Bowie, David: 1. Outside LP

By 1994, David Bowie and Brian Eno were again collaborating in the studio. The result was the 1995 concept album Outside released as part of a new deal with Virgin Records. This complex project touches on the increasing obsession with the human body as art and the paganization of western society. With its package-arts broken-down style, its haunted sound of ruin and its non-linear story-line of art, murder and technology, Outside predates the new sensibility of movies such as Seven, Copycat and the TV shows The X-Files and Millennium.

As befits the multiphrenic nature of outsider art and emotion, Bowie sings in any number of voices: one minute the melodramatic crooner, another the stylized Londoner, another the quiet, intimate recluse of the Berlin years. The song "The Hearts Filthy Lesson," made the soundtrack of one of the biggest and darkest movie hits of that year in David Fincher's Seven. This is David Bowie at his most creative and eclectic. It's an album of depth, variety and power that will surprise and possibly shock you.