Tom Waits vs. David Bowie
- Thread starter line b
- Start date
Ah right OK. @suspended view of things?
IdleRich
IdleRich
Watching Before I Go To Sleep right now which is an embarrassing ripoff of Memento... except that in that guy pierce was a superhuman who could beat his way out of any jeopardy his memory problems gave him (until SPOILER you find out he was the bad guy all along) whereas in this Nicole Kidman is pathetically vulnerable to every new revelation.
I think @suspended and the coder mindset would say that you can go the other way out from the deterministic model, the little bits break down into more little bits, it keeps going.
There's creativity in the system cos it never stops.
But you @woops you just wanna have a sudden flash of something special and unforseen and amazing
There's creativity in the system cos it never stops.
But you @woops you just wanna have a sudden flash of something special and unforseen and amazing
woops
is not like other people
good lad. get back down the pub tomorrow
Counterpoint! But didn't our present music ultimately historically come to an end with Schoenberg, early electronics, and free jazz? Everything after that has been about romanticism (including left protest music.) Is it wrong to cling to a modernist aesthetic in these circumstances? The fantasy is nice, the deployment provides the thrills, for sure, but what else can one say after that?
sus
Moderator
No, that was one lineage of musical development. A narrative made up by people living in Schoenberg's time and milieu. A reasonable narrative for them, but for our purposes, we can see the wider picture: a long history of development, not just scales/modes/notes but timbers and affects and rhythms which is healthy and alive today. This is de-colonializing the Western Canon, I think.
Partially. Greatness and auteur theory are ultimately antithetical to pop, yet must exist in constant tension with it. More people in the 1960s and 1970s listened to Umm Kulthum's interpretations of arabic classical music than they did the Beatles and David Bowie, in excess of 500 million (Rachit taha talks about this in his Wire Invisible jukebox) yet a highly specific and not very globally relevant auteur like Bowie is canonised today. So far from trying to escape the modernist trap you accuse this forum of harbouring, you end up sharing its core assumptions. Which is fine. I am not one of those people who thinks the modernist project can just be rejected outright to please the present academic vogue. Pop music itself is a contradiction, it is never so-called 'immediate music.'
Here is @blissblogger putting it more eloquently than me
That last sentence is key here. The ability to generate myth, to bring a forward momentum to the table is the key determining factor of great pop, never what the masses are listening to in all their gloriously incompatible mess at one point. Pop then itself is a memory, a memory of selective omission. If it wasn't, it could not move forward. This is where Adorno is wrong, but wrong in an interesting way.
blissblog
blissout.blogspot.com
I agree. But Bowie is even more Western than Schoenberg. I'd argue that all his music is aggressively cordal, as opposed to either homophonic or totally polyphonic. It's too tempered, there is zero gospel or melisma in his voice, and any dissonance is purely used as an affectation.
sus
Moderator
Partially. Greatness and auteur theory are ultimately antithetical to pop, yet must exist in constant tension with it. More people in the 1960s and 1970s listened to Umm Kulthum's interpretations of arabic classical music than they did the Beatles and David Bowie, in excess of 500 million (Rachit taha talks about this in his Wire Invisible jukebox) yet a highly specific and not very globally relevant auteur like Bowie is canonised today. So far from trying to escape the modernist trap you accuse this forum of harbouring, you end up sharing its core assumptions. Which is fine. I am not one of those people who thinks the modernist project can just be rejected outright to please the present academic vogue. Pop music itself is a contradiction, it is never so-called 'immediate music.'
Here is @blissblogger putting it more eloquently than me
That last sentence is key here. The ability to generate myth, to bring a forward momentum to the table is the key determining factor of great pop, never what the masses are listening to in all their gloriously incompatible mess at one point. Pop then itself is a memory, a memory of selective omission. If it wasn't, it could not move forward. This is where Adorno is wrong, but wrong in an interesting way.
blissblog
I wouldn't expect someone who participates in the Arabic classical tradition to be familiar with British pop icons. (Though they probably are for Western-media-hegemony reasons! I just wouldn't hold it against them if they didn't.)
Which is just to say that the world is a big place, with a lot happening, and as much as I am 100% team pluralism, team cosmopolitanism, am happy I'm listening to Umm Kulthum right now instead of a repeat of Ziggy Stardust—and indeed, you can find comments in my history praising the contemporary for its greater access to international cultural works—I also think it's reasonable for people to stake out a tradition, one belonging to their home culture, and pay outsized attention to that.
Last edited:
sus
Moderator
So just as Schoenberg is globally a "nobody" in terms of influence, within a specific canon he is very important.
Though as I gestured at above, I think that the innovator v. pop artist divergences mean that audience size often correlates negatively with "formal importance/influence in the tradition"
Though as I gestured at above, I think that the innovator v. pop artist divergences mean that audience size often correlates negatively with "formal importance/influence in the tradition"
sus
Moderator
No question that Bowie isn't some icon of anti-rockism—I just wanted to advance the notion that the rejection of Bowie on this board was happening on fairly rockist grounds.
I like Blissblogger's characterization of pop as myth, but I think this is the sort of logic that leads us to call Bowie a great pop artist. I don't think being mythical is the only way to be a great pop artist, but it is one, and incidentally the path that probably is most easily recognized and admired in a rockist framework. (Hence Bowie)
I like Blissblogger's characterization of pop as myth, but I think this is the sort of logic that leads us to call Bowie a great pop artist. I don't think being mythical is the only way to be a great pop artist, but it is one, and incidentally the path that probably is most easily recognized and admired in a rockist framework. (Hence Bowie)
Last edited:
Kanye was more of the avant-yob right up to the 808s and heartbreak era. That was a great pop album in the collective innovation mould. Everything after that has been more about curating a beatnik crowd. I was listening to My Dark Twisted Fantasy the other day and so little of it actually resonated with me as direct pop music today. Bowie is like this.
I mean, I tend to find most white angloamerican pop boring. My influences are 60s-70s Black American pop, and middle eastern stuff. So I'm definitely not antipop. But I think there is a strange conservatism in the angloamerican tradition where someone like Dusty Springfield is an outlier! You don't get this in other white pop traditions, Bosnian, Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian etc... So I'm not the best person to quiz on the finer points of Bowie.
sus
Moderator
What would you want out of your pop music, specifically, that's not in MBDTF?
Ah yes. Well that battle - rockist vs poptimist was never conclusively won and frankly I think we should chuck it in the bin. Pop has become a genre more than anything else, or at least, an overarching genre. Almost, funnily enough, like IDM or Funk metal. A magpie-like parasite.
I mean it's about tricks. about manipulation. About suspending disbelief. Love Lockdown does that perfectly. It's cliche, but those cliches are deployed in a significant, neuron-zapping way. Military technicians. Pop is always manufactured music.