I don't 'get' Bowie at all.

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Postby The Write Profile » 23 Apr 2005, 09:47

Well, seeming as I'm currently playing the very swinging Pere Ubu as I'm typing this, I've probably proved nathan's point. Other than that, this had been taken out of Classic threads which was a shame because we only needed to go over this argument once. The fact it took 17 pages kind of put the nail in it.

In short the fact is that there was a period where Bowie, chopped and changed throughout a decade even if it didn't always come off 100% (Diamonddogs and Young Americans) the results were often fascinating if solipsistic..then there were the 3-4 albums either side (Hunky Dory to Aladdin Sane, Station to Station...to Scary Monsters)

The he burned out. The fact of the matter is, that well, while his recent stuff isn't bad, it just doesn't matter. And I guess that's what we're left with.

The Madonna versus Bowie comparisons?

You could be glib and say that Madonna changed clothes and partners, Bowie changed styles and approaches. And that's the pop world we're stuck with.

that'll do. Lock this thread and put it away in classics. It's been done :-)

I'll think of new ideas for threads, currently I'm off to a 21st!
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Postby Diamond Dog » 23 Apr 2005, 10:36

To even begin to talk of Madonna as having contributed to music in the same way as Bowie is, frankly, obscene.


Now lock it up again.
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Postby Clippernolan » 23 Apr 2005, 16:02

pig_bodine wrote: It's been said alot before, and more articulately, but he's an actor playing the part of a musician, and this, I believe is where the soulessness comes from.


I prefer to think of it as irony, and in a wierd way, a sort of rebellion against the bit of rock orthodoxy that every performer must be "real". In some ways, I think trying to find authenticity in Bowie's music is not really the point - he set himself up as being a sort of parody of a rock star in the Ziggy days, and in some ways I think this freed him up to explore other areas without becoming attached to them. I think this is quite a feat. And at the end of the day, the songs are very well executed and have the mark of the artist on them, which is the best kind of authenticity.
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Postby The Modernist » 24 Apr 2005, 15:35

Clippernolan wrote:I prefer to think of it as irony, and in a wierd way, a sort of rebellion against the bit of rock orthodoxy that every performer must be "real". In some ways, I think trying to find authenticity in Bowie's music is not really the point - he set himself up as being a sort of parody of a rock star in the Ziggy days, and in some ways I think this freed him up to explore other areas without becoming attached to them. I think this is quite a feat. And at the end of the day, the songs are very well executed and have the mark of the artist on them, which is the best kind of authenticity.


16 pages and then someone nails it as accurately and succintly as this. Well done Clipper.

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Postby Diamond Dog » 02 May 2005, 07:39

I think Clippr has suggested something I'd never really considered before - that being that Bowie's well documented coolness was a deliberate and considered anti rock and roll gesture. Very much the way Kraftwerk are - so, who influenced who, ultimately?
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Postby Hugo » 02 May 2005, 10:47

Diamond Dog wrote:I think Clippr has suggested something I'd never really considered before - that being that Bowie's well documented coolness was a deliberate and considered anti rock and roll gesture. Very much the way Kraftwerk are - so, who influenced who, ultimately?


A quote from my forthcoming book about Low (out in September):

Bowie had already met Kraftwerk frontmen Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter in Los Angeles. According to Schneider and Hütter, they'd talked about working together; according to Bowie, they hadn't. Whatever the case, nothing ever came of it, but Bowie saw them socially a few times once he'd moved Germany. These days, Bowie is a touch equivocal about their musical influence on him, although there are some undeniably Kraftwerkian moments on Low. But it's true that Bowie's and Kraftwerk's conceptions of rhythm wildly diverge. Low is a meeting of the synthetic and the organic – Bowie was welding R&B beats to electronic soundscapes. But Kraftwerk were in the process of eliminating the human altogether from the beat (their robot rhythms ultimately bled back into black music through house and techno, but that's another story).

The significance of Kraftwerk at this stage of Bowie's career was more general. It was the 1974 release of Autobahn that had turned his attention back to Europe, and to electronic music: "What I was passionate about in relation to Kraftwerk was their singular determination to stand apart from stereotypical American chord sequences and their wholehearted embrace of a European sensibility displayed through their music," Bowie said in 2001. "This was their very important influence on me."

Kraftwerk and the Kosmische bands belonged to a generation of Germans that "had no fathers, only grandfathers," as film director Werner Herzog once put it. "Because of the war," Ralf Hütter told a French journalist in 1978, "and the rupture it caused with the past, we no longer had a tradition to respect, we were free to experiment. And we weren't taken in by the myth of the pop star either. We'd seen enough of that in the 1930s." That rupture propelled German artists forwards into the future, but sometimes also backwards, skipping a generation to before the Nazi catastrophe, to the false dawn of the Weimar years, or the German Romanticism of the previous century. Kraftwerk actually went both ways, using electronics and avant-garde techniques to create a "European industrial folk music" that conjures up a largely pre-war world of futuristic optimism. Band member Wolfgang Flür explains, "All of us in the group are children who were born straight after World War Two. So, we had no musical or pop culture of our own, there was nothing behind us there was the war, and before the war we had only the German folk music. In the 1920s or 1930s melodies were developed and these became culture that we worked from. So, I think it was in us, ever since we were born; I cannot explain us, but it is us. It is romantic, childish, maybe, it is naive, but I cannot do anything about it. It's in me."

Kraftwerk's albums evoke a time when autobahns were a novelty; when travelling across Europe in a steam train was the epitome of glamour. They look back to the golden age of the radio, or the futurist visions of a 1920s movie like Metropolis. (More recently, there's been their twenty-year obsession with cycling, reducing the industrial fantasy of mechanical salvation to its simplest expression.) This nostalgia for a future that never happened was something that Bowie also picked up on; it's a sadness that informs the second sides of Low and its successor "Heroes". At heart, it's very much a form of Romanticism (Kraftwerk signal this with the title of their 1977 track Franz Schubert).

For a couple of years, Bowie's and Kraftwerk's careers seemed to intertwine. While Bowie was at work on Low, Kraftwerk were in the studio recording their groundbreaking Trans-Europe Express: an ambiguously kitsch photo of the group looking like a 1930s string quartet adorns the album cover. The title track cheekily namechecks both Bowie and his own "train" album (from station to station to Dusseldorf city, meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie); Bowie returned the favour on "Heroes" (V2-Schneider). Both Bowie and Kraftwerk conceived of their act as a whole – the music, the clothes, the artwork, the concerts, the interview, all integrated and self-referring. They both nodded to pan-Europeanism, recording versions of their songs in French, German and English. Both nurtured a camp sensibility, working the delicate seam that lies between irony and earnestness. Both blended postmodern pastiche with a retro-modernist aesthetic. Both made emotional music by seeming to negate emotion. Seen through the prism of psychiatry, the work of both comes across as rather autistic (Bowie's autism is schizophrenic; Kraftwerk's obsessive-compulsive).

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Postby Diamond Dog » 02 May 2005, 11:11

The book is called what Electrician and published by whom?
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Postby Hugo » 02 May 2005, 11:49

Diamond Dog wrote:The book is called what Electrician and published by whom?


It's one of Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series. There's more about the series here:
http://33third.blogspot.com

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Postby marios » 02 May 2005, 11:54

The Electrician wrote:
Diamond Dog wrote:The book is called what Electrician and published by whom?


It's one of Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series. There's more about the series here:
http://33third.blogspot.com


You write for the 33 1/3 series?! Nice.

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Postby Diamond Dog » 18 Sep 2005, 10:46

Top thread. Continue.
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Postby The Modernist » 18 Sep 2005, 12:23

Bumping this has made me waste a whole hour and a half in what was meant to be a busy day. cheers Pete :)
I don't think there's anything to add, it has all been said and imbetween some of the silliness there was some fantastic writing on why Bowie cannot be casually dismissed, some of Quaco's posts in particular nailed things brilliantly for me.

I wonder why we don't get lively debates like this on here now though, if you look at the replies for recent threads there's not been one for ages to really capture people's imaginations.

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Postby Diamond Dog » 18 Sep 2005, 12:28

Eek A Modernist! wrote:I wonder why we don't get lively debates like this on here now though, if you look at the replies for recent threads there's not been one for ages to really capture people's imaginations.


It's because I don't start as many threads as I once did. 8-)
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Postby Bungo the Mungo » 18 Sep 2005, 12:32

Nancy (Class Of 1997) wrote:I oftenly don't get Metallica and it's not that big thing. You can't get into each and every artist/band around, can you?


I missed this, first time 'round. 'Oftenly' is me new favourite word. Brilliant! I have to get it into conversation, and soon. Thanks Nancy!!

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Postby The Modernist » 18 Sep 2005, 12:34

Diamond Dog wrote:
Eek A Modernist! wrote:I wonder why we don't get lively debates like this on here now though, if you look at the replies for recent threads there's not been one for ages to really capture people's imaginations.


It's because I don't start as many threads as I once did. 8-)


Actually it was Jethro who started this one wasn't it? I liked the way he said he was going out to do some shopping or something and would post later, then just left everyone to attack each other like wild dogs. Top stuff!

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Postby The Modernist » 18 Sep 2005, 12:35

John Coan wrote:
Nancy (Class Of 1997) wrote:I oftenly don't get Metallica and it's not that big thing. You can't get into each and every artist/band around, can you?


I missed this, first time 'round. 'Oftenly' is me new favourite word. Brilliant! I have to get it into conversation, and soon. Thanks Nancy!!


Although hopefully you won't have to endure a conversation about Mettalica when you do John!

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Postby Bungo the Mungo » 18 Sep 2005, 12:40

Eek A Modernist! wrote:
John Coan wrote:
Nancy (Class Of 1997) wrote:I oftenly don't get Metallica and it's not that big thing. You can't get into each and every artist/band around, can you?


I missed this, first time 'round. 'Oftenly' is me new favourite word. Brilliant! I have to get it into conversation, and soon. Thanks Nancy!!


Although hopefully you won't have to endure a conversation about Mettalica when you do John!


Lord help us! They are the worst band around. Hell, I have to take back me comments about Tangerine Dream on another thread now....

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Postby NancyL21st » 18 Sep 2005, 14:46

John Coan wrote:
Nancy (Class Of 1997) wrote:I oftenly don't get Metallica and it's not that big thing. You can't get into each and every artist/band around, can you?


I missed this, first time 'round. 'Oftenly' is me new favourite word. Brilliant! I have to get it into conversation, and soon. Thanks Nancy!!


:shock:

*gulp*

You're (ahem) welcome, John!

My unintentional mistake on that matter. It should've been "often" I know.

As for Metallica, I like just a couple of their songs and that's all. I hardly can listen to them at all. Very very hard.
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Postby BARON CORNY DOG » 18 Sep 2005, 15:00

Jimmy Jazz wrote:There's nothing to "get" You like it or not.


Yes, and half are right while the other half are wrong. Such rampant, casual relativism must be stamped out at any cost!
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Postby Bungo the Mungo » 18 Sep 2005, 15:23

Baron wrote:
Jimmy Jazz wrote:There's nothing to "get" You like it or not.


Yes, and half are right while the other half are wrong. Such rampant, casual relativism must be stamped out at any cost!


YES

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Postby BARON CORNY DOG » 18 Sep 2005, 15:36

Jimmy Jazz wrote:
Baron wrote:
Jimmy Jazz wrote:There's nothing to "get" You like it or not.


Yes, and half are right while the other half are wrong. Such rampant, casual relativism must be stamped out at any cost!


Ok for a bit of stirring up then. You know what people actually mean when they say 'they don't get it' don't you ? They don't mean ; I am stupid, therefore I don't get it.


No, the people who don't get it are the ones who have not been fooled. However, in the presence of other people who are otherwise sane, those who haven't been fooled are being charitable to question whether or not they might be missing some angle.
take5_d_shorterer wrote:If John Bonham simply didn't listen to enough Tommy Johnson or Blind Willie Mctell, that's his doing.


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