sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Are soul and emotion inseparable? Can you be authentically emotionless and can that constitute "soul"?

luke's positing that pop and soul aren't the same thing. pop is hyper emotional.

he's all tired after work probably. he gets misanthropic. he'll see tomorrow that we're all just sweet boys needing nurturing and he'll come help us out.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
thing is like in my first week of uni one of my guides in the department was this girl who who only really had opinions in bowie. That's when i decided to boycott him i mean how can you be that devoted to someone its scary.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
thing is like in my first week of uni one of my guides in the department was this girl who who only really had opinions in bowie. That's when i decided to boycott him i mean how can you be that devoted to someone its scary.

he's timmy mallet for pretentious people.

don't imbue him with a depth or profundity he's entirely underserving of.

some marketing tacked on to some astonishingly embarrassing music.
 

version

Well-known member
According to biographer David Buckley, the Los Angeles-based Bowie, fuelled by an "astronomic" cocaine habit and subsisting on a diet of peppers and milk, spent much of 1975–76 "in a state of psychic terror".[1] Stories—mostly from one interview, pieces of which found their way into Playboy and Rolling Stone—circulated of the singer living in a house full of ancient Egyptian artefacts, burning black candles, seeing bodies fall past his window, having his semen stolen by witches, receiving secret messages from The Rolling Stones, and living in morbid fear of fellow Aleister Crowley aficionado Jimmy Page.[2] Bowie would later say of Los Angeles, "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth".[4]
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
don't think i ever consciously heard a david bowie song, he reminds me too much of andy warhole
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
According to biographer David Buckley, the Los Angeles-based Bowie, fuelled by an "astronomic" cocaine habit and subsisting on a diet of peppers and milk, spent much of 1975–76 "in a state of psychic terror".[1] Stories—mostly from one interview, pieces of which found their way into Playboy and Rolling Stone—circulated of the singer living in a house full of ancient Egyptian artefacts, burning black candles, seeing bodies fall past his window, having his semen stolen by witches, receiving secret messages from The Rolling Stones, and living in morbid fear of fellow Aleister Crowley aficionado Jimmy Page.[2] Bowie would later say of Los Angeles, "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth".[4]

marketing
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
it's a word that means different things resulting in conversations at cross purposes

- a black style or black-originated style (resulting in all those MOBO like confusions where Ed Sheeran gets the award)

- music that's "soulful" meaning has "vibe", groove, funkiness, warmth, fluidity etc (i.e the sort of souljazz ideal of what music should be - which can be extended globally as with this blog which gives away a lot of African or other non-West world-y type musics but still within the value set - http://hollandtunneldive.blogspot.com/) - kind of macrobiotic, organic, nutritional idea of music

- emotion (as content - raw, naked, confessional - and also as a transmitted effect on the listener, stirring up intense feelings)

i hesitate to dredge up something from the distant past (a good decade before Barty was born!) but at the height of the soul revival of late 80s - circa George Michael and Aretha Franklin duet getting to number one - me and David Stubbs wrote a polemic called "All Souled Out", and among the things we argued was that there was more "soul" - meaning emotional reality, ability to move the listener - in the weak vocals and not overtly demonstrative singing in a New Order or a A.R. Kane song than there was in all the groups at that time like Wet Wet Wet

A.R. Kane were actually black British but Alex Ayuli's singing was fragile, pallid and avoided any of the vocal conventions of soul or Eighties R&B

but we also argued that Alexander O'Neal type modern Eighties R&B music was fine because it was "delicious plastic"

it was a trans-valuation move - actually quite similar to Bowie describing his Young Americans as "plastic soul", preempting criticisms of him as honky jumping on the Philly bandwagon

cmon Barty, "Fame" is a great tune.

And that is actual "true Bowie soul" i think cos he's abjectly honest about his experience of fame and how it's fucked his ability to have any kind of normal relations - and it's quite a harrowing tune
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
talking of beyond soul, 2010s drum n bass is a contender. It exists in a realm beyond emotion or meaning, but not in any way as good as that sounds.
 

version

Well-known member
I liked the way they used Fame in the new von Trier trailer, I can't not think of cartoon sheep hopping in time now.

 
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luka

Well-known member
luke's positing that pop and soul aren't the same thing. pop is hyper emotional.

he's all tired after work probably. he gets misanthropic. he'll see tomorrow that we're all just sweet boys needing nurturing and he'll come help us out.

Worked till 7. Just in a restaurant counting all my money and enjoying a crispy cold lager .
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
talking of beyond soul, 2010s drum n bass is a contender. It exists in a realm beyond emotion or meaning, but not in any way as good as that sounds.


itt's still more morally sufficient than some of the revival jungle that is just ripping off the most cliched rave sampples.

Some of u lot wanna make harddcore into this all over one roof ting. it really, really wasn't. half of it was powered by black asian and white lumpen geezers not being let into mainstream clubs. there was a brief meeting point from late 91 into early 92 but that was it. they all went to prog house after that. in fact it was a victory for balearic even then. which is the irony of all of this, one of the whitest musics was conversely the most soulful in the rave continuum.

And yeah i know someone's gonna come tell me that eurotrance is ultimately descended from the blues and James Brown. all true but look at the amount of white intermediaries you have to go through first (and even the kraftwerk link is tenuous...)

But yeah, 2010s drum and bass is mostly boring as fuck.
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
And yeah i know someone's gonna come tell me that eurotrance is ultimately descended from the blues and James Brown. all true but look at the amount of white intermediaries you have to go through first (and even the kraftwerk link is tenuous...)

.

I don't think there's any blues or soul or in trance or Kraftwerk. The JB thing people foist on Kraftwerk sometimes is i think because people assume Sex Machine and Man-Machine must be coming from the same place

but that's where it's gets into the confusing terminology thing with "soul" having multiple meanings. Because a lot of Kraftwerk is either soul-stirring (the grandeur of "Trans Europe Express") or poignant ("Autobahn", "Neon Lights", "Computer Love"). Despite the we are robots shticks, it's quite emotional music - some of it anyway. It can bring me to tears.

Perhaps it's a kind of angelic, purity-beyond-the-human emotion - like pure agape - with things like "Neon Lights" or "Man Machine"

if there is a black music connection with Kraftwerk, it's doowop as mediated by the Beach Boys, and then melded with Schubert

As for trance - depends which kind of trance, some of it is the coldest deadest stiffest music this side of gabba - but then there's all that Eurocheese fluffy trance is really wet. Paul Van Dyk writing "Like An Angel" about his girlfriend.
 
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