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Every David Bowie Album Ranked

Mitchell Plitnick
24 min readJan 10, 2023

I’ve been meaning to write this for years.

Today, January 10, 2023, is the seventh anniversary of David Bowie’s death. I have been a Bowie fanatic since I was nine years old and first heard what was, at the time, his most recent release, the greatest hits compilation, “ChangesOneBowie.” I was in love at first hearing, and have never stopped, even when that love was painful, an era I’ll get to.

The list below is my personal ranking of his albums. I’m doing this for fun, no other reason. My guess is that there will be people out there who would list Bowie’s worst-to-first precisely opposite of mine, and that’s just great. Music hits all our ears differently. But for those of you out there who loved David Bowie’s work as I did, I’m hoping this is just a bit of entertainment and an opportunity to relive his work from beginning to all too premature end.

So, here they are, my ranking of Bowie’s 26 studio albums. For me, live albums must be judged differently, so I am leaving them out. I’m also leaving out reissues, remixes, compilations, and the like. Finally, I decided not to include the Tin Machine albums. I am among those who very much liked Tin Machine, even though I’m not a particular fan of industrial or punk rock. But they put Bowie back on a solid artistic footing and they were a breath of fresh air after the dreck of the ’80s (I’ll get…

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Mitchell Plitnick
Mitchell Plitnick

Written by Mitchell Plitnick

Author of "Except for Palestine," with Marc Lamont Hill. Pres of ReThinking Foreign Policy. Policy analyst for 20 years. https://mitchellplitnick.substack.com/

Responses (6)

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Thank you for sharing, big fan!

Glad to see a list that puts Diamond Dogs near the top! It's so often overlooked.

Marvellous article and a lot of fun to read more about these albums. I agree with most of your ranking, too! Personally I'd have put Hunky Dory higher and Young Americans a bit lower, but totally agree about how great the albums at the top of this list are, especially 2,4 and 7!