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I listened to 9 Bowie albums I'd never heard yesterday, which was a wild experience. I think over the course of the week I'll listen to the 9 I already knew and loved. Anyway, here's a copy and paste from what I put on Facebook. I liked music a lot in high school, as I was sure to let people know. Unfortunately, I was also a loving idiot. You could tell as much because I didn’t listen to David Bowie. It’s not that I disliked him--I actually dug most of the songs I heard, and I listened to tons of classic rock--but I had some bizarre hang-up about solo artists vs. bands, where I thought the contributions of the group were inherently more interesting than the ideas of one person. Never mind that many “bands” are that in name only, and many solo artists are reliant upon particular supporting musicians (Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen were also victims of this thought process, with or without Crazy Horse/The E Street Band, and I’ll be intolerable when their lives come to an end). At some point in college (I think between freshman and sophomore year) I finally sat and listened to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars as part of a summer phase where I would kill time by listening to consensus classic albums that I had missed. I knew and loved the hits (Moonage Daydream, Ziggy Stardust and Suffragette City), but I was just as blown away by Five Years, Rock and Roll Suicide and everything else. Hunky Dory came soon after, and kicked my rear end again. This is when I realized how stupid I was for ignoring the guy when I was starting to get into music. People like to talk about Bowie’s chameleonic career moves and various personas, but the only reason any of that matters is because he was a goddamn amazing musician. Just look at a song like “Changes.” On the surface it’s just a catchy pop-rock tune, but when you analyze it, even with rudimentary knowledge of music, it’s clear how amazing that song really is. The chord changes in the intro are so unexpected, so uniquely Bowieish that it takes my breath away every time. His pop sensibilities are why I’ll always prefer his glam rock era, but he still had the ability to pump out amazing songs in any style. Is it even possible for someone to write four songs as wildly different but all incredible as Space Oddity, Heroes, Let’s Dance and The Hearts Filthy Lesson? (confession: I am listening to 1. Outside, his bizarre 1995 pseudo-industrial concept album with Brian Eno right now, so maybe that last song won’t stick as much, but it is really good!). And that’s without getting into the 72-hour-old Blackstar, which is fantastic. I’ve been listening to David Bowie almost non-stop since 7 this morning, about a half hour after I learned that he had passed. Other than the hour-long commute to work, it’s exclusively been albums I didn’t already know (which is how I’ve arrived at 1. Outside), and almost every second has been awesome. Nobody has more songs that make you think “how the gently caress did he come up with that?” Over the course of the day I’ve heard at least 20 songs that could make a budding songwriter give up because they’ll never reach that quality. Some are all him, some are for other people (All the Young Dudes), some are collaborations (Under Pressure), but they’re all incredible. Moreover, it’s all so fresh. I love Lemmy, but if I had decided after his death to listen to Motorhead all day, even if I’d never heard it before, I would have burned out by album number three. Burning out on David Bowie is impossible, even if you’re listening to failed experiments. That’s pretty much my whole ramble. Bowie’s greatness is self-evident, and you can see just how widespread his influence is by the variety of people who are distraught over his passing, from pop stars to extreme metal bands, from music theory geeks to the instrumentally challenged. And you can tell the sentiment is genuine, because everyone has a different song that they feel best represents him. Bowie is eternal.
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Jan 12, 2016 16:47
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Halloween Jack posted:Considering which albums were his best and worst, I think The Man Who Sold the World is not very good and squeaks by on the strength of the title track. Thoughts? Width of a Circle is spectacular and the rest is good too.
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Jan 13, 2016 16:31
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cptn_dr posted:There's a couple of live videos of Of Montreal and Janelle Monae[ covering Moonage Daydream that I'm pretty fond of. Did she ever do a full cover of Heroes or was that just a bit for a commercial? I also saw Ween do Let's Dance at Lollapalooza a few years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qqqH_u5mmQU
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Jan 14, 2016 15:02
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sticklefifer posted:
Isn't most of it just Nadsat from A Clockwork Orange? I remember reading that when the album came out and many of those words definitely fit the bill. Edit: realized you picked up on that with "Burgess references."
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Jan 16, 2016 14:38
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Good god, he basically invented a language for that song. It's a hybrid of Burgess and Orwell references, Polari, Filipino and Russian slang, and bits of the stuff he made up for Outside's characters.
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All of the songs on Side A of Low end right as they're getting interesting.
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Jan 22, 2016 15:52
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Vince MechMahon posted:Actually Billy Joel only has like six good songs. Cemetry Gator posted:So avant garde that he spent his entire career in the middle of the road. What are jokes?
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Feb 12, 2016 20:36
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Vince MechMahon posted:Usually they're funny or clever, which the post we're talking about here wasn't. Actually they're often neither of those things! Nobody would ever call Billy Joel avant garde in earnest.
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Feb 12, 2016 21:26
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I feel like CD and TVIV are a bizarro version of the rest of Something Awful where ridiculous things are the norm and normal thoughts are considered not serious.
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Feb 12, 2016 23:16
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