwriter and musician David Bowie, released in November 2016 via Parlophone Records in the UK and Columbia Records in the US.

David Robert Jones (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016), better known by his stage name David Bowie, was an English singer, songwriter and actor. For over five decades, he was regarded by critics and musicians as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, his music and stagecraft significantly influencing popular music. During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at 140 million worldwide, made him one of the world’s best selling music artists. In the UK, he was awarded nine platinum album certifications, eleven gold and eight silver, releasing eleven number on albums. In the US, he received five platinum and seven gold certifications. He was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1996.

There might not be any musician in history with as consistent a career as David Bowie. He released 14 albums between 1967 and 1984, and every single one of them is fantastic. His later work was less consistent, but equally explorative, with two of his best works released in the last few years/days before tragically passing away.

He’s an artist who is particularly well-suited to the compilation format, since so many of his songs are so instantly recognisable, and have propagated throughout pop-culture for almost 50 years. Legacy collects many of his best, and most well-known songs into a solid, if slightly uneven package, and it serves as a fitting summation of Bowie’s work.

Legacy is content to let its exemplary artists stand on his own. It’s collected in chronological order, spanning from David Bowie all the way to Blackstar. It flows very well, largely thanks to Bowie’s remarkable gift for a striking melody. There’s not a single track that isn’t in some way memorable.

Legacy shows how remarkable an artist Bowie was. He was defiantly strange, and tried his hardest to never make the same album twice, but his work has an immediately recognisable through line, which is that it’s all fantastic. Between his catchy melodies, creative instrumentation, and very odd, moving-but-funny lyrics, David Bowie deserves to remembered as one of the greatest musicians of all time.

This double album 2LP record set is on 180 gram audiophile vinyl housed in a gatefold sleeve with printed inner sleeves and printed cards, pressed in Europe via Parlophone Records.