Bowie's Outside: C or D?

When Reeves joined the Cure I was all ugh. He has the worst guitar tone ever, like the guitar equivalent of a Simmons drum.

Jason C00per has been in The Cure for two decades as of this year.

that is weird

This was noted on another Bowie thread recently, but Eno to the Beeb right after he passed:

"About a year ago we started talking about Outside - the last album we worked on together. We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that."
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35279642

Hadn't realized that a decent quality Leon Tapes bootleg finally leaked last year. By no means an easy listen, but a real feast when combined with the outstanding PAotD analysis linked upthread. One unique angle pursued there is that Outside, for all its virtues, wasn't so much a comeback or a new direction for Bowie but rather a compromised "conceptual art project Eno and Bowie carried out in the press," the record itself merely a public record of the occasion before Bowie flitted onto new things. It's really an amazing piece that I'd recommend to anyone who found themselves fascinated by this era.

From my end, one interesting piece in this story is that for such an outsized project, it ended up being strongest as a set of songs. Where I saw there record as this incomplete masterpiece when I was younger, it seems so much more like Diamond Dogs (as PAotD notes) or even Young Americans in its earnest but failed pursuit of Philly Soul -- a product of massive but ultimately unrealized ambitions that ends working best as something else altogether.

BTW, the title track of this doesn't get enough love.

outsiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidddde

Got it from the loft yesterday. Better than I remember. Needs more listens.

I never thought this album was bad, just a little ... much.

Young Americans in its earnest but failed pursuit of Philly Soul

Wait did I miss a vote on this?

What is the best Leon bootleg?

the one that's only three tracks long

ah i c

young americans is one of my least favorite bowie albums; it comes right after the obvious bad ones like tonight, never let me down, the labrynth soundtrack. I think it's generally worse than tin machine 1 and 2; and that's all because of 'across the universe' being so lame.

so difficult to listen to an album with one terrible song, throw it in the trash and set it on fire

if you replaced "across the universe" with "who can i be now" it'd be a 100 percent perfect album so like...."across the universe" can hardly ruin the whole thing

It's crazy that Who Can I Be Now didn't make the cut, but indicative of how massive a hot streak he was on at the time.

well actually the rest of the album doesn't measure that much for me either aside from the title track; it's just not very memorable. but it's also the last bowie album I ever got so that might have something to do with it.

If it's any consolation, it's not in my Bowie top five.

and that's all because of 'across the universe' being so lame

I find Across the Universe objectively atrocious but at the same time weirdly enjoyable to listen to.

well, the guitars sound terrific for one thing

man diamond dogs as a comparison for outside is pretty interesting and dead on. at the time i enjoyed outside (always loved 'strangers when we meet' and was happy that 'hallo spaceboy' was a big hit)(in iceland at least) but kinda dismissed it as a failure and a mess (just way way too busy to my ears, bowie chasing too many trends at once). years after i'd meet ppl whose favorite bowie album was outside and have to stifle my shock and urge to mock, it seemed so clueless and bizarre and based in ignorance, i'd always have to say 'look outside is fine but there is no way in hell it is bowie's best album'. i enjoyed earthling more (a lot more) and thought it corrected many of the mistakes of outside - clearer vision, better hooks, no damned skits. i revisted it after he died and it was a revelation. there's still a lot there that doesn't work and i still have no use for the skits but it strikes me as pretty clearly his strongest late album. some of this might just be a result of the dnb influence but it also strikes me as much more jazzy than i would have noticed at the time. between lester bowie on btwn and the last album there's part of me that imagines bowie spending his last two decades (or at least more of his last two decades) doing these more focused less stunt casty kind of laswell albums.

"The Heart's Filthy Lesson" through "No Control" is one hell of a sequence.

"Across the Universe" sucks, but the drums on that track are killer and weirdly 90s R&B, especially the breaks and fills toward end around 3:15 and beyond.

Thanks thread for the notice that a decent version of the sessions leaked last year. I downloaded the audio of the three suites from YT and am just finishing the first suite now. This is straight up amazing.

More talk about 1. Outside, please.

So I've played this 3 or 4 times since I got it down from the loft, although always pretty distractedly - in part because it's so long. Read the wiki page for it this morning and the concept/conceit is just ridiculous, but the music, and some of the songs, as noted above, is excellent. If you culled it down to 50 minutes, deleted the skits, it'd be roundly recognised as excellent, I think. As it is, it's too long, and the whole mythology/narrative built up around it almost seems like a deliberate attempt to prevent people getting it. But A Small Plot Of Land, Spaceboy, Oxford Town, Filthy Lesson, Destruction, the title track, and especially Strangers are all amazing. And everything else is at least interesting. I guess in 1995, next to Blur and Oasis and Pulp and The Bends, it just seemed like a crazy, OTT mess.

Bonkersly, this was the first Bowie album I ever heard, way back when it came out. For a 16/17 year old I think it was just too much.

to 20-year-old-me, Blur was the only competition. 1. Outside was my favorite album of 1995.

This album sounds particularly good at the moment, I feel.

I guess in 1995, next to Blur and Oasis and Pulp and The Bends, it just seemed like a crazy, OTT mess.

Hmm, maybe. The record seems more in keeping with what was going on in 1997 rather than 1995.

In 1995 it just didn't seem as cool as the Berlin records/Before and After Science, ime

yeah the 'eno and bowie! back together! to make a new trilogy!' hype didn't help

like i enjoyed that last byrne/eno record but i think if it had been presold as 'get ready for another my life eating bush' i would have been let down. unfair to hold an album's hype against it i know but it definitely influenced my perspective, was something i had to work past.

I bought Buddha of Suburbia the other day, too. There aren't any threads about it that I can see on here. Any major discussion in any other threads that anyone knows of? I'm very intrigued by it. It does in retrospect seem to sit very neatly between BTWN and this.

it's really good (buddha). title track is one of his best songs and all the instrumentals are super interesting; if not quite on par with side 2 of low or heroes, they show bowie really stretching out and doing something different.

Buddha>Outside.

I think Buddha is one of the reasons people were let down/confused by Outside. Buddha (along with BTWN) broke his losing streak - I remember at the time people really excited it marked a return to "experimental" Bowie - and then came the announcement he was reconvening with Eno (on his own winning streak as producer) for a full collaboration. And then the album was this unfocused sprawl with a crazy concept that embraced both weird improv and then fashionably ugly electronica/industrial tropes. I recall my introduction to "Outside" via the end credits to "Seven" the week before.

No one heard Buddha at the time though, did they?

I kinda admire the fact that Bowie used electronica/industrial tropes, and later on some jungle tropes... could you imagine McCartney/Jagger/Ferry going "jungle"!?

It was hard to find. I think it was pulled in England, sneaked out in December 1993? In the USA it didn't get a release until fall '95.

I mean, christ, the Stones' idea of broadening their palette at the time was getting in The Dust Brothers and ripping off k.d. lang!

It's true, trip hop seemed more Mick's speed. Though Bowie dipped into that, too.

i can imagine ferry going trip-hop

he flirted with it mildly on his '90s solo albums.

No one heard Buddha at the time though, did they?

Got an MM review I'm pretty sure. I've heard good things about the series itself. Kurieshi wrote a piece that ran in the Times but (precisely because it's in the Times and thus paywalled) I've not read it beyond the introduction.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/article4662362.ece

Never cared about the story or reading the liner notes or anything, but I love the spoken tracks. He does good voices over nice music and I like the mangled sci-fi syntax (though I'm sad to learn the "something is about to be heard" I've always got before Hallo Spaceboy is a mishearing.

The two songs people often mention as classics, Have Not Been to Oxford Town and Strangers When We Meet, are maybe the most underwhelming for me on this record.

I love A Small Plot of Land most. It could easily fit on Blackstar - very similar to Tis A Pity She Was a Whore.

I had to buy buddha as an import when it was released; yeah it got no airplay or attention in the US outside of bowie fans.

Wrote this on the RIP thread because it felt more appropriate there but selfishly I want to talk about this record.

A lot of has been written about Bowie’s legacy since his passing, but for me, the thing I keep coming back to is the fact, or perception anyway, that Bowie was /the/ guy who spotted trends before they were trends and brought them into the mainstream. /Outside/ very clearly—and very self-consciously—was designed to explore that side of Bowie's persona. Yes, it was a celebration of “outsider” art and the sordid characters that produce it, but even more than that, a tribute to Bowie's own mythology for championing, popularizing, consuming, and, ultimately, discarding those artists and movements before moving on to something else.

Candidly, I think Bowie understood the significance of that role—as Lester Bangs wrote about /Young Americans,/ Bowie's best work often seemed to be when he failed at something so wildly that it became something else entirely—but don’t think he was ever entirely satisfied playing it. Deep down, Bowie really did wish he could be a pop hermit like Scott Walker or a performance artist like Chris Burden physically harming himself for his art. But as his copious interviews on the talk show circuit reveal, he also wanted to be loved, admired and appreciated.

I realize now that this is one of the reasons I have always found /Outside/ so fascinating, because it not only self-consciously exploits that tension — but the project itself was consumed by it, transforming from the ambitious, careening, improvised opera about “outsider" art it was initially conceived as into a messy, overstuffed “gothic non-linear hyper-cycle” into an art rock concept album, the subject of which is "David Bowie."

That’s why, even tho PAotD judges /Outside/ to be something of a failure … I’m not sure it actually is. The songs are great. The bootlegged /Leon/ sessions that started it off are completely unique. The story is intentionally batshit and incomprehensible. Not everything works and some of it is baffling, but it’s never boring. As a result, the project as a whole feels like…pretty much everything Bowie ever did. And on those terms, I feel like it has to be judged as one of his most important releases.

I love A Small Plot of Land most. It could easily fit on Blackstar - very similar to Tis A Pity She Was a Whore.
― Eyeball Kicks, Tuesday, February 2, 2016 10:51 PM (seven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Donny McCaslin covers it (and "Warszawa") on his upcoming album.
http://www.ew.com/article/2016/07/29/donny-mccaslin-small-plot-land-cover

This is on Spotify. It's a nice thread from the Blackstar era to its roots in Bowie's catalogue. I like the instrumental sax solo section, perhaps unsurprisingly. Makes me think that some enterprising person could make an interesting cover of the whole record.

Tho it was recorded later in NYC, 'Small Plot' always struck me as a bit of a head nod to the Leon sessions (PAotD agrees). Joey Baron and Mike Garson are amazing on it. There's another mix of it that Eno supposedly did on the Basquiat OST that mixes them both out – but I prefer the original.

Listening to this again after a long while, I'd say this is up there with Blackstar as one of his very best post-Let's Dance LP's.

Or "classic", in other words.

no doubt, IMO anyway. I can kind of see how people find it overly indulgent and maybe, story-wise, even silly, but I really like basically all of it.

The "indulgent" nature of it is a huge part of why it rules so much, IMO.