When I heard my favorite musician, David Bowie, was about to release a new “greatest hits” set called Nothing Has Changed, I wasn’t particularly excited. Looking over the list of songs on the release, I had almost all of them, and many were “radio edits”, which meant the songs were cut down to fit radio playing times. Sometimes these cuts were simply brutal and harmed the songs more than helped.
Still, after giving the list a second look I found a number of tracks interested me. There was the new song, Sue (or in a Season of Crime) along with three tracks taken from the aborted Toys album which I heard snippets of but was curious to hear in full (Let Me Sleep Beside You, Your Turn to Drive, and Shadowman). There were also some interesting curios/remasters. Of those, the one I most wanted to hear was the remastered The Man Who Sold the World, one of my all time favorite Bowie songs.
Then, at the tail end of the set were five very, very early Bowie tracks that predated his first big hit, Space Oddity: In The Heat of Morning, Silly Boy Blue, Can’t Help Thinking About Me, You’ve Got A Habit of Leaving, and Liza Jane.
Taken together, there were at a minimum ten songs I was curious to hear/have out of the 59 in the set. Had I bought those ten songs individually, I would have paid roughly $10.29 for them…if they were all available for download (amazon.com does not allow you to buy three of the very early Bowie songs individually). The full album, on the other hand, was $19.99.
With an approximate $9 difference, I decided to go for the whole thing.
Now, I’m a David Bowie fanatic and willing to make the investment in the overall product. Even so, I’m level headed enough to warn those who have most of these songs and maybe aren’t as big a fanatic of David Bowie to go over the track list like I did and consider whether you want to spend their money on the whole thing or just some of the songs in this particular set. As I said, the extra nine bucks for me wasn’t too big a hurdle but to others the price difference might be greater. Even so, did I get my money’s worth?
Well…sorta.
I really enjoyed the three songs from the so-far lost Toys album and wish Mr. Bowie would officially release the whole thing. As for the new song…it’s Ok, a jazzy piece that neither blew me away nor severely disappointed. The very early works of Mr. Bowie, I knew coming in, would be more curiosity pieces than songs worth listening to over and over again. I was happy to have them in the set, but again, they aren’t necessarily earth shakers.
The remastered works were clear and sounded great, but at least to my ears weren’t necessarily a significant step up from what you find in other recent releases.
My overall impression of the album is that it is a good, pretty comprehensive effort but one that those unfamiliar with Mr. Bowie’s oeuvre will enjoy more than “old fans” like me.
A few days back Keith Harris at the Concourse wrote a snarky column about new boxed sets…
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/2014-music-box-sets-a-guide-for-the-bemused-and-disgus-1664336893
…and basically trashed most of the sets offered this Christmas/Holiday season, including Nothing Has Changed. Most egregious was this statement regarding David Bowie’s more recent output:
I know a bunch of Bowie fans who, against all reason, continued to buy his albums into the ’90s and beyond, and then sold them back in disgust.
If you were a David Bowie fan up to Let’s Dance and tuned out afterwards, Nothing Has Changed should prove Mr. Harris and his supposed friends’ opinion quite wrong. While I would agree that Mr. Bowie floundered a bit after Let’s Dance, his output since 1993’s Buddha of Suburbia has been on par, in my humble opinion, with some of his great 1970’s work, though obviously not as commercially successful.
In conclusion, if you’re not very familiar with Mr. Bowie or haven’t checked out his more recent output, you might want to give Nothing Has Changed a try. Otherwise, consider what songs you want and what songs you need and then decide whether getting this album is worth the investment.