fange
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Post by fange on Jun 27, 2021 10:44:24 GMT
Well it depends what you mean by 'say' - that's why I put the word in quotes. But I don't think Bowie had very much to say at all. There's no overreaching message, no philosophy. What Ray says makes perfect sense. But I don't think of it as a flaw. I just like the sounds, the images. Oh I disagree. He represented, and consciously so, a clear move away from the idealism of the 60s into something apocalyptical. He was one of the first to grasp that the 70s would be a very different decade, fragmented and nihilistic. Yeah, i think so too. The variety of styles and lyrical themes represented, or maybe held a mirror up to, so much of the best and worst of the 70s. It was compelling in real time (i remember seeing Bowie several times on TV invthe 2nd half of the decade), but seeing it now in hindsight makes me appreciate it even more.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 27, 2021 10:55:41 GMT
I think we can safely say that shit really did start going wrong when Bowie died. I think about this a lot. I remember the day he died, they were using the "BlackStar" song for a show called the "Last Panthers" and there is a line in the final scene delivered by John Hurt where he says that "we are all barbarians now". It kind of felt like Bowies death was more than just him dying, like the end of Western Pop culture producing proper Art or something like that. Keep in mind this was the height of the whole Pitchfork Does Pop period where Beyonce and Taylor Swift were getting lauded as being as worthy as guys like Bowie...... Bowie has always been a bit hit and miss for me (certainly better than the Beatles that is for sure) but that's to be expected from someone who had such a huge catalogue. He was an interesting figure and I love that interview at the beginning of the noughts were he is enthusing about the Internet and the possibilities it brought, he certainly had an uncanny knack of predicting trends. Not sure people as interesting as him make pop music nowadays certainly not the kind that gets played on the radio stations. I mean his music is weird; the lyrics, the delivery, it's strange and eccentric. Pop is so generic and normal now it's almost incomprehensible to people my age and younger that there was this man a household name and everything who for sang about drug addicts and spacemen ( Space Oddity, Ashes to Ashes) and anal sex ( Width of a Circle)..... Not saying the current crop don't sing about anything but I feel it's gone back to the old days were it was all girls and cars except now it's all about your private parts and how big a gun you got.... Singing about your private parts isn't weird or edgy t's just crass....... There was a mystery to it all with characters like Bowie.... Anyways I am rambling ain't I.... Been a while since I used message boards........
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fange
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Post by fange on Jun 27, 2021 11:43:29 GMT
Look south the way your mother dwells If she knew what's going down, she'd give you hell I'm the kind of man she warned me of Till there was rock, you only had God
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rayge
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Post by rayge on Jun 27, 2021 11:58:24 GMT
What were the Beatles trying to say? If you set out to work out an answer you'd get nowhere - beyond the sort of half-arsed shite McCartney trots out about 'love each other'. After the break-up, Lennon really blossomed as an artist, I think, with personal and political themes and his re-embracing of the whole rock and roll rebel stance. The Beatles, though, as a collective, were basically 'about' the whole pop thing: which is not to put them down – on the contrary, in fact. The 'serious artist' thing ws something shoved on to them by critics.
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Post by oh oooh on Jun 27, 2021 12:22:33 GMT
Well it depends what you mean by 'say' - that's why I put the word in quotes. But I don't think Bowie had very much to say at all. There's no overreaching message, no philosophy. What Ray says makes perfect sense. But I don't think of it as a flaw. I just like the sounds, the images. Oh I disagree. He represented, and consciously so, a clear move away from the idealism of the 60s into something apocalyptical. He was one of the first to grasp that the 70s would be a very different decade, fragmented and nihilistic. That may be what he represented. To some. You're still not addressing the question of what he was trying to say. It's probably not a fair question anyway, because I think it's extremely rare for artists to be saying anything of consequence, coherently, for any length of time at all. Maybe Dylan in his early days, the anti-war stuff. But he quickly dropped all of that.
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Post by Reactionary Rage on Jun 27, 2021 12:45:41 GMT
I think we can safely say that shit really did start going wrong when Bowie died. I think about this a lot. I remember the day he died, they were using the "BlackStar" song for a show called the "Last Panthers" and there is a line in the final scene delivered by John Hurt where he says that "we are all barbarians now". It kind of felt like Bowies death was more than just him dying, like the end of Western Pop culture producing proper Art or something like that. Keep in mind this was the height of the whole Pitchfork Does Pop period where Beyonce and Taylor Swift were getting lauded as being as worthy as guys like Bowie...... Bowie has always been a bit hit and miss for me (certainly better than the Beatles that is for sure) but that's to be expected from someone who had such a huge catalogue. He was an interesting figure and I love that interview at the beginning of the noughts were he is enthusing about the Internet and the possibilities it brought, he certainly had an uncanny knack of predicting trends. Not sure people as interesting as him make pop music nowadays certainly not the kind that gets played on the radio stations. I mean his music is weird; the lyrics, the delivery, it's strange and eccentric. Pop is so generic and normal now it's almost incomprehensible to people my age and younger that there was this man a household name and everything who for sang about drug addicts and spacemen ( Space Oddity, Ashes to Ashes) and anal sex ( Width of a Circle)..... Not saying the current crop don't sing about anything but I feel it's gone back to the old days were it was all girls and cars except now it's all about your private parts and how big a gun you got.... Singing about your private parts isn't weird or edgy t's just crass....... There was a mystery to it all with characters like Bowie.... Anyways I am rambling ain't I.... Been a while since I used message boards........ It's easy to project onto events like that because it was so big in so many ways but you can't help but see it as symbolic of the end of something. I'm sure we all know there will never be another Bowie in the same way we know there will never be another Beatles or a Hendrix and there is something very sad about that. Something has been lost on a cultural level and Bowie was totemic of an earlier, greater age.
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fange
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Post by fange on Jun 27, 2021 12:50:13 GMT
What is something of 'consequence' though, JC? Dylan did the folk/people's music thing for a few albums, but rock has seldom really been about those constant big statements where you are 'saying something important', has it?
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Post by Deleted on Jun 27, 2021 12:50:32 GMT
What were the Beatles trying to say? If you set out to work out an answer you'd get nowhere - beyond the sort of half-arsed shite McCartney trots out about 'love each other'. After the break-up, Lennon really blossomed as an artist, I think, with personal and political themes and his re-embracing of the whole rock and roll rebel stance. The Beatles, though, as a collective, were basically 'about' the whole pop thing: which is not to put them down – on the contrary, in fact. The 'serious artist' thing ws something shoved on to them by critics That seems a very reductive way of seeing it, that because Lennon wrote about serious subjects he therefore became a greater artist. Lennon lost his way as a solo artist sadly. His musical invention and artistic imagination seriously diminished from his peak Beatles brilliance.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 27, 2021 12:57:56 GMT
Oh I disagree. He represented, and consciously so, a clear move away from the idealism of the 60s into something apocalyptical. He was one of the first to grasp that the 70s would be a very different decade, fragmented and nihilistic. That may be what he represented. To some. You're still not addressing the question of what he was trying to say. It's probably not a fair question anyway, because I think it's extremely rare for artists to be saying anything of consequence, coherently, for any length of time at all. Maybe Dylan in his early days, the anti-war stuff. But he quickly dropped all of that. I don't think what he did can be reduced to one simple "message". It's art not advertising.
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Post by oh oooh on Jun 27, 2021 12:59:39 GMT
What is something of 'consequence' though, JC? Dylan did the folk/people's music thing for a few albums, but rock has seldom really been about those constant big statements where you are 'saying something important', has it? Yes - I agree! That's what I was saying, prompted by Ray's criticism (?) that Bowie had nothing to say, and therefore dressed himself up in an effort to distract from that. But I would argue that Bowie had even less to say than many major artists (his lyrics were mostly surrealistic, imagistic - cut-ups etc.) but again I'll say - it doesn't make him any less interesting or important as an artist. It's only since the advent of Serious Rock Criticism (Paul Morley et al) that we've had to wade through all this bullshit where terms like 'dystopian', 'nihilistic' and 'post-modern' are used to pump up bands who just wanted to sing songs and fuck women.
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Post by oh oooh on Jun 27, 2021 12:59:57 GMT
That may be what he represented. To some. You're still not addressing the question of what he was trying to say. It's probably not a fair question anyway, because I think it's extremely rare for artists to be saying anything of consequence, coherently, for any length of time at all. Maybe Dylan in his early days, the anti-war stuff. But he quickly dropped all of that. I don't think what he did can be reduced to one simple "message". It's art not advertising. Exactly.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 27, 2021 13:02:53 GMT
What is something of 'consequence' though, JC? Dylan did the folk/people's music thing for a few albums, but rock has seldom really been about those constant big statements where you are 'saying something important', has it? Yes - I agree! That's what I was saying, prompted by Ray's criticism (?) that Bowie had nothing to say, and therefore dressed himself up in an effort to distract from that. But I would argue that Bowie had even less to say than many major artists (his lyrics were mostly surrealistic, imagistic - cut-ups etc.) but again I'll say - it doesn't make him any less interesting or important as an artist. It's only since the advent of Serious Rock Criticism (Paul Morley et al) that we've had to wade through all this bullshit where terms like 'dystopian', 'nihilistic' and 'post-modern' are used to pump up bands who just wanted to sing songs and fuck women. You were doing alright until that last sentence. I don't think those things are an invention of rock critics.
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fange
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Listening to long jazz tracks
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Post by fange on Jun 27, 2021 13:02:57 GMT
Amen to that. Bowie was a relatively complex artist in that the characters he created for himself in the 70s were far from simple caricatures. He was able to sing about anything and everything he wanted to, profane or profound, in lots of styles that had something for everyone. It's an extraordinary body of work.
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Post by oh oooh on Jun 27, 2021 13:06:41 GMT
Yes - I agree! That's what I was saying, prompted by Ray's criticism (?) that Bowie had nothing to say, and therefore dressed himself up in an effort to distract from that. But I would argue that Bowie had even less to say than many major artists (his lyrics were mostly surrealistic, imagistic - cut-ups etc.) but again I'll say - it doesn't make him any less interesting or important as an artist. It's only since the advent of Serious Rock Criticism (Paul Morley et al) that we've had to wade through all this bullshit where terms like 'dystopian', 'nihilistic' and 'post-modern' are used to pump up bands who just wanted to sing songs and fuck women. You were doing alright until that last sentence. I don't think those things are an invention of rock critics. That way of talking/writing about artists certainly is. And particularly with artists like Bowie.
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Post by Reactionary Rage on Jun 27, 2021 13:07:12 GMT
What is something of 'consequence' though, JC? Dylan did the folk/people's music thing for a few albums, but rock has seldom really been about those constant big statements where you are 'saying something important', has it? The medium is the message or summat. What does Highway 61 Revisited say? Or Are You Experienced? If they say anything it's more an expression of some kind of personal/cultural liberation through the grooves, an explosion of the self in all its different shades and colours. An individualism that was in keeping with the times. Bowie didn't produce a Blue or a Plastic Ono Band and he was naturally oblique and esoteric but I do think the likes of Hunky Dory, Station to Station and Low are personal and revealing, albeit in a different way to some kind of standard singer songwriter thing.
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