Maybe he did. His latest stab at relevance works best when it most resembles those simple anguished moments. A retreat from both Outside's conceptual grandiosity and Earthling's tacked-on electronica, hours... attempts to reclaim the eternally hip early-70s Bowie that a billion rockers from Nivana to Placebo have since tried on for themselves. But like most of the Thin White Duke's change-ups over the last two decades, this cautious time-travelogue lacks commitment. It's kinda like revisiting dangerous old ground without giving up the penthouse.

        hours... begins strongly by surrenduring to weakness. "Thursday's Child" slinks on an understated trip-hop groove, with one of those classic Bowie vocals that's both intimate and remote. The melody twists into abstraction, leading the singer into a lonely place where he looks back on his life and tries to wash away regret with forgiveness. "Something about me stood apart/A whisper of hope that seemed to fail/Maybe I'm born right out of my time," he croons. These are hardly profound revelations, but they ring usually true: Not since Scary Monsters has Bowie confronted his least-favorite subject - himself. The old rage is you, replace by a melancholic self-acceptance that's even more daring because it's so obviously hard-won.

        The next few tracks are almost as satisfying. "Something in the Air" suggests the messed-up vibe of Diamond Dogs, while the whistful accustic strum of "Seven" hints at Hunky Dory. Eventually, though, hours... starts piling on wanky guitars as tunes wander and lyrics sputter, turning a promising disclosure into another mediocre, not-quite-modern rock posture. Too bad; these days, Bowie sounds too much more plugged-in when he remains unplugged.

        In a special Collector's Edition of Entertainment Weekly, there was a poll to see who were the top 100 Entertainers of All Time. Mr. David Bowie himself was named number 55. Here's the little caption he got: Written by Jeff Gordinier

        WHEN IT COMES TO CH-CH-CHANGING, HE HAS NO PEER. David Bowie is the supreme incarnation of the adage, "He was X before X was cool." He was gender-bending before gender-bending was cool. He was tech wiz before tech was cool. He was heavily into space aliens before space aliens were cool. Crooner, songwriter, actor, out-and-proud gay man, straight married man, art-gallery bohemian, Internet entrepeneur, fashionista, and the guy who basically created that creepy-aristo glamour that's come to define English rock stardom, Bowie, 52, is above all a Nobel laureate in the science of staying ahead of the curve.

        "The thing I always really wanted was creative sucess - to have albums that I could look back on and say, 'Well, that was an imprtant album, whether or not anybody else knows it,'" he told EW in 1997. Take Low, the chilly requiem of alienation that Bowie cut with Brian Eno in 1977 - and whose eerie chromosomal code can be detected in the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead. "At the time, it received incredibly hostile press," Bowie said. "But that's now turned into one of the milestone albums that I made."