Driving into work this morning, listening to 6Music, it was basically all Bowie, all the time. I can't think of any other popular artist where that wouldn't get tedious very quickly.
I was a huge david bowie fan in college that peaked in seeing him 3 times on the serious moonlight tour. In never fanned so hard since.
If that's kind of play is required in all such cases, remind me not to outlive Billy Ray Cyrus.
I remember going to see a late showing of the Ziggy Stardust concert movie at our local arthouse theater when I was 12.
I can't think of any other popular artist where that wouldn't get tedious very quickly.
Excellent point.
The Man Who Sold the World to Scary Monsters is really a tremendous run (and at 1971 for the UK release of TMWStW to 1980, almost a decade exactly) -- I can think of a number of bands/artists who kept to that peak for a decade, but very few who did it while being huge-rock-star-famous.
re: 8
And very hard to think of any that did it while consistently innovating in the way that he did. Not unless you stretch it to include people like Miles Davis, and even then, the changes were happening over a longer time scale.
Since I doubt I have anything original to say about his music, what about films?
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Hunger and Labyrinth seem like the top 3 non-cameo Bowie films. Others?
re: 11
The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Yeah, contra the comments in the other thread, I am the second-last to know and poor lourdes is going to be the last to know when he gets up. (I guess it's good in general that we spent almost all of yesterday offline?) 8 (and 9!) is something he has said on several occasions. It never quite clicked for me as a personal attachment, but Bowie obviously was a genius, totally peerless.
"The Man Who Sold the World to Scary Monsters" that wasn't a very nice thing to do.
"The Man Who Sold the World to Scary Monsters" that wasn't a very nice thing to do.
Capitalism is the water in which we swim.
The Man Who Sold the World to Scary Monsters
I think we have the title for the official David Bowie biography.
We feel that we overpaid.
10: he was good as Tesla in "The Prestige" and I think that is a bit more than a cameo. (Actually "The Prestige" really has a strikingly good cast overall. How did they do that?)
I suppose his turn as Andy Warhol in Basquiat was more than a cameo as well.
When I first read this news this morning, I thought it was some sort of publicity stunt. I mean, Blackstar *just came out*. Reviews written just days ago literally open with lines like: "David Bowie has died many deaths yet he is still with us." But as the morning has progressed, it's starting to seem more and more likely this is actually true, and now I'm feeling pretty deeply sad.
I was mostly offline yesterday, and so this thread was news to me.
Surprising.
20: How I figured, too. Some people were celebrating his birthday a few days ago; when I saw someone post the Chris Hadfield version of Space Oddity this morning I thought people might just have extended that into the next weekday. Unbelievable. He lived so many lives he seemed all but immortal.
There is talk around, considering lyrics and videos of Blackstar that Bowie went out in some ultimate performance art. Only album without him on the cover. Only speaking for myself, I can see asking for more morphine drip after the first of Jan in order to add to the legend.
Very much remember his Playboy interview, and Bowie telling the kids to read their Nietzsche.
Last decade or so, have seen stuff like the Rodney Bing... doc that showed Bowie from the sixties and have changed my image of Bowie into somebody formed in the 60s, a hippie, with the idealism and global benevolence somewhat hidden in the years of cool.
A video of David Bowie that I love (and which wouldn't be the same as audio-only): A duet with Gail Ann Dorsey in which they're loose and happy and he is delightful.
A good mood to remember him by.
I still have the Bowie appreciation CD a commentator here made for me 10 years ago. Listened to it a few times, still didn't get into Bowie. But now is perhaps a good time to give it another go.
Oh christ, now all the singers of Under Pressure are dead.
Wow, for some reason this seems even worse given that Blackstar was getting such great notices. :(
10: The Last Temptation of Christ would easily make my list.
Really (I know, I'm a monster) this was well timed; praised to the heavens retrospective recently, surprisingly well received new album (showing a strong Scott Walker influence, still/again0 even more recently.
Sad though!
29: I had exactly the same thought, hoping he was still aware enough to know about the reaction to his new album.
28: I was putting that in the cameo category, although it was a pretty great walk on role.
"It won't be pleasant. You're not Roman, but try to be brave."
Remember that time he faked his own death, and then reinvented himself as a creepy spokesman for President Reynolds?
then reinvented himself as a creepy spokesman for President ReynoldsTrump?
Per the NYT "he was to be honored with a concert at Carnegie Hall on March 31 featuring the Roots, Cyndi Lauper and the Mountain Goats." Sounds like a hell of a show.
I love TRaFoZSatSfM but have been intimidated to go through the rest due to its quantity.
This one really hits about as hard as a celebrity death can for me because Bowie, even though an old man and way older than me, feels to me so linked to being a teenager and that incredible ability to reinvent yourself.* Not having him around to reinvent himself again makes me feel old and depressed.
*Lemmy also felt like a permanent part of another kind of teenage spirit -- the fuck you, forever, part -- and his death also hurt for that reason. Obviously Bowie was a greater artist than Lemmy, but Lemmy was Lemmy.
The world gets ever-more lame.
I don't know how it happened, but I knew almost nothing about David Bowie (other than that he was married to Iman and that he was pretty) until today.
Now, I'm reading the threads and discovering all the music that I actually haven't heard before (from this Hunky Dory to the Bing Crosby/Bowie duet, to Pressure (acapella with Mercury) to the cover by Hadfield on the ISS. I too am not musical, and know that I don't pay much attention to music. But how did I miss all of this? Reminding myself to not take the music for granted.
35/38: My tastes are, of course, idiosyncratic, but for my money, Lodger and Scary Monsters are his most interesting albums.
Reading a little bit more about Bowie, this morning, I'm still processing, and here's what I've been thinking about my own relationship to his music:
I realize that, in an important way, David Bowie was my first major musical love. I grew up as the youngest in a household with a lot of music, and that meant that I felt like I was always catching up, or coming late in my appreciation of music.
It wasn't until I went away to college that I had the feeling of exploring music on my own, rather than within the context of other people's tastes. I got a chance to make my own musical discoveries (I was very pleased, for example, when I got excited about Townes Van Zandt to find that nobody else in the family had heard of him before), but I still had a default attitude that my discoveries were just figuring out for myself how to appreciate something which was already familiar to other people.
While that was, of course, true for David Bowie as well, Ziggy Stardust was, perhaps, my first experience of connecting emotionally to a recording in a way that revealed an emotional need which I wouldn't have otherwise been able to articulate.
I was in my early 20s, just out of college, feeling depressed and directionless, and I found something deeply reassuring about the theatricality of David Bowie -- the ability to express intense emotion while still keeping a certain distance.
Thinking about that now, it feels like a long time ago. Bowie has meant a lot to me, over a long period of time, and part of what's striking to think about is just how much has changed between that period of my life and myself today.
I'm chocked full of emotional needs that I'm not able to articular, but no music has ever done shit for me on that count.
Comity re 8 and 9. On Bowie's birthday last week I was thinking of the Miles Davis comparison. Didn't think it would be a posthumous comparison so quickly.
40 is lovely, especially the intense emotion mediated through theatricality description.
needs that I'm not able to articular,
Freddy Fender, then
The Let's Dance video was a political statement about the treatment of Australian Aboriginals? Who knew?
(Not me, certainly. I don't know if I ever saw the video.)
You know, reading over all the encomia to David Bowie today, to his general decency and good character, and most especially to his groundbreaking work The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, it's clear that most people are still living in the fantasy world that Bowie so adroitly constructed. But now, at the hour of his death, isn't it time that people woke up and acknowledged that David Bowie was no altruist -- IT'S A COOKING ALBUM!
40.4,5: It was Bowie--and Ziggy Stardust in particular--that I recall really resonating for me during early 20s post-college meandering depression. For several years my rock-bottom fix it move was to smoke a joint and play that album while I juggled. You know, instead of working or socializing... but then I got better sort of.
And for may years, I've chastised slightly younger me for not getting my act together to go to his '72 concert in Cleveland (first Ziggy show in the US).
I consider myself a Bowie fan, but I don't like the song Changes.
Thinking about using Bowie's 1976 arrest as an averted example of lives ruined by the drug war. It looks like the quantity was a half-pound, and under NYS law at the time had a penalty of up to 15 years, but a grand jury declined to indict him. Makes me wonder if the DA engineered the result.
Aside from all the music and self-reinvention and all that, the man had a hell of a face.
With a different kind of face, self-reinvention might have been more difficult.
53: Someday there will be a Hitler with that face and we'll all be fucked.
Oh, sure. Lou Reed, e.g., was not going to successfully have a career involving being androgynously beautiful.
55: There was, in 76 or so. Didn't last long, luckily.
I was stunned a few years ago when I learned that Bowie was widely considered to be something of a sex symbol. I'd always assumed he was rather the opposite, succeeding quite in spite of his looks.
I mean, you have to admit he had some weird teeth.
Reading this, I like to imagine that JP went on to become one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers and LB is Joey Ramone.
Disagree with 63. But anyway, I'm not even sure why I wrote 61, it was gratuitous and mostly beside the main point of 60.
The main point of 60 being that something about him just made him never seem attractive to me (to put it mildly), and I was surprised to learn that is apparently not a widely shared opinion.
The main point of 60 being that something about him just made him never seem attractive to me (to put it mildly)
FWIW: as a I said, I got into Bowie starting with Ziggy Stardust, and I don't think he looks attractive in that cover photo. But clearly he's quite attractive at other times.
[incidentally, did anybody watch the video that I linked in 24? Somebody in the YT comments says of him and GAD, "The two of them are almost painfully gorgeous." I wouldn't have said that, but they are very cute].
65: I figure that "androgynously alien" is something that's either appealing to you or it isn't, and if it isn't it's hard to see the appeal.
Among rock stars in unitards, Urple finds David Lee Roth sexier.
It's a shame that "Best Moose Knuckle" wasn't an Oscar category until 1988.
Why doesn't the internet have a "who wore it better?" site devoted to male rock stars in unitards? Someone do that please.
I mean in retrospect it is incredible that there was a 10-15 year period where it was not only legitimate, but almost a uniform, to appear onstage in a skin-tight unitard and makeup if you were a male rock and roll singer. I know people are all like gender fluidity, so hot right now, but the most hardcore idols of male heterosexuality of my youth were wearing pink and purple skintight unitards and eyeliner and no one batted an eye.
67 seems right; I guess the whole point of comment 60 (which I now regret even posting, but oh well) is that I was genuinely surprised to learn that "androgynously alien" is something that's appealing to as many people as it apparently is. I'd have thought that was* more of a fringe taste.
* "I'd have thought that was..." was originally "I'd have pegged that as...", which I've changed to avoid the inevitable deliberate misconstruing that would have been passed off as humor.
If you want a more actually serious discussion of the gender fluidity in the 70s and rock music/Bowie/counterculture thing, this essay by Mike Kelly which somebody, maybe here, linked on Facebook is really really great. Also rare to have such good culture criticism from a great artist.
inevitable deliberate misconstruing that would have been passed off as humor.
I see you are learning the way things work here.
...the inevitable deliberate misconstruing that would have been passed off as humor
Everybody needs a hobby and I'm trying to get starting on backpacking.
I see you are learning the way things work here.
Folk humor.
Backpacking turns out to be a more expensive hobby. Also more time consuming and basement-space taking.
Also,
I've Already Called A Post "Oh, You Pretty Things"
is not a standard I've held to, in naming posts.
Humblebee bumblebrag. I was pointing out that I was referencing Bowie even when he hadn't just died.
But we never found out if Sally made it back from the music festival! It's a giant cliff-hanger!
She did, with no visible damage. Went again the following year, and is lobbying for tickets again this year. (Apparently it's a good lineup, if anyone's likely to go to Governor's Ball in NY this summer.)
Speaking of things from that thread, Moby is your oven fixed? If you move will you face a big project cleaning the oven?
It works, except for the self-cleaning feature. So, yes, it's really dirty.
