1.Outside

First impressions: Good album, your mother won't like it. Has enough depth so you keep discovering things about it for months. If you like hits, this ain't pop. No hit singles leap out at you from this one, mister. A dark, troubling narrative fills the inner booklet, written by Mr. Bowie himself. Sometimes the brief dramatic characterizations that pop up between songs to introduce characters in the story, well, once I'd gotten the idea after a couple dozen go-rounds on endless repeat in my CD player I decided to program those out.

Best tracks: Outside, Strangers When We Meet, The Heart's Filthy Lesson, I'm Deranged, and one of my favorites but maybe not yours, A Small Plot of Land. The overall effect of the album is....disturbing. Bowie has regained my faith in his experimentation after a few weak albums in the mid-80's. You know, it's not so much that your mother will tell you to turn that thing down and send you to your room, it's more like she'll send you to therapy for this one.

Two months later: Outside is Bowie's most conceptually layered album ever. For as jarring a scenario as Bowie presents, he's really covered all the bases for a morality play. A serious consideration of Outside forces the listener to evaluate what exactly their values are.

On the extreme you've got the unnamed Ritual Art Murderer. It's easy to peg this person as reprehensible since you've got an innocent victim, as innocent as it gets, in the person of a 14 year old girl, Baby Grace. Not consenting, not adult. So you say, okay, this Ritual Art Murderer is a criminal, they're warped, they admit it, that's easy. So what do you believe in?

Bowie uses his fascination with art to present us with an artist who harms no one but himself. You've got the artist who slowly, digit by digit, limb by limb, dismembers himself. You believe everything is cool as long as someone doesn't harm others, right? Bowie presents us with this idea in the extreme.

Still cool? So suppose you say, "But peoples' personal lifestyles often become a burden upon the state, indirectly inflicting the consequences of their lifestyle choices upon the community". So Bowie paints this character to have his disciples tuck him away in a mountain cave once he's turned himself into a flesh potato with a head. The disciples attend to the artist, causing no imposition upon state or community. What do you think then?

So perhaps you accept that. Weird, sick, but that person's own prerogative. Okay, then consider Ramona A. Stone. She wasn't named Stone by accident. This cold individual harms no one directly, as far as we can tell. She simply leads a suicide cult where she acts as the catalyst for encouraging others to extinguish their own lives. People are responsible for their own actions, right? Hey, if Ramona can present them with sufficient rationale to persuade them to commit suicide in the name of religious freedom....is this where we draw the line?

There's always a debate around whether freedom of information should include the freedom to pass along the kind of information contained in The Anarchist's Cookbook, so someone could be trained to make bombs, and the person providing the information for entertainment purposes only wouldn't be directly responsible. Ramona A. Stone is the embodiment of absolute freedom of religion, a Jim Jones who outlives the flock. What do we believe then, when the pilot doesn't go down with the ship? Adults are fully responsible for their own decisions, right?

In Diamond Dogs Bowie presented us with an apocalyptic world oppressed by outside forces embodied in Big Brother. In Outside Bowie presents us with the opposite horror, a world ruled by inner forces given absolute freedom. Bowie, savoring the wine of his maturity and experience, has produced the most eloquent album of his career. Many Bowie fans have already stated that Outside is Bowie's best work since Scary Monsters. Scary Monsters marked Bowie's challenge to his personal demons. Not only is Outside Bowie's confrontation of our cultural demons, Outside is Bowie's most important work.