Bowie's Outside: C or D?

I saw this show, it was awesome. saw bowie on the reality tour again a few years later, also awesome. I don't remember any reviews of the outside tour being horrid. the glass spider tour, yes,

And so the Outside era begins.

:-D

Now that I no longer like things that make sense, I'll have to go listen to it again.

daria g OTM.

He correctly pointed out that "Strangers When We Meet" is the classic of his autumnal years.

Decided to put this on tonight... First words on the album are "2015...16".

think i'm at the point where this is my favorite bowie album but idk

just listening to this properly and it's even more 'early/mid 90s trip-hop' than i'd have guessed. some of it sounds like Madonna's Human Nature. The Motel for one.

*Erotica i mean

Baby Grace is the victim
she was fourteen years of age

this record is definitely divisive, I know people who just think it's the worst thing ever.

I like it a heck of a lot more than Black Tie White Noise, which I don't like much at all apart from Jump They Say (or at least I didn't last time I listened to it which was years ago. It's probably my favourite of his 90s albums.

I only saw Bowie live twice, in 1996 and 2000, and both times he played Hallo Spaceboy and both times it was awesome.

the Pet Shop Boys remix was a hit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjYHTCR0qBk

this record is definitely divisive, I know people who just think it's the worst thing ever.

― akm, Thursday, January 14, 2016 1:58 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean one can see why they'd think so! the whole vertigo-comics-at-its-worst nature of its aesthetic, the programming and guitar tones that register as dated in a bad way to a lot of ppl ...

i listened to the bootlegged 'leon' for the first time today. it's ... probably less cohesive than the '1. outside' version, even.

I remember being so bummed, this being a reunion of Eno and Bowie and Eno being on a real winning streak as a producer. He never really recovered. Outside is so weird and chaotic, and just about everything he's produced since has been boring and safe. Nu-U2, Coldplay ...

I really loved this record when it came out, well, "really" might be strong...I hadn't listened to it in yrs and tried the other night, I could not hang with it

this was my first real bowie purchase in 1995, and i loved it. I think it still holds up.

think i'm at the point where this is my favorite bowie album but idk

Same, pretty much. I wouldn't claim that it's his best, but I wore it out in high school and it's the one I've internalized the most.

I think Earthling remains my preferred listen, drawing on the band that toured Outside, but I admire the fact that Outside even exists. Following the demi-retrench of Black Tie and the formal exercise of Buddha of Suburbia this seemed to be a striking way forward. A lot of the songs still stand up and to quote myself again from 2002 on here: "We Prick You" = my secret favorite.

just listened to this again this morning minus the segues, I think it's still awfully good. certainly better than Earthling.

hey i would like to suggest black tie anticipates both this and buddha in subtle ways. it's kind of an avant garde sophistipop record

reeves is way more subdued on this than earthling so it's kinda automatically way better imo, but earthling has some of bowie's best tunes

earthling feels super perverse to me in that, according to bowiesongs, bowie wanted to capture the sound of his band, and the result sounds like everyone fed their instruments through a bank of effects and then triggered them with a synthesizer

I wasn't aware of Reeves Gabrels as menace until Earthling.

That Earthling tour is closer to that capture-the-sound-of-his-band ideal. Shit was fire, from what I've seen (I've told my story about missing his epic 3-hour-plus Ft Lauderdale show).

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

He follows me on Twitter, oddly enough. So when I saw him favoriting some of my Bowie tweets this week I was all 'That seems a little strange, somehow.' (Roger O'Donnell also follows me as well so I'm waiting for Simon Gallup to show up on my doorstep.)

i forgot reeves was in the cure now until the other day and then instantly felt less enthusiastic about the show this spring.

Reeves is just doing the job in the Cure. Took it down a notch from Porl, so you'll be fine.

This is the first Bowie album I heard: I was lent it by my English teacher. I lent him Screamadelica in return. Finally bought my own copy a few years ago. Right now it's in the loft though, so I can't revisit it despite a strong desire to (knackered knee = no ladder climbing).

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.