Change Your Reputation

David Bowie's favorite albums, drawn from the list of 25 he wrote up for Vanity Fair in 2003. The set has 23 of them: one of his picks is a single and another a various-artists compilation, and sets only take albums by one artist. The rest keep the order he listed them in.

Almost none of them are the obvious ones. There is the R&B he grew up on, The Fabulous Little Richard and James Brown's Live at the Apollo, which Brown paid to record himself. There is the 1960s underground on both sides of the Atlantic: The Velvet Underground & Nico, which he first heard on an advance copy his manager brought back from New York before it came out, The Fugs, The Incredible String Band and Syd Barrett's The Madcap Laughs. There is 20th-century composition, from The Rite of Spring and Strauss's Four Last Songs to Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, Harry Partch's homemade instruments on Delusion of the Fury, Glenn Branca's massed guitars on The Ascension and George Crumb's Black Angels, here in the Kronos Quartet's recording. There is reggae and dub poetry from Toots & The Maytals and Linton Kwesi Johnson, early electronic music from Kid Baltan, the Jacques Brel songbook he sang himself in the 1970s, and Florence Foster Jenkins, a society soprano famous for singing badly.

If you only have time for one, play The Velvet Underground & Nico. It is the clearest line from this list into his own records.