David Bowie R.I.P

I went to see the Professional Bull Riders on Friday night at Madison Square Garden, and the first song the DJ played was "Let's Dance." (The DJ at PBR events plays a whole lot of music you'd never expect. I wrote about it for the Voice in 2010.)

xpost Would have been great if he just put on Let's Dance and danced to it.

Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet: Tramp with Orchestra by Gavin Bryars; Hampton String Quartet, Michael Riesman and Orchestra

This will either drive you up the wall or you will produce some amazing drawings while listening to it. You could probably cook a fish to this as well.

Gathering Storm by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

GYBE are among my, erm, two favourite Montreal bands, Arcade Fire being the other. All Montreal bands have around nine members, I believe.

"Vinyls": Bowie knew how to keep up with the times."

pioneer really. that thing was from 2006.

http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/press/00/0611nokiarecommendp2.htm

it's weird that thing is apparently not from vanity fair or from 2013.

so confusing.

is vanity fair an aggregator now?

i do vaguely remember african-american record people in philly saying vinyls in the 90's. along with "rares". and "grip". and "twelves" for 12-inch singles. a japanese dealer was asking me for twelves last week.

i think someone just put that on their website and attributed it to vanity fair?

this guy. sam. he's from canada.

http://scallemang.ca/

hey that's the guy who posted Bowie's top 25!

It was in Vanity Fair. I remember when it was first published because it was around the time I released The Ascension.

lots of things being posted for a second (at least) time

Branwell, most of those albums date, at the latest, from when DB was much more interested in nailing 15-yo girls than repping for female artists.

ie

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/13/the_dark_side_of_david_bowie_as_the_mourning_goes_on_we_cant_ignore_his_history_with_underaged_groupies_in_70s/

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/13/david_bowie_rock_star_groupies_and_the_sexually_adventurous_70s_labeling_us_as_victims_in_retrospect_is_not_a_very_conscious_thing_to_do/

Just encountered the best Bowie lyric ever (from Tin Machine's 'Crack City'): "They're just a bunch of assholes/With buttholes for their brains"

That 5 years doc was decent, p boring critics imo but wow Alomar, Dennis Davis and Fripp were great. Some cool footage too. Bowie's career arc is pretty perfect up until Let's Dance, then you get a pretty big ellipse of 30 years but I guess that's the way artist stories go - Dylan's narrative is def strongest circa 61-67 too.

god this smokes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2syGy1TjXq0

BBC versions of the Ziggy tracks are mostly better than the originals imo

Wrestling with the Tin Machine albums for the first time ever. The second one is going down muuuuuuch more smoothly than the first did. To the extent that I'll make an early call (still only about halfway through listening) that it's Bowie's best since Let's Dance. The production and arrangements have been tightened up and Gabrels is laying off the WHEEELDLYDEEEEDLYDEEEEEE to an admirable extent. There may be some decent songs on the first album but it's really hard to hear them under the 'David Bowie and some random bar band' soundscape.

Bowie at the Beeb is probably the best double disc set I ever bought for ~5 eur

bowie at the beeb is getting a vinyl pressing soon

Oh wait here's a Tin Machine song with someone else on vocals and it suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks so oh well I guess.

But seriously David. You were so close to having a uniformly good album for the first time in forever. You couldn't have asked this maudlin doofus to sequester his pair of doofy songs to an unrelated single?

You should hear his brother.

Bowie at the Beeb is so great. I love that version of "Eight Line Poem"

I'd previously thought "Real Cool World" was a pretty meh and perfunctory song, but heard in the context of his previous decade's work, it's a real breath of fresh air.

It sounds pretty good.

Absolutely starved of new Bowie in 2012 I finally picked up Tin Machine II and thought it was surprisingly good, but that may have been desperation on my part. Those Sales-sang songs are comically bad, of course. You Belong In Rock 'N Roll was always decent and Shopping For Girls is pretty good, but....blah.

"Goodbye Mr Ed" is a Good Song.

The first time I saw him was a Tin Machine show in 1992, the academy on like 43rd st . Anyone else see 'em?

Hope they give the Bowie at the Beeb Reissue a nicer cover.

Meanwhile..

http://www.clickhole.com/article/7-musicians-talk-about-how-david-bowie-impacted-th-3816

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ZtpYfNq74

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIy12hhhCm0

The true mystery of Bowie is Never Let Me Down. Pretty much all the other missteps can be explained away. Tonight was a slapdash attempt to cash in on the Let's Dance phenomenon; a case can be made for Tin Machine (although I'm not going to make it); the try-hard 90s albums are OK in their way... but Never Let Me Down is dreadful, just dreadful, despite the fact that he spent a lot of time on it and promoted the hell out of it. At the time he said it was getting back to what he was doing with Scary Monsters! But I defy any Bowie fan to listen to the Glass Spiders monologue without cringing. Getting it so wrong and so right is really Bowie's strange alchemy...

I think the consensus we've seen so far is a preference for NLMD over Tonight. I certainly do.

I saw your name in the acknowledgements of the book version of Pushing Ahead of the Dame. Wondering if I should go ahead and spring for that book or just stick to reading on the web.

You and Ned. Perhaps some other or former ILXors as well.

ok bowie at the beeb is fucking amazing

Can't stop spoonerizing that as Bieber at the Bowie

I listened to Tonight and Hours back to back a couple of days ago. Not something to be repeated often.

Tonight is definitely worse due to Bowie's sheer lack of engagement, though Hours is a distressing listen due the truly excruciating production which is about as bad as anyone could muster in 1999. Disgusting pan pipe synths, real drums that wind up sounding like the worst early Fruity Loops samples, everything a big treble-y, soulless mess, yet one he was clearly invested in. There are no pointless cover versions either, unlike the obviously superior Heathen and Reality. I'm not even convinced that the songwriting is even that bad, but outside of Thursday's Child, New Angels Of Promise and the OK Seven, it's genuinely quite difficult to tell. In short, Tonight is a lazy disgrace but '...hours' is a sad rake-in-the-face misstep, forgotten by most.

From a sonic perspective, I think the number one reason why Bowie's work isn't as strong post-1980 is that he became way too concerned with keeping up with the times. Up through Scary Monsters, he was mostly ahead of the curve and laying his own foundation (with the glaring exception of '1984'). I'm listening to Black Tie, White Noise just now, which seems to be heading in the right direction (AKA very far away from his '80s work) but sounds very much like an album released in 1993.

hours is second worst album, and a strange misstep after TBOS, Outside, and Earthling.

Number two reason(?): two solid decades without Tony Visconti.

I saw your name in the acknowledgements of the book version of Pushing Ahead of the Dame. Wondering if I should go ahead and spring for that book or just stick to reading on the web.

Get it. Thing is that they're two different experiences -- the book revises/polishes/updates a variety of the entries; the original web posts have the photos, the video/audio links, the comments.

As for 'hours...' I always assumed it was his watery VH1 'adult' album, for a watery audience. But I don't know if he ever pulled a Pee-Wee "I *meant* to do that" answer.

Well, having one of the songs lyrics written as a competition, isn't.

it's so weird seeing a lot of people hate on "Hours" i thought it was awesome and kind of current. haven't listened to it since it came out tho. i remember the Pixies cover was really cool.

You're thinking of Heathen, not Hours.

doh

'...hours' is a sad rake-in-the-face misstep,

Imagining Bowie stepping on a rake - like something from a Laurel & Hardy movie - has given me the only piece of entertainment I think I've ever got out of '...hours'.
I agree with Old Lunch that the 90s albums are very much of their time, almost to the month. This is 1993, this is 1996...