David Bowie may no longer have a lucid plan for how to keep up with the stylistic grandchildren — his 1995 tour with Nine Inch Nails proved to be a generation-gap disaster as young Reznorfarians turned their backs on the funny old guy doing a bunch of songs that weren't half as fuckinamazin as "Closer" — but he certainly hasn't lost his will to try. If Bowie's attempts to be as inventive as he once was have been marked by ideas less likely to redirect the course of rock (or, occasionally, produce listenable albums) than the costume-illusion distancing of Ziggy Stardust, the '70s soul rapprochement of Young Americans or the avant-garde sound of Station to Station, his unflagging enthusiasm and curiosity have at least kept him a credible and provocative figure. Leading an unchartable multi-media course of stylistic discontinuity and precipitous reinvention-doing whatever total change of pace comes naturally — London boy David Jones is still productively making it up as he goes along.

Throughout his lengthy career, David Bowie has worked in many widely disparate musical areas, and virtually all of them have proven enormously influential, even if sometimes it's taken years for the rest of the rock world to catch up with him. Nonetheless, the mercurial star continues to shift gears, styles and fashions almost as often as shirts and, by example, helps keep pop and rock developing and changing. (Unfortunately, long after he's abandoned some excessive dalliance or another, his camp followers trundle on, missing the ephemeral and transitory essence of Bowie's work.) Even if only as the source of unreproachably hip songs to cover, Bowie has played an essential role in glam-rock, new wave, post-punk, neo-soul, dance music, etc.

Although he actually began recording in the late '60s, we join the Bowie show in progress at the dawn of the '70s, when he dropped some of his more theatrical Anthony Newley affectations and got down to rock'n'roll cases. (The discography omits some of the less significant compilations and repackages, as well as film soundtracks, collaborations, EPs and spoken-word records.)

The Man Who Sold the World begins Bowie's affair with guitar-heavy rock'n'roll, courtesy Mick Ronson. Tony Visconti's compressed production gives the album an utterly synthetic audio quality; few records this simply played sound as studio-created. In retrospect, the grim futurist imagery of "Saviour Machine," "The Supermen" and "Running Gun Blues" seems far more prescient than the thrilling but unadventurous band's music. Still, a shockingly strong debut for the electrified Bowie. (Besides illustrating the album's various covers, the Ryko reissue adds a previously unreleased track and the "Holy Holy" single from 1970, as well as both sides of the 1971 Arnold Corns single: early versions of "Moonage Daydream" and "Hang on to Yourself," both of which would get full play on Ziggy Stardust.)

Hunky Dory was a detour of sorts, briefly returning a seemingly innocent Bowie to his hippie-folkie-cabaret days for the catchy "Changes" and the obnoxiously precious "Kooks," plus such atypically direct tributes as "Song for Bob Dylan" and "Andy Warhol." But the album also contains the redemptive "Life on Mars," "Queen Bitch" and "Oh! You Pretty Things," all essential cornerstones in the burgeoning glam-sci-fi-decadence world Bowie was assembling. (The reissue adds an alternate mix of the album's "Bewlay Brothers" and a demo of its "Quicksand," as well as a second version of the previous LP's "Supermen" and an unreleased '71 song, "Bombers.")

Bowie began his fey alien role-playing in earnest on Ziggy Stardust, a classic rock'n'roll album. He introduces this new persona via the pseudo-biographical title track; otherwise, songs paint a weird portrait of an androgynous (but sexy) world ahead. Armed with supercharged guitar rock and truly artistic production (Bowie and Ken Scott), and mixing rock'n'roll stardom imagery with a more general Clockwork Orange outlook, the peerless set (including "Suffragette City," "Hang on to Yourself," "Rock'n'Roll Suicide" and "Moonage Daydream") outlines some of the concerns that underpinned a lot of rock songwriting in the '70s and '80s. (The reissue — also available in a deluxe edition with a slipcase and book of liner notes — adds demos of the title track and "Lady Stardust," the otherwise unreleased "Sweet Head," a '71 B-side, "Velvet Goldmine," and a remix of the 1972 single "John, I'm Only Dancing.")

Bowie's label then dredged up an oldie, reissuing 1969's lightweight Man of Words/Man of Music as Space Oddity (after the memorable lead-off track, but clearly in the hopes of cashing in on Ziggy's sci-fi content). The Ryko edition adds a 1970 B-side ("Conversation Piece" and a two-part single version, with Mick Ronson's first appearance, of the album's hippy dippy "Memory of a Free Festival"). In another dose of déjà vu, an American corporate relative of Bowie's old UK label put together a two-disc set of even earlier recordings (primarily from the 1967 David Bowie LP), titling it Images 1966-1967. Years later, London condensed Images into the single-record Starting Point.

Having peaked so gloriously with a character that could not last indefinitely, Bowie adjusted Ziggy a bit on Aladdin Sane and came up with a weird set of tunes — some tremendous, some minor — and a distant, unpleasant left-field studio sound. "Panic in Detroit," "Watch That Man," "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday" are some of his greatest songs, painting bleak pictures of detached existences, with cinematic strokes and killer riffs. Rather than singing about apocalypse, Bowie captures the barren feel of a dead world, and feeds it into the music. Aladdin Sane is also notable for allowing a serious crooner side to re-emerge — as on "Time," a foreshadow of future developments. That said, it must be noted that Bowie's revisionist cover of "Let's Spend the Night Together" is utterly misguided.

In a surprisingly guileless gesture, Bowie next made an all-covers album of songs by great mid-'60s English bands. (In a remarkable coincidence, it entered the British charts precisely the same week as Bryan Ferry's first solo album, also a collection of favorite oldies.) Although not easily related creatively to Bowie's creative flow, Pin Ups is a wonderful, loving tribute that contains generally ace renditions of classic but, in America at least, largely unknown songs by the Pretty Things, Pink Floyd, Them, Mojos, Merseys, Kinks, Yardbirds, Easybeats and Who. If nothing else, Bowie's reverent consideration helped gave the songs and artists much-deserved cachet in the new rock world. (The Rykodisc edition adds two worthless items: a previously unissued rendition of Bruce Springsteen's "Growing Up" and a drippy version of a Jacques Brel/Mort Shuman composition — "Port of Amsterdam" — that had been used as a B-side.)

Bowie then jettisoned his band and drafted a new bunch of sidemen to further explore his trendily somber vision of a doomed future on Diamond Dogs. Although the LP contains one of Bowie's most incredible and concise songs — "Rebel Rebel," perfectly describing his followers and their role in the new society — and such significant items as "1984" and "Rock 'n Roll with Me," it also has a pompously overblown and underdeveloped concept. In retrospect, Diamond Dogs isn't so bad, but it does suffer significantly from eccentric, seemingly unfinished, production and strident sound. The 1990 reissue addresses the latter concern with much-improved remastering, unexpurgates the cover painting to its intended form and adds two tracks: an intricate demo of the album's "Candidate" and 1973's previously unreleased soul stomp "Dodo."

Bowie's first concert record, the two-record David Live, was recorded in Philadelphia at two 1974 shows with a ten-piece band featuring guitarist Earl Slick. Featuring a fine song selection broadly drawn from the preceding albums, the program also includes renditions of the Stax classic "Knock on Wood" and "All the Young Dudes," a song Bowie had graciously given Mott the Hoople. The reissue adds "Time" and "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow."

Dropping his gimmicky costumes, Bowie donned a fine suit and made Young Americans, an album mainly composed of phony (but pleasant) Philadelphia soul/rock mixed with other oddities, like a truly awful collaboration with John Lennon, "Fame." It took five years for the British new wave, finally bereft of their own new ideas, to ape Bowie and start reflecting African-American idioms into their work.

Following that brief infatuation, Bowie launched an experimental phase that directly influenced far more bands, especially the "new romantics" and arty minimalists. Station to Station is a strangely impersonal mixture of chilly show ballads, techno-pop and whatever was passing for disco that year. The album features the hit "Golden Years," but also the experimental and challenging "TVC15." It also marked the beginning of Bowie's artistic distance from his former rock-idol role.

That trend was formally instigated with Low, on which Bowie arranged to co-opt the modernistic sensibility of Brian Eno (his collaborator on three consecutive studio LPs) and present a selection of tracks that are not so much songs as word-paintings or, in many cases, simply mood pieces. Moving from the grandiosity of Young Americans to the art-noise sketches here, Bowie took heart from intellectual, bare-bones rock bands like Wire and, in turn, helped legitimize and promote such spartan stylings.

As the follow-up to Low, Heroes has slightly fleshier production, though nearly one full side is comprised of whizzing synthesizers and amorphous textural noodling. Robert Fripp contributes lead guitar, and his presence adds a bit of sinew to the overall sound, something lacking in the less-forceful Low. The album leans heavily on chilly, European affectations (with a large debt owed to Kraftwerk), but also has room for a genuine and spectacular pop single, the atmospheric, concertedly European title track (also released in French and German).

Bowie's second double-live LP, Stage, features a Carlos Alomar/Adrian Belew guitar lineup and includes hits ("Ziggy Stardust," "Fame") as well as Eno-era album tracks ("Warszawa," "Beauty and the Beast").

Lodger, the third installment of the Bowie-Eno trilogy, finds Bowie drifting back into a solid song-oriented context. Though much of the material seems to be stream-of-consciousness, there are a couple of pure poppers, such as "D.J." and "Boys Keep Swinging," that recall a more commercial time. Also of interest is Bowie's version of "Sister Midnight," rewritten as "Red Money."

Scary Monsters is Bowie's most consistent LP since the pre-Low period, a culmination of the styles that had been showcased individually on previous discs. The tone is up-front, a confrontation with the real world of alienation Bowie always ascribed to his fictional settings. Scary Monsters contains two soon-to-be standards: "Ashes to Ashes" and "Fashion."

Having tired of years of acclaim matched with only sporadic, middling glimmers of the kind of success that superstars are supposed to enjoy, Bowie changed labels and made Let's Dance, a calculated effort (with the production assistance of Nile Rodgers) to get in step with the sound of today, rather than tomorrow or yesterday, his usual habitats. Not surprisingly, Bowie succeeds at whatever he sets his mind to, and the record was a worldwide smash. "Let's Dance," "Modern Love" and "China Girl" may not be the Thin White Duke's finest creations, but they do hit a solid compromise between art and commerce, and don't harm his reputation nearly as much as expand his audience (and bank balance).

After a mega-tour to consolidate the album's huge success, Bowie banged out Tonight, a casual, smug cookie-cutter job geared for easy chart ascent. (What other recording challenges are left for Bowie? He's tried self-indulgent art and go-for-the-jugular commercialism, scoring just what he wanted on both fronts.) In its losing defense, the album does include a duet with Tina Turner and a remarkably swell pop hit, "Jazzin' for Blue Jean," that recalls far earlier times in his career.

The styleless Never Let Me Down was released to general indifference and critical derision. Although this casual loud-rock outing — Peter Frampton and Carlos Alomar share guitar responsibilities with Bowie — seems on first blush to be slapdash and slight, the first side is actually quite good, offering provocative pop-culture lyrics delivered with first-take enthusiasm and carefree backing. "Day-In Day-Out" is silly but charming in its way; the verses' catchy ticktock pop on "Beat of Your Drum" makes it resemble a Cars song; the Lennonish title track is equally weird and likable. Bowie has rarely sounded so unconcerned and relaxed. The inferior second side starts off with the subsequent tour's fantasyland nonsense theme song ("Glass Spider") and ends with Iggy's "Bang Bang," a cute digression in keeping with the record's flip attitude.

After Never Let Me Down, Bowie went off and formed Tin Machine, a collaborative modern-rock quartet with guitarist Reeves Gabrels and the fraternal rhythm section of Hunt and Tony Sales. The group's debut, Tin Machine, presents an uneven (thanks mostly to bouts of Gabrels' idiotic guitar-god riffwank) but entertaining rough'n'ready vision of contemporary rock as blunt, vulgar, violent, ephemeral and derivative — in short, the direct antithesis of Bowie's prevailing artistic ethos. The title track is an amusing rewrite of the Yardbirds' "Over Under Sideways Down" (a Pin Ups flashback, perhaps?); "Under the God" addresses neo-fascism with a sly Ramones citation ("Beating on blacks with a baseball bat"), while "Crack City" ("Louie, Louie" recast as a Diamond Dogs outtake) ludicrously sets out to slay a dragon — or at the very least indignantly call drug dealers bad names. The cover of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" is fair but irrelevant, and the album's catchiest melody ("Baby Can Dance") is oddly saved for the very end. All in all, Bowie's exercise in self-denial doesn't actually trim much out of the diet — it's not a great leap forward, but a fun ride all the same. (The Virgin reissue adds a live version of "Bus Stop.")

The ancient nude statuary on the front of Tin Machine II outraged retail moralists, who declined to stock the album and forced a redesign. Such disfavor would have been easier to accept if they'd simply listened to the thing. Making it obvious that Bowie's agenda for the band involves self-conscious slumming and a desire to revisit his past under cover of an autonomous timeline (thereby escaping accusations of regression), the album displays a singing style (on "Baby Universal") that hasn't been heard in years; a cover of Roxy Music's glam-era "If There Is Something" and nonsense originals like "You Belong in Rock & Roll" all suggest a futile effort to reclaim lost innocence. Whatever Bowie's motivations, Tin Machine was clearly designed for instant obsolescence. It only takes drummer Hunt Sales stepping up to sing the generic blues "Stateside" for Bowie's experiment in democracy to collapse in a miserable heap.

Nevertheless, the group (augmented on tour by an extra guitarist) pressed on long enough to leave an egregious live album, Oy Vey, Baby, as its final squalling-guitar statement. Between crummy sound, Gabrels' numbing fill-every-space onslaught and rearrangements that exacerbate an irrational set list (not to mention Bowie's always dangerous saxophone exercises), it's a woeful epitaph in any language. (The U2 joke of the title is cute, though.)

After that escapade, Bowie wisely returned to his own monotheistic world; unfortunately, the record he chose to make was Black Tie White Noise, an ill-conceived if reasonably well-executed (by Nile Rodgers) adventure into acid-jazz — or whatever other description might characterize a pretentious album of mildly ambient dance grooves with trumpeter Lester Bowie (no relation, ha-ha) blowing his horn in half-hearted opposition to a third of the tracks. (Other guests, including onetime Spiders From Mars Mick Ronson and Mike Garson, complicate the remainder.) Covers of Cream's "I Feel Free" and Morrissey's "I Know It's Going to Happen Someday" (from Your Arsenal, an album Ronson produced) are capricious red herrings, so is the hapless Bowie/Bowie horn jam, "Looking for Lester." The title number is a glossy R&B duet (with Al B. Sure!) that cites both Marvin Gaye and "We Are the World" in an oblique consideration of the LA riots. Although the album's main theme is a sense of racial and personal harmony resulting from Bowie's marriage to model Iman ("The Wedding" even opens the procession with church bells), its most compelling track digs at the other end of life's yard. "Jump" is a vague take on society's deadly power.

Ironically, the little-noticed Buddha of Suburbia, an album expanded from the soundtrack work Bowie did for a BBC-TV mini-series of the Hanif Kureishi novel, takes a far more effective and enthralling spin on the modern dancefloor. Recorded quickly as a two-man endeavor with multi-instrumentalist Erdal Kizilcay, the album benefits from a paradoxically random simplicity (of sound, not designs: like his confrere Eno, Bowie sets and meets arbitrary conceptual challenges here). Although fully realized, the scattered pop songs — "Strangers When We Meet," the Pet Shoppy "Dead Against It," the "Fame"-like "Bleed Like Crazy, Dad," "Buddha of Suburbia," one version of which has a hideous Lenny Kravitz guitar solo — have an ebullience and directness, an ingratiating why-not-try-this? aspect that counteracts Bowie's implicit high-art seriousness. The rest of the album meanders through fascinating rhythms and varied atmospheres like a wealthy shopper in a fine department store, picking up the latest styles, trying them on and then scampering on to the next rack. Bowie's liner notes make the whole thing seem obnoxiously self-conscious, but you've got to love a brilliant piss-artist who can admit to repeating bits "at varying intervals so giving the impression of forethought." Downplaying the source and eliminating Bowie's exegesis, the belated American issue has a completely different cover and booklet than the import.

Bowie reunited with Eno as co-writer, co-producer and instrumental collaborator for Outside, which is subtitled The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue and described as "A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle." So much for humor and humility. ("A convoluted load of bollocks," would be a more apt underline.) Flying in the face of all we know to be true about concept albums, Bowie cobbles together a lurid meta-plot and peoples it with processed-voice characters. As is often the case with such preposterous projects, the construction process involves some quality songs, and it hardly matters that the bubbling techno calm of "We Prick You" is indicated as being sung by members of the Court of Justice, that Leon Blank renders "The Motel" or that Detective Nathan Adler delivers "The Hearts Filthy Lesson," a dance track loaded up with random instrumental action. If there's nothing else self-evident about the artist, it's that Bowie — in whatever guise he affects — is always Bowie. Outside's raucous highlights include "Hallo Spaceboy," a pulverizing industrial flip of the nine-inch tail, and "Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)," a powerful, King Crimson-like charge lanced by lines of feedback and colliding rhythms. The album also contains passages of orchestral grace and quiet solace, like the febrile piano/drum jazz inventions at the heart of "A Small Plot of Land" and the nearly subliminal buildup of "The Motel." The story of Outside is not worth telling, but the master of musical language still festoons it with brilliant sonic poetry.

The Changesonebowie compilation covers a lot of stylistic ground in eleven tracks: from "Space Oddity" and "Changes" to "Rebel Rebel" and "Golden Years." Changestwobowie is weaker, but still has such amazing tracks as "Sound and Vision," "Starman," "D.J." and "1984." The eighteen-track Changesbowie, issued to coincide with the 1990 greatest-hits tour, includes all of the first Changes LP (replacing the original "Fame" with a remix), adds "Fashion" and "Ashes to Ashes" from the second, and then tops it off with such tunes as "Heroes," "Let's Dance," "China Girl," "Modern Love" and "Blue Jean." Fame and Fashion — drawing only from RCA albums — straddles all three, with a half-dozen or so in common with each and only one song ("TVC15") that doesn't appear on any of the others. The pointless and unnecessary Golden Years repeats Fame and Fashion's "Fashion," "Golden Years" and "Ashes to Ashes," but also contains things like "Joe the Lion," "Wild Is the Wind" and "Scary Monsters."

Rykodisc's wholesale reissue of Bowie's catalogue, which began with the 1989 boxed set Sound+Vision, refurbished the sound, artwork and contents of his '70s and '80s albums, adding bonus tracks-B-sides, outtakes, alternate versions, non-LP singles, live bits — to all but two of them (Aladdin Sane and the thanks-I've-had-enough Ziggy Stardust concert film soundtrack). The studio Ziggy Stardust received extra-posh treatment in a special edition with its own booklet and slipcase, as well as five extra items, including the original demos for "Ziggy Stardust" and "Lady Stardust." (In 1995, having already replaced Sound+Vision Plus, the audio/video bonus disc that originally came in the box, with a more current CD-ROM, Ryko redesigned the set to eliminate the 12 by 12 box and the multi-media item, leaving three music discs in a regular-sized jewel case.)

Virgin subsequently acquired the rights to what was left and brought out augmented CDs of Bowie's three '80s records on EMI America and the lost-on-arrival Black Tie White Noise. "Under Pressure," Bowie's memorable 1982 45 collaboration with Queen, is the bonus track on Let's Dance. Tonight goes to the movies for Bowie's soundtrack contributions to Falcon and the Snowman ("This Is Not America"), Labyrinth ("As the World Falls Down") and Absolute Beginners ("Absolute Beginners"). The new version of Never Let Me Down effects a swap, deleting "Too Dizzy" but adding two B-sides from the album's singles and another movie theme ("When the Wind Blows").

Meanwhile, Rhino packaged up a nifty set of Bowie's earliest singles (and some outtakes) as Early On, thereby putting the amusing music from some previously highly prized 7-inch obscurities within easy reach. Rykodisc then trumped its own Changesbowie (and, in the process, the two similarly named RCA compilations it had replaced, as well as the slapdash Golden Years and Fame and Fashion) with a prodigious 39-track greatest-hits, The Singles 1969 to 1993, two discs that follow Bowie's musical saga all the way from "Space Oddity" — the leadoff track of 1969's Man of Words/Man of Music (later retitled Space Oddity) — right up to the doorstep of Outside. (Early copies of the compilation included a bonus third CD of Bowie's warmhearted Christmas duet with Bing Crosby.) Whether or not it was planned this way, The Singles neatly complements Sound+Vision — a beautifully appointed three-CD collection of classics, obscurities, outtakes, concert recordings, etc. that is everything but a greatest hits — with a minimum of overlap.