yep, thats the era. Whatever his reasons for the look, it didnt matter.
RIP David Bowie
- Thread starter EastEnder
- Start date
yep, thats the era. Whatever his reasons for the look, it didnt matter.
Favelado
J'adore South Shore
It's because you said it was clever that I thought it was important whether it was ironic to some extent or not. I think in the 90s it was viewed as his shit period, but it looks good now and the pop he made sounds fresh. Working with Nile Rodgers generally a brilliant idea of course.
i suspect he was taking the piss of yuppies a little....but like i said, it doesnt matter cos Let's Dance is one of the best songs EVER written, in my view.
Favelado
J'adore South Shore
He wasn't. He compromised his art to get mass acceptance and then beat himself up over it.Describes himself as ending up with a "Phil Collins audience"
Good article here. Very thorough interview.
David Bowie interview from 1996: 'I have done just about everything that it’s possible to do'
story
Changing the facts
Scary Monster (and Super Creeps) was released in Sept 1980. So I suppose you could argue that it was conceived in the 70s
Chilli.s
mingling jets and statuettes
All a bit of a blur, sorry. Thanks for the correction.
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
christ, you're such an eeyore
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
WTF? Is enjoying music the preserve of the young? You wally.
editor
hiraethified
I DJd a pub in Tulse Hill last night. The crowd DEMANDING that I play more Bowie at the end was very mixed in age.
Two women in their mid-twenties stayed behind to talk to me about Bowie and the massive influence he'd had on their lives. I don't think it was about 'a soliloquy for lost youth' to them. It was about celebrating one of the most original musicians this planet has seen.
Two women in their mid-twenties stayed behind to talk to me about Bowie and the massive influence he'd had on their lives. I don't think it was about 'a soliloquy for lost youth' to them. It was about celebrating one of the most original musicians this planet has seen.
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
All ages of fans here mourning him for all sorts of reasons:
We Asked David Bowie Fans What He Taught Them About Life | VICE | United States
We Asked David Bowie Fans What He Taught Them About Life | VICE | United States
editor
hiraethified
Maggot
The Cake of Liberty
I always wonder if the Market Square is the one in Bromley.
story
Changing the facts
I saw your post before you deleted it.
Not looking for an argument either, but I really felt that I wanted to respond.
I think your view is a very odd reading of the situation. And your post is full of contradictions.
You seem to be arguing simultaneously that it's impossible that Bowie affected "millions of lives" and also that his work will endure in the same way as Mozart or Byron.
The ways in which Bowie's work and life affected and influenced people all over the world, for several decades, is not restricted to the people who bought and paid for his output, but in any case, that number is something like 140 million. I've been struck by how many people have been saying that even though they never bought a Bowie record, they know loads of his songs, and they are important or significant to them not just because they like them, but became they're associated with a person, or with a time in their life. (As one of many examples, a lassie who told me that she'd inherited Bowie from her dad, who recently passed away.)
Speaking personally, this last week has made me evaluate and identify the specific ways in which Bowie has affected my development. For everyone like me, a diehard longstanding fan who was marinated and basted in Bowie from an early age, there will be thousands of others who are also trying to identify and name what he meant to us on a personal internal level. If I'm only now paying attention to the details of how he's formed me, then I can only suppose that many others are also, to some extent, unaware of the ways in which he was personally important for them.
The numbers of people who were influenced and in some respects formed by Bowie is exponential. If it's not the case for you, then you can't know in what ways it's so for others. And I can see that it must look really odd from the outside, but since it is still mysterious to us, I can't see how anyone outside of th strange experience can claim to know.
You say that the Bowie nights and the clubs that sprang up in the early eighties were not all that big a deal, but you're seriously misguided in this. You say yourself that the enormous numbers that were involved with the raves etc. followed the commodification of music. (They happened in warehouses, ffs.) I would contend that the percentage of people who went to those clubs in the 80s and ended up working in music or the arts was much much greater than the percentage of people from raves who went on to work in the creative field. It was just a much smaller world back then. I'm a Londoner, but I expect it was the comparable with elsewhere: Soho was totally empty in the 70s and even in the 80s. If you went to the clubs or to gigs, you pretty much knew everyone else who did so too. There's just no comparison.
What Bowie did was somehow initiate a group of people of a certain age, alert us to the fact that the old ways were now outdated and anachronistic, that the world could be created differently by us and by our peers. All we needed to do was identify it in ourselves, and each other, and stop trying to fit into the old world and create our own. We each of us took something personal from Bowie and his work, be it something to do with gender/sexuality, style, refusal to comply, insistence of virtue, reinvention if we got it wrong this time, whatever. He gave us licence to explore and enquire, to change rather than settle.
You say you have "personal experience" of both Pete Burns and Jarvis Cocker dressing differently. Maybe that's true. If so, I defy you to say that that those encounters had no effect on you and the way you felt. You could have felt challenged or liberated by them in exactly the way that Bowie challenged or inspired them. You say that they were genuine outsiders, yet you describe them as following Bowie. (Incidentally, I spoke with a woman yesterday afternoon who told me that she'd grown up just around the corner from where Bowie and Angie were living when Zowie (as he was then) were living, and how seeing them in the street, both of them wearing frocks and pushing the baby in a buggy, made a light come on for her: you can be different and strange, and still have children and live normally.)
You say that there are no outsiders anymore, only hipsters. I'd agree with you that we're still surrounded by conformity, but I'd also argue that those conformists are conforming in a way that includes some aspect of style, fashion, music, and that's as a direct result of the revolution that Bowie started: without Bowie and those who followed, music, style, fashion etc would be absent from their conformity.
As for the grieving: of course it's about us. Grieving is always about those left behind.
Grieving openly is not infantile. Going to festivals is not infantile. Having fun, enjoying life, being in touch with one's emotions is not infantile. That's a ridiculous idea. I'd agree that people who are now old enough to be parents are the first generation to feel that it's not necessary to put aside the things that made us happy in our youth: music, fun, sex&drugs&rocknroll, lively friendships, explorations, new experiences. And maybe it would have happened without Bowie, but before Bowie even music would end up being a nostalgiafest (the Stones, the Beatles, Dylan, Lou, Iggy.... they've not really moved beyond what they achieved in the first instance in the way the Bowie managed to do)
Is it a soliloquy for lost youth....? Well, no, because that doesn't make sense. If you mean it's an elegy for lost youth: not that either, because one of the extraordinary things bout Bowie is that he made music that has meaning and resonance alongside us as we grow older. His last LP is about death, and we're paying as close attention to this lesson as we paid to any of the other lessons he gave us.
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
cos you realised it was bollocks? well done
editor
hiraethified
So I heard that the DJ at the Bowie tribute night in O'Neill's Beckenham was such a douchebag that he was seen playing Candy Crush between songs, fucking about with scratching to the intros to Bowie songs and showing off his DJ 'skills' with a weird mix of laughing gnome and let's dance. My friends were not impressed at all. What a fucking ego.
I didn't know that Bowie was a fan of Syd Barrett. Good!
"Please Mr Gravedigger" might be a bit Barrett-y.
I'd argue that Bob Dylan does, but he really is the only other IMO.
rubbershoes
not the only raver in the village
That's on the iPlayer in the UK too. I did a link to it earlier in this thread but can't do it now as I'm on my phone.
It's a fantastic programme
