Much of Bowie's most affecting work sinks into your pores slowly, doing its work secretly over time. This is especially true of Hunky Dory. A mixture of light and shadow, Hunky Dory is Bowie's first really good album. Up til this point Bowie had shown flashes of great promise, but a new maturity turned this into a pop culture coming out party.
On the cover Bowie was still looking more like an actress than "The Actor" as he was billed in the liner notes. Sexuality and gender preferences have been a predictable hand played by Boy Bowie over the years, and one of the first of those requisite check-in calls appears here as "Queen Bitch", a romp that is equal parts Velvet Underground and velvet underwear. Still, Hunky Dory is a multi-course meal, and meat isn't the only flavor on the plate here.
In addition to the Velvet Underground tribute, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan both get their due. Andy Warhol examines one of the recurring themes of Hunky Dory, the hazy ego boundaries between the self-contrived cinematic existence and the "real" person inside. Life On Mars?, a choice cut, observes a self-conscious girl going to the movies only to find that she's watching a movie of her own life. The song starts out with a forlorn piano and gradually the orchestration builds until it crests with the perfect corny theatrical ending. Are those really tympani or is it just a clever illusion?
This song hits very close to who Bowie is, the ever-detached performer slyly manipulating external image for calculated result. It's not surprising that this possessive self-observation eventually became a self-fulfilling prophecy, a muting of the boundaries between performer and role for David Bowie. As an amusing side note, the Usenet Bowie discussion group informally agreed that Barbra Streisand's cover of Life On Mars? is the all-time worst cover of a Bowie song.
Bowie touches on this filmy existence again in Quicksand, "I'm living in a silent film, portraying Himmler's sacred realm of dream reality....", with several references to screen stars of eras long past. (Maybe this ties in with the "glamour actress" covers of both The Man Who Sold The World and Hunky Dory.) Quicksand is as close to unmasked, first-person philosophy as Bowie gets.
For masking look to The Bewlay Brothers. Hunky Dory opens with the light Changes, unfettered by identity, and closes in bondage to the night of The Bewlay Brothers. Image and reality reach a climax as the close of the album bears down. Yet again Bowie brushes up against frontal image and hidden secrets. This track is Bowie's "mystery song", inviting speculation and red herrings. It whispers of murky memories, defrocked beliefs and the people that could lie within us at any place in time. The only thing certain is that it closes with the mark of a heavy neanderthal voice issuing domestic demands, echoed years later in a different form on Lodger.
In contrast, the bright, upbeat album opener, Changes is one of Bowie's "cabaret" numbers. You've got the best version right here. The concert versions on David Live, Santa Monica '72 and the Ziggy Stardust Soundtrack weave into cocktail piano and intentionally mannered lounge vocalisations. Changes offers optomistic glimpses of youthful resilience. Changes alone isn't exactly a sample of the album as a whole. The general feel of this album leans toward "singer-songwriter", Bowie's whispy voice intoning deep thoughts and wry assessments to a strumming guitar on many of the songs. It's one of Bowie's mellowest, something that was poised to change with the next album, Ziggy Stardust.