So Bowie left Tin Machine and started his solo career again. His first move was to reunite with producer Nile Rodgers for an album a little less focused on commercial success than Let’s Dance. Bowie was definitely moving away from rock, experimenting with jazz and soul as well as hip-hop on this album. While it did marginally better than the Tin Machine albums, it didn’t exactly reignite his career. There are a lot of love songs on Black Tie, White Noise. That’s because David Bowie had just married supermodel Iman, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. While this may not be the most anguished or exciting album in Bowie’s career, he does sound genuinely happy.

Following this, Bowie did the soundtrack for the TV miniseries Buddha of Suburbia. This album is most instrumental, but did allow Bowie the leeway to dabble a bit more into electronica and various textures. If we was going to head-first into this new experimental medium he would need his old experimenting partner back, so he reunited with producer Brian Eno from the Berlin Trilogy for Outside. The album was supposed to be the first part in a series of records about a dystopian future where murders can be classified as art and Bowie would be playing the part of detective Nathan Adler. While it is an interesting idea, and the album sold even better than the last one, there was no follow-up and the story of “The diary of Nathan Adler or the art-ritual murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle.”

For the Outside tour, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails to open for him and from there he decided to use Trent Reznor to help out with his next album, Earthling. Apparently Bowie had decided to move genres from “industrial” to “jungle” or “drum-and-bass”. For someone like me, who has a hard time differentiating between various electronica subgenres, this made no difference it was important to Bowie. And the single I’m Afraid Of Americans did pretty well on MTV – undoubtedly helped by the fact that NIN frontman Trent Reznor was also featured.

The nineties were a pretty successful time for Bowie while he dabbled in these EDM textures, but they oftentimes felt pasted on top of the songs instead of intrinsically part of the songwriting process. Furthermore, it was disappointing to see Bowie, who was so often on the cutting edge, to be seen chasing trends and fads as if he were just hopping on the latest bandwagon. As the millennium began to close, Bowie had decided to revert back to what he did best… but he had done some many different things, the next few years found Bowie struggling to understand and define the entirety of his career and persona while still making new music.