10 Perfect Albums That Blended Different Music Genres

From the moment that David Bowie hit the rock scene, he was never going to be in one genre for very long. Although he might have been pigeonholed in the public eye for Space Oddity, the Man Who Sold the World was already far away from those folksy space rock tunes, indulging in the sounds of heavy metal and crafting a more glamorous aesthetic that wouldn't unfold until much later. The road to Ziggy Stardust was starting to form, and Hunky Dory occupies the middle ground just before everything took off.

While this album does boast some of Bowie's more recognized singles like Changes and Life on Mars?, the rest of the record takes a bit of a different turn than just straight ahead glam rock. Writing most of these songs on the piano, Bowie seems to be working through different spaces in his own voice, going from the balladry of Quicksand to the off the wall tribute songs like Andy Warhol, which went on to inspire Cliff Burton to reshape the riff into the middle section of Master of Puppets.

For as frontloaded as the first side of the record is, Bowie feels much more introspective on the back half, writing songs for his idols like Bob Dylan or trying to build his very own Velvet Underground song from the ground up on Queen B*tch. Ziggy was just a few months away from touching down on Earth, but the Bewlay Brothers was already our first major hint that something big was on the horizon.