CHANGESONEBOWIE

I just kind of trailed off and haven't written anything about anything for a while. Mostly it's because we're in that 57 days of the war on Christmas thing and bah humbug to that. I don't hate Christmas, i hate the way it has metastasized into some kind of bizzaro wintertime state fair that interrupts every other aspect of life. I believe i remarked about the snowman-shaped yard balloons back at Halloween. Also, the dripping icicle lights put me in mind not so much of water, but more like your house has a particularly nasty STD or slime mold infestation or something. 

You don't have to stop just because i'm seasonally afflicting all over your disorder, but don't act like i'm required to congratulate you for torturing my astigmatism with the several hundred tiny  supernovas stapled to your house. 

<font style="sarcasm">I know what will cheer me up! Let's listen to what i'm told is the "40th Anniversary Edition of the classic compilation album on 180g heavyweight vinyl"; said compilation being David Bowie's CHANGES<font color="red">ONE</font><font color="black">BOWIE</font></font>. 

It's no secret that i'm not a fan of "best of" albums, they're objectively terrible, but they aren't the worst kind of album. The worst kind of album is the unnecessary mixtape, aka those snippets of music that interrupt the commercials on commercial radio. Now, before you pee your pants because you drank too much rage-o-hol, i'm not talking about actual DJ sets (commercial or night club) or proper Roster Mixtapes, i'm talking about the equivalent of random picks from the "officially licensed" jukebox. Now That's What I Call a waste of natural resources. Album is an artform, not top-40 TRL, and certainly not the Damien Hirst paid me to sign his name on this dot painting i made according to his concept because that's the actual concept that makes it a real Damien Hirst painting kind of art. You know that "Starbucks" coffee was actually purchased, roasted, bagged, and distributed by Nestle, right? It's just a brand, a non-nutrative everything varnish, a GUI for the actual human reality of crappy manual labor. I know i'm all bent out of shape, but that's because i have to pick up heavy crap for other people all day long. I'd much rather have a record store, but me actually getting to retire just isn't in the budget and there are multiple intevening paragraphs between here and that part of this long-winded story. 

If you can remember all the way back to that time i did the full Bowie discography, this thing exists in between Station to Station and Low. You know, that period where he went to Europe to try to not snort Stevie Nicks+Stevie Ray Vaughn+Eric Clapton levels of cocaine anymore and ended up making a fairly good Iggy Pop album while spilling gloopy Eno sauce all over his ill-fitting sport jacket? You're all well acquainted with my morbid sense of humor, this is the first of his several auto-eulological albums, but i highly doubt his personal involvement at the time went much beyond "yeah, sure, whatever RCA, just leave me alone for a year, i have a migraine." The execs at RCA probably expected him to OD and die right around the time minimum wage employees were arranging this compilation on the shelves. Spoiler alert, he lived quite a long time after, and there's a CHANGESTWOBOWIE, but i don't have that one, so that's good. If i'm being too hard on him, keep in mind i like at least 3 of his later albums very much, and Blackstar is on my list of unquestionable masterpieces. Honesty can be a surprisingly cactus-shaped projectile. Fun tangent, the soccer fields when i was a little kid had a serious sticker problem and having to play goalie without gloves was probably a form of war crime by today's standards. 

Where was i? Oh yeah, i realize i'm a rare breed of egalitarian aficionado, but even if i had the money to publish whatever i felt like, i'd still have to wait for however long it takes to unclog all that audio cholesterol from the arteries of the manufacturing process. I'm not afraid to say it, a crummy album is still better than 9 random singles from 1987 pretending to be an album. Again, there's an enormous difference between a 1987 Roster Album and a now album of only the songs you happen to vaguely remember hearing at the mall back then, so check to make sure you aren't about to fast and furiously wreck yourself, if you Tokyo my drift. This particular retrospective, like the 3rd or 4th reissue of it, could totally be an enjoyable listen if i ever get around to actually listening to it. 

I suppose we better, i mean it was the original point that stirred my virulent verbiage from its slumber like a poke in the ribs with a half eaten candy cane. Hey look, my copy was made in Germany, that's a fun coincidence (he was living in Germany at the time). 

Ground control to guy who's gonna die in space. How soon until Musk sets off for Mars? Nevermind. 

Originally, this compilation featured an Aladdin Sane session reworking of JOHN,I'MONLYDANCING, but subsequent corporate shenanigans ensued and this is just the boring old original version (it's not actually boring). 

Did you know Changes came to be one of the songs Bowie hated most? True story, every artist has at least one song they wish they had never created, and Changes was Bowie's that one. 

Ziggy Stardust. There's a corgi named Ziggy around this place somewhere. That's random information, but then again so is this album, so i'll Divinyls style touché myself. 

I do like Suffragette City, but i'd vote to not have the rest of this album around it if that were an option. 

Yup, that was Side A. It does not flow, there's no reason why these songs are in this order, i could shuffle Mrs. Bottle's iTunes folder with more enjoyable results. I don't hate any of these songs, i just don't know why i'm being forced to listen to them in this configuration, and amazingly enough i can't even invent one. 

K, i don't remember Diamond Dogs feeling quite so Rolling Stones in its original context, and i definitely don't remember that atrocious vocal tremolo. Hold on, i have to hear the original... ok, yeah it's there, but this 2016 remaster is so dark and the vocals are so far up in the mix that it just sounds like a nasty hardware malfunction rather than an evocative spatial effect. This i definitely don't like. 

Rebel Rebel is fine, but now everything sounds weird. It's similar to that terrible transition from tape to protools that happened in the 90s. All of a sudden the whole album sounds like i've been listening to it through sunglasses. 

Nooooooo! Fame is terrible. What the hell did they do, just cut everything above 300Hz? It's supposed to be bitey and jangly and spastic not sound like tuba farts and sewer-tunnel reverb. Hate it, absolutely hate it. 

There's no other possible explanation, the 2016 remaster was meant to sound tolerable through .25" ear bud speakers and Parlophone just clearly did not care. Golden Years is skipping straight out of the factory seal. I wasn't going to tell you i only paid $6 on clearance, but happily spending full price for this particular pressing would be aiding and abetting. This is what you release for the 40th Anniversary? This sounded good in the control room? The test pressings got physically okayed by a human with actual headphones? 

That's the only plausible explanation, they mixed and mastered this to sound tolerable on your iPod and didn't bother coming back after lunch. If i had a record store i'd advise people not to buy it and i wouldn't restock the shelf. Anhörenvergnüngen? Nein. 

I don't think it's the pressing plant or the designer's fault, it's just cheap crap to make a buck. That bugs the hell out of me (get it? Volkswagon joke, bug...). Remember how a lot of movie fanatics felt like Lucas and Spielberg spent a nauseating amount of time and money ruining their own classic movies? Yeah, that's pretty much how i feel right now. To be fair, it also goes the other way. Prince and Metallica for example, their own authorized remasters are phenomenal. This however isn't that. It sounds like dubbed randomness pressed into molten plastic. No, it's not as muddy as Spirit's Clear, but that album sounded bad from the get go because it was recorded bad by tired people. These songs originally sounded like coked up sweaty people having a party, but now i'm listening to it through the hotel walls at 3AM instead of sleeping. On the bright side, at least it lived up to my expectations. 

Now look, i've been merciless to this album, and i think i'm justified. I just listened to a clearance-priced, multi-republished, 2016 cash grab in 2022. You can quote me sales figures and ROI's all day long, but how many bands didn't get to release an album by proxy?  You'll never convince me that this is valuable or even close to worth it. I would rather buy a beat up 40 year old copy of the orinigal albums, those are works of art. Corporate controlled mass-market art to a large extent, sure, but this is just a commodity for the sake of continual commodification. "People will nostalgia-buy a best of Bowie album, every Warner subsidiary gets a turn!" 

Holy crap, you're still reading this? [Rummages around for some non-sequitur pop-culture joke] ok, ok, it's like that MST3K quip about some terrible Raul Julia movie "[heavy snowfall] this is how much pure cocaine you'd need to actually enjoy this album!" 

Good night everybody. Dream a little dream of me finding record store money under the couch cushions. Tell me you wouldn't shop at my record store stocked full of absolute insanity without a "best of" album within 20 square miles. Fine, i'll dream it myself, then go lift heavy things again tomorrow. Hopefully this review had enough curmudgeon in it to make up for lost time. Counterintuitive as it may seem, at least i had fun not enjoying this album in the slightest.