Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

Scary Monsters mainly serves as a transitional album in Bowie’s career. While the album partly serves as Bowie’s final goodbye to his career up to that point (with referential songs), he also questions what opportunities await him in the 80s with others.

Songs like “It’s No Game” (originally composed as a demo in 1970), and “Ashes to Ashes” (which lyrically pays homage to “Space Oddity”’s Major Tom) bring that nostalgic factor of Bowie’s 60s-70s career to the album as a bookend for it.

Meanwhile, other songs like “Fashion” or “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” showcase a more worldly focus (conformity with the norm, social anxiety, etc.), and these serve as more of a concerned view towards the future rather than a look at the past.

Thanks to Scary Monsters‘ distinctive sound, as well as its engaging lyrical content for a new decade, it is often seen by fans and critics alike as one of his best works, and by some as the “last great David Bowie album” for a long time.