David Bowie R.I.P

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...

Buddha of Suburbia is a fine album for someone who isn't David Bowie but I'm starting to feel like I'm judging him unfairly at this point in his career. By which I mean that it just dawned on me that the span of time from Let's Dance through BoS is roughly equivalent to that between Man Who Sold The World and Scary Monsters. These are clearly completely different and separate phases of an artist's career, and it seems almost like he totally abandoned that earlier phase at a point. His '80s and early-'90s work certainly doesn't seem to be at all informed by what he did in the '70s so it seems wrong to keep using that as my qualitative yardstick as he spans time.

Hours was his 'new' album at the point I got into Bowie as a teenager so I have nostalgic affection for it, of course this is only enhanced by the 'horribly dated 2 weeks after it was released' aspect of the sound and the visual design. I guess I also like the way it attempts to combine being a "watery VH1 'adult' album" with these grasps at up-to-the-minute modishness, aging pop artists normally try for one or the other?

seems like pretty much any artist who started in the 60s sucked by the 80s, even Leonard Cohen had his "Jazz Police"

that's not really true

two examples i can think of off the top of my head: aretha franklin and van morrison, both of whom released some of their best songs/albums in the '80s

tom waits is almost an exception, if he would have started just a few years earlier

George Clinton

buddha of suburbia fucking rules btw

would say this should be a separate thread but I suspect there already is one

xp

Paul Simon, Neil Young, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, George Jones, Doc Watson, Captain Beefheart all released great stuff in the 80s

Leonard Cohen
many Dylan songs
Lou Reed's best albums

all in the '80s

Jazz Police is great and I'm Your Man is Len's masterpiece.

agreed

lots of weird people did fine in the 80's. robert wyatt. people like robert wyatt.

i mean people weird like robert wyatt. from the 60's. obviously people like robert wyatt.

ZZ Top

i would say king crimson too if it weren't for that damn adrian belew! kidding. kinda. people like that stuff. i don't listen to it though.

yeah, well, anyway, lots of people from the 60's did good stuff in the 80's.

as Shakey mentioned, Hag released three of his finest albums between 1978 and 1981.

hours is bad, I've listened to it a few times over the past week (I went back and gave all the albums I disliked a chance); but it's not as bad as Tonight, which sounds phoned in. NLMD is 1/2 bad but half of it is good, I think. I can see what he was doing. The tour got all kinds of smack but if you look at that and then look at what Gaga does now, that's where all that started. It's silly and over the top but he was a little early with it. Anyway time will crawl is a great song, so is the title track, and day in day out and bang bang are ok too.

hours : I really chalk up the failure here to gabrels having way too much control. he cowrote everything, was very involved in the production, and it sounds like a mess. there are some good songs on there but they are produced and played in this squally, weird terrible noisy way that isn't avant-garde, it's just dumb. I like Survive a lot, and Tuesday's Child. That's about it. The art is awful.

it's also a mess bc in addition to being an album it's full of rerecorded songs that were intended as a soundtrack to a video game. it's just tremendously overworked, which makes it feel empty

uh strike "in addition to being an album" from that sentence, i think i need more coffee

hours is self-produced with help from Gabrels and Mark Plati, which is the problem. Most of the tunes sound like Bowie fiddling on his keyboard or 12-string and hoping Gabrels and Plati can spice'em up.

Phew. Okay this is finally live

http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashvillecream/archives/2016/01/20/neds-atomic-link-bin-20-must-read-david-bowie-reactions-and-remembrances

And don't forget this too

http://nedraggett.tumblr.com/post/137499173067/david-bowie-further-reading

I'm pretty sure hours is the only Bowie album I've never heard even once. His best of the 90s is easily Buddha of Suburbia for me.

Thanks, Ned!

Dwight Yoakam names his five favorite Bowie songs: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/yoakam-700535-bowie-elvis.html

xpost -- yer welcome!

i tried rewatching velvet goldmine

i still hate it. well, i like looking at it but hearing jonathan rhys meyers sing causes me physical pain & mcgregor's fake jagger bums me out. i know it's supposed to all be a pose but i caaaaaaaan't stand how affected it all is

If I remember right, the concept with Hours was like inhabiting old "Bowie" spaces, right? That's certainly obvious on "Seven," which is fairly amazing. I love "Thursday's Child."

i fucking hate velvet goldmine too

I really like Todd Haynes for the most part. VG just tries way too hard