“Fame” by David Bowie

Cut in New York in January 1975, at Electric Lady Studios, "Fame" is the tough, wiry funk heart of David Bowie's ninth album, Young Americans. Bowie wrote it with Carlos Alomar and John Lennon, who also turns up singing backup, and produced it with Harry Maslin.

The groove is all tension, a clipped, circling riff and a beat that struts instead of swings, part funk, part funk rock, part soul, with Bowie's voice sliding from croon to sneer and back. What he's sneering at is the prize itself: fame, and all the trouble that comes with being a star, sung by a man who sounds thoroughly fed up with both.

RCA put it out as the album's second single, and North America ate it up. It gave Bowie his first number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and in Canada and finished at number 8 on Billboard's list of the year's biggest hits, even though Britain stopped it at number 17. He reworked it in 1990 as "Fame '90" for the Sound+Vision Tour, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame counts it among its 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.