David Bowie’s 1987 Slump Held Its Own Weird Magic

In his 1980 song “Ashes to Ashes,” David Bowie sang of how his long-running character, the doomed astronaut Major Tom, was “hitting an all-time low.” Seven years later, Bowie found himself in similar straits. Never Let Me Down, his seventeenth album, was released in April of 1987 to middling sales and critical hostility. It was his first album in 16 years to fail to crack the British Top Five. The Glass Spider Tour, lavish and overstuffed, kicked off a month later and was equally panned. As the magazine Smash Hits trolled at the time, “If Dame David Bowie is such a bleeding chameleon, why, pray, can’t he change into something more exciting than the skin of an aging rock plodder?”

Bowie turned 40 that year, and he became caught in a backlash against rock’s aging aristocracy. He’d pulled off a coup at the start of the decade with the massive, career-boosting success of his album , but was panned as being just as self-indulgent. Time hasn’t softened that consensus. Thirty years later, in his book , Rob Sheffield called “an all-time low”—as if to echo Bowie’s own lyrics in “Ashes to Ashes.” Lesser albums by popular artists are routinely relegated to the dustbin of history—or at the very least, the tail end of online rankings and listicles. But there’s as much to be learned from the dead ends and disappointments of great artists like Bowie as there is from their triumphs and masterpieces.