Best of Bowie

This two disc collection of David Bowie's videos from 1972 to 2000 is a fascinating look at his ever evolving persona as an artist, and features a bunch a truly great songs.

On the other hand, the videos themselves were more of a mixed bag than I expected. There are some classic early experiments ("Ashes to Ashes") and a number of interesting videos from the mid-90s on, but I was surprised, given Bowie's penchant for trying new things, how many of these videos were pretty standard or familiar.

A lot of disc one is just concert or playback videos, often from TV appearances, with Bowie sometimes painfully obviously simply lip-syncing to the record. But more surprising is how many of the 'middle' period of these discs 1980 to 1990 were just not very imaginative. Finally Bowie seemed to catch on to the importance of working with more visionary directors like Mark Romanek, and the last half of the second disc is almost always interesting on a film-making as well as a musical and historic record level.

I'm very glad to have this, but I'd keep my finger on the skip button on future viewings.