Hunky Dory 40 years later

All the strangers came today

Hunky Dory is the first album I owned by David Bowie. At the time, I would have preferred it to be Let’s Dance, but I couldn’t convince my mom to buy it for me on just any ol’ day. So, it was something I was waiting to receive on my birthday, which was months away.

I had $4 saved up and was looking through the “bargain basement” cassette tapes at the new drugstore in town.

I remember the store’s grand opening, drawing the salt-of-the-earth townspeople with free soda, hotdogs, and balloons filled with helium, not just plain air and put on a long white plastic stick to make it look like it was floating.

In the bargain bin, which was literally a bin you had to dig through, I found Hunky Dory, an album released by Bowie in 1971. It was 1983 and the cassette was $1.99. I bought it. I listened. I thought, “This is terrible. I can’t believe I spent my savings on this.” I was afraid of the music, but I kept listening.

Then my assessment ratcheted up from “terrible” to “strange.” The music was coming from a place I didn’t understand. It made me feel new kinds of feelings. It gave me the intuition that life could be more interesting than a free balloon, if I wanted it to be.

Before I knew it, Hunky Dory was the best thing ever. When I eventually received Let’s Dance for my birthday, I loved it immediately, of course. However, in the 40 years since then, I’ve listened to Hunky Dory much, much, much more often.

"Retrospectively, Hunky Dory has been critically acclaimed as one of Bowie's best works, and features on several lists of the greatest albums of all time. Within the context of his career, it is considered to be the album where ‘Bowie starts to become Bowie’, definitively discovering his voice and style.”

The album did the same for me.