Retrospectively, the album has been praised by critics for the band's performance and the unsettling nature of its music and lyrics, being considered by many to be the start of Bowie's "classic period".

[17] Although Bowie is officially credited as the composer of all music on The Man Who Sold the World, the author Peter Doggett quoted Visconti as saying that "the songs were written by all four of us.

[23][24] Much of the material has a distinct heavy metal edge that distinguishes it from Bowie's other releases, and has been compared to contemporary acts such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

"[16] The music writer Simon Reynolds, comparing parts of the album to Van Der Graaf Generator and Comus, interpreted it as "Bowie trying to pass for an underground band", despite having already abandoned hippy values.

According to Doggett, they contain numerous themes that Bowie would continue to explore throughout the rest of the 1970s decade, including "madness, alienation, violence, confusion of identity, power, darkness and sexual possession".

[28] Since Bowie wrote most of the lyrics at the last minute, O'Leary writes that The Man Who Sold the World is a more "coherent" concept album than Ziggy Stardust (1972) and Diamond Dogs (1974).

[10][17] Originally debuted in February 1970 at a BBC session,[30] the song is led by Ronson's widely lauded guitar work,[29] using feedback and improvisation throughout.

[17] For "Black Country Rock", Bowie had a small portion of the melody and four quickly-written lines that he gave to Ronson and Visconti, who expanded upon them to create the song.

[36] Featuring an "oh, by jingo" chant that is reminiscent of music hall numbers,[31][35] the lyrics follow a group of innocent children who have not experienced the corruptions of adulthood.

[18] Spitz compares the song's blues style to Led Zeppelin,[35] while O'Leary and Pegg write that Ronson was attempting to emulate Cream's Jack Bruce.

[29][42] The lyrics explore a sexual conquest similar to "You Shook Me" (then-recently covered by Jeff Beck) and Robert Johnson's "Love in Vain".

For the design's foreground, Weller used a photograph of the actor John Wayne to draw a cowboy figure wearing a ten-gallon hat and holding a rifle, which was meant to be an allusion to the song "Running Gun Blues".

[50] Bowie suggested Weller incorporate the "exploding head" signature on the cowboy's hat, a feature he had previously used on his posters while a part of the Arts Lab.

[2][50][51] Bowie was enthusiastic about the finished design, but soon reconsidered the idea and had the art department at Philips Records, a subsidiary of Mercury, enlist the photographer Keith MacMillan to shoot an alternate cover.

The shoot took place in a "domestic environment" of the Haddon Hall living room, where Bowie reclined on a chaise longue in a cream and blue satin "man's dress", an early indication of his interest in exploiting his androgynous appearance.

[52][53] The 1971 German release's artwork presented a winged hybrid creature with Bowie's head and a hand for a body, preparing to flick the Earth away.

For the cover of the 1972 worldwide reissue by RCA Records, the label used a black-and-white photograph of Bowie in character as Ziggy Stardust in an action pose, wielding a guitar and with his left leg up in the air.

[2] According to Kevin Cann, the album was disliked by Mercury executives, but was played on US radio stations frequently and the "heavy rock content" increased interest in Bowie.

[68] Reviewing for Rolling Stone in February 1971, John Mendelsohn called the album "uniformly excellent" and commented that Visconti's "use of echo, phasing, and other techniques on Bowie's voice ... serves to reinforce the jaggedness of Bowie's words and music", which he interpreted as "oblique and fragmented images that are almost impenetrable separately but which convey with effectiveness an ironic and bitter sense of the world when considered together".

[74] Mike Saunders from Who Put the Bomp magazine included The Man Who Sold the World in his ballot of 1971's top 10 albums for the first annual Pazz & Jop poll of American critics, published in The Village Voice in February 1972.

[68][78] Despite his annoyance with Bowie during the sessions, Visconti still rated The Man Who Sold the World as his best work with him until his fourteenth studio album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980).

[28] The critical success of The Man Who Sold the World in the US prompted Mercury to send Bowie on a promotional radio tour of the country in February 1971.

David Buckley has described it as "the first Bowie album proper",[93] and NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray stated, "this is where the story really starts".

Club called the album his "career blueprint", writing that it was musically a forerunner to the "swaggering electric disorientation" of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane (1973), but its greater importance on sequencing and atmosphere, as well as stronger songwriting, predated Hunky Dory.

In a review for AllMusic, Erlewine complimented its "tight, twisted heavy guitar rock that appears simple on the surface but sounds more gnarled upon each listen".

[88] The album has since been cited as inspiring the goth rock, dark wave and science fiction elements of work by artists such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, Gary Numan, John Foxx and Nine Inch Nails.

[28] It has been claimed that glam rock began with the release of The Man Who Sold the World,[97] though this is also attributed to Bolan's appearance on the UK television programme Top of the Pops in March 1971 wearing glitter.

[99] The title track provided an unlikely hit for Scottish pop singer Lulu, which was produced by Bowie and Ronson,[67] and would be covered by many artists over the years, including Richard Barone in 1987, and Nirvana in 1993 for their live album MTV Unplugged in New York.

[104] Bowie vetoed inclusion of the earlier recording, and the single remained its only official release until 2015, when it was included on Re:Call 1, part of the Five Years (1969–1973) compilation.

A press notice stated that the collection, released on 28 May, features "non-album singles, a BBC In Concert session, music for a TV play and further Visconti remixes wrapping up (Bowie's) recordings from 1970 and revealing the first sonic steps toward Hunky Dory".