Tom Waits vs. David Bowie

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  • Total voters
    12
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
funnily enough I was just reading about Waits in this extract from a Rickie Lee Jones memoir:

"When I was 23 years old I drove around LA with Tom Waits. We’d cruise along Highway 1 in his new 1963 Thunderbird. With my blond hair flying out the window and both of us sweating in the summer sun, the alcohol seeped from our pores and the sex smell still soaked our clothes and our hair. We liked our smell. We did not bathe as often as we might have. We were in love and I for one was not interested in washing any of that off. By the end of summer we were exchanging song ideas. We were also exchanging something deeper. Each other.

Tom had two tattoos on his bicep. He liked to don the vintage accoutrements of masculinity: sailor hats and pointed shoes. The more he tried to conceal his tenderness, the more he revealed a chafed and childlike nature. I adored him. He was my king. In bed he was the greatest performing lion in the world. I mean to say that Tom was never not performing."
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linebaugh

linebaugh

Well-known member
besides the quality of making both very boring yet very obnoxious music, the original connection I thought was with the fan bases and the type of reverence both whip up in those who enjoy them. A figure to help build a personality around and project onto. I wonder if the 'acting' they both do attracts that.
 
S

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
linebaugh said:
besides the quality of making both very boring yet very obnoxious music, the original connection I thought was with the fan bases and the type of reverence both whip up in those who enjoy them. A figure to help build a personality around and project onto. I wonder if the 'acting' they both do attracts that.
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Yeah Nick Cave forms the trinity here.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Seems pretty clear to me that if someone said this is my favourite music and played Bowie I'd be like okay that makes sense and if they played Tom Waits I'd make a face like they'd just done a fart.
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
craner said:
Tom Waits did the soundtrack to one of my favorite films, One From the Heart, so for that alone I would vote for him. If I was going to vote.
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“…she's got big plans that don't include you…”
I do like that album a lot.
 
T

the ig

Well-known member
Waits and Cave, with their drearily locatable schtick, are the twin menaces of overly literary songwriting imo. Seems like all you ever get from them is an already well-upholstered world drawn from classic cult fiction. It’s all so rehearsed and second hand, there’s hardly any reason for any of it to exist as song.

I had to play-check a Waits album I had in before listing recently (I think it was ‘Bone Machine’) and it was fucking excruciating. His lyrics read like a tidy compendium of beat/hardboiled cliches. They come at you with ticker-tape regularity…and he thinks he’s making this thing full of texture and life, lol. There’s probably a fucking app to help you write like that these days. And then the put-on voices: the wino with the buzzy sibilants, alternating like clockwork with the huckster with ragged lungs. All that lumber of tired allegory: circuses, sideshow freaks, flop-house prophets, sailors raising hell on leave, it’s like he squares the worst of lyrical Dylan with the worst of sung Beefheart.

Bowie may be acting but it’s an entirely different thing, far less locatable, far more rarefied, refracted and elusive. There’s no fake-real, yknow, ‘lived-in fuck mattress’, for want of a better image, under everything. He was and is entirely brilliant, of course.
 
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Leo

Leo

Well-known member
the ig said:
Waits and Cave, with their drearily locatable schtick, are the twin menaces of overly literary songwriting imo. Seems like all you ever get from them is an already well-upholstered world drawn from classic cult fiction. It’s all so rehearsed and second hand, there’s hardly any reason for any of it to exist as song.

I had to play-check a Waits album I had in before listing recently (I think it was ‘Bone Machine’) and it was fucking excruciating. His lyrics read like a tidy compendium of beat/hardboiled cliches. They come at you with ticker-tape regularity…and he thinks he’s making this thing full of texture and life, lol. There’s probably a fucking app to help you write like that these days. And then the put-on voices: the wino with the buzzy sibilants, alternating like clockwork with the huckster with ragged lungs. All that lumber of tired allegory: circuses, sideshow freaks, flop-house prophets, sailors raising hell on leave, it’s like he squares the worst of lyrical Dylan with the worst of singing Beefhart.

Bowie may be acting but it’s an entirely different thing, far less locatable, far more rarefied, refracted and elusive. There’s no fake-real, yknow, ‘lived-in fuck mattress’, for want of a better image, under everything. He was and is entirely brilliant, of course.
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100% on Waits, but I put Cave on a higher level. He grew out of those similar caricatures a long time ago.
 
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