David Bowie: “Nothing Has Changed”
Pitchfork: ‘David Bowie is nothing if not a curator. The first great Bowie best-of was 1976’s “Changesonebowie” LP, whose argument was that he was a mamapapa comin’ for you, a rocker too strong and too glittery to be pinned down. (The 1981 “Changestwobowie” LP and the 1990 “Changesbowie” CD, stabbed in its gut by the dreadful remix “Fame ’90”, tried to extend that premise.) Bowie’s initial attempt at a full-career assessment was the 1989 “Sound + Vision” box set, revised and updated in 2003. In both forms, it’s a bunch of hits and album tracks and rarities clumped together, an impressive show of range whose failure is that it assumes, rather than argues, that he’s a rock god and that therefore anything he does is interesting. Twenty-five years later, coinciding with an actual touring museum exhibition of the apparatus around his music, Bowie has assembled a new retrospective. “Nothing Has Changed” — a very sly title, as a riposte to “Changesonebowie” and “Changes”, especially since it’s also a lyric lifted from his 2002 song “Sunday”—comes in three different versions, each with a cover image of Bowie regarding himself in a mirror.’
