22 - Reality

Reality. Bowie's been living and dying and resurrecting and doing it all over again for ever. It's time to retire. So, right on the heels of Heathen he makes his retrospective retirement spectacular.

Why? Because reality is over. The world finally caught up with Bowie. Existence is just a stream of digital factoids and humans have no ability to reconcile any of it into a coherent meaningful existence. There's no ego to build out of that, it means Bowie really is nothing more than his discography. There's no knowledge anymore. He has to just wait. And wait he does, for 10 years. But that's in the future. Where are we now?

Art rock. The splotchy, colorful, scribbly, weird fonts and out of order typesetting kind of art rock. The Picasso meets Warhol wacky postmodern revival. We reinvented a word for it, that word is quirky.

New songs, very old songs (he'd been nursing "Disco King" since the 70s, but it never found a home until now).

Now, i've really thought about it and i don't think i'm making this up. This album is the composed death of David Bowie. It's hospital clean, he's sewed up all the wounds and the smell of freshly applied antiseptic floats on the air. Ben Gibbard has started the night shift behind the wheel of the death cab, my friends of friends the Starlight Mints are shaking hands with surrealism. There's no underground anymore, so there's no mainstream either.

Time to retire, with all these flashing lights and blurry images. We want an encore, but it sure sounded like he wasn't going to do one. By the end you get a very clear sense that the next character David Bowie was going to inhabit was himself, at home, no more pretend, no more show, no more ego.

So he undoes his bow tie, pours a double scotch, and sings a song to death itself in his best Sinatra impersonation. Man, Bring Me The Disco King really is an amazing finale. We know he'll make 2 more albums, but we didn't know that then. This was then end, and he did it in style.

23 - The Next Day

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 4 Seasons - The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette

Image
This might be my longest  album review ever. But i swear a couple times, so it's worth the read ;) How could i possibly mention Jefferson Airplane, The 4 Seasons, and Frank Zappa in the same context? Zappa said "this is rediculous" and a few years later The 4 Seasons said "you know what, Frank is right. This IS ridiculous." To which Jefferson Airplane said, "Oh. Ok. Got it." The real question is: which one is the most transgressive? Zappa said stop fighting, you look like idiots. Jefferson Airplane said i guess if love and community is a bad thing, then sure we're criminals and we'd be happy to move out into the fields and live peaceful lives without your garbage, let us go already. The 4 Seasons said hold my champagne for a moment. In 1969, The 4 Seasons released the single most ironic, acidic, extravagant, and downright befuddling album ever created, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. Zappa was accused of writing "shitty doo-w
Read more

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

Pat Benatar - Seven The Hard Way

Image
I don't know about you, but i love Pat Benatar. Yes, that's also her debut album with the single most underrated song in the universe (My Clone Sleeps Alone) in the background, but that's just a generic non-self-titled debut album. We're jumping ahead to her 6th album, Seven The Hard Way, because that, ladies and gentle germs, is how you kalaidescope a concept. Not one, not two, not three, but 4 protien-packed layers to this metaphor. You don't really need to know the overly complicated rules of Craps to know that A) it's gambling, B) "the hard way" refers to rolling doubles, so good luck rolling two 3.5s, and C) you're going to lose, one way or another. It's a joke, but more importantly, it's Pat Benatar and the roll out is Sex As A Weapon, so the innuendo is not intended to be subtle. Wait wait wait, that's only 3, Bottle, where's 4? You're right, last but not least, side B opens with Seven Rooms of Gloom, a Holland-Dozier-Hol
Read more