David Bowie R.I.P

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

Aw, my friend Dawn is quoted in that NY Times piece, with a photo of her daughter (who is soulmates with my daughters, bonded by Bowie, Wild Flag, Ex Hex...). She was the first person I thought of when I heard the news.

Revisiting The Next Day this morning, for the first time in about two years. Feeling surprised and a bit guilty about having dismissed/ignored it pretty quickly after release (last.fm tells me 25 listens, which seems correct).
For me, the title track is putting everything from hours to Reality to shame in terms of sheer vitality, force and also: fun. His voice is so strong, remarkable lyrics and generally it sounds like an unreleased b-side from Lodger, like an excellent mix of Repetition and Red Sails.

The Stars (Are Out Tonight) another highlight, from there it gets a bit hit and miss. Certainly would have been a better album if only 10 songs would have made the cut, but its undeniably a total positive surprise, that such a comeback was still possible at that time.

mcgregor's fake jagger

Wasn't it supposed to be Iggy?

It looked more like Kurt, really.

I remember seeing an interview with Ewan McGregor at the time of release and he said he got to get out his 'inner Noel Gallagher' in that role, or something similar

Whatever that is worth

I will take you AAAALLLLLL on about Velvet Goldmine in another thread, come and have a go if you think you're etc. (semi-joking emoji here) but not on the Bowie RIP thread.

I just think it's a bit disrespectful to discuss fan fiction in an RIP thread.

That's what it is, isn't it? Never thought about it like that.

Lou Reed's best albums

all in the '80s

no way

Aged 10, "Ashes to Ashes" spooked the hell out of me but I knew there was something deep happening there. In the last week I've spent a lot of time with "Scary Monsters" and it's pretty remarkable. And Ashes is breathtaking in its complexity. I guess when you have that rhythm section, you can make even a crazed lysergic paranoid meringue sound as funky as hell, and people will love it. But it's a phenomenally odd song to reach number 1.

I always forget there's a Tom Verlaine cover on Scary Monsters

Lou Reed's best albums

all in the '80s

no way
― Chicamaw (Ward Fowler), Thursday, January 21, 2016 6:22 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Haha yea I was like say what now?

Oh yeah. I've said so many times. The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts, New Sensation – his most rewarding solo records. Toss in New York, which some of you like more than I, and it's a good decade.

The seventies boast, what, Transformer, Coney Island Baby, and maaaaayybe The Bells? It's not even close.

None of his 80s albs can match Berlin, Metal Machine Music, Street Hassle or Take no Prisoners, just for starters.

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...

― Zelda Zonk, Mittwoch, 20. Januar 2016 11:56 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Always thought I'd be the only one around here going to bat for Tonight in comparison to NLMD. Listened to the latter again last week with a friend and we both agreed that it's not only for the most part ridiculous (like Tonight) but sounding like a total void, idea and inspiration-wise, produced to death.
Granted the majority of Tonight, Loving The Alien and Blue Jean excepted, are accidents with varying degrees of unintented hilarity, but the songs seem alive at least while the whole of NLMD to me feels like a vast and lifeless desert of overambitious creative white noise, difficult to even walk through. Pushing Ahead Of The Dame sums it up nicely in the review of Beat Of Your Drum: "If only the whole album had been as tasteless as this."

Although I wasn't quite sure of what to make of it before (I think I mostly liked it but I probably haven't listened to it since the '90s ended), it's pretty clear to me after hearing it in chronological context that Outside is Bowie's best since Scary Monsters. A little more cringingly Tekwar in spots than I'd like, but David is present! And engaged! And the music isn't doing him a massive, dated disservice! Okay, it's a little dated but not in an off-putting way.