Someone challenges me to say what I thought about David Bowie, now that he's died. Well, the fact is, I didn't think much about David Bowie in the years since first hearing his Ziggy Stardust album - I seem to want to remember it was in 1973 but don't remember - which I wasn't interested in or in the the music of his which I heard in the years after that. I never saw his acting because I didn't like his music and I pretty much stopped going to see movies late in the 70s. I figured Hollywood wasn't making movies for adults, much, and I didn't need to see them.
I do have an indirect connection to him in that I once knew a woman whose sister dated David Bowie for a while, she wasn't too impressed with him. If he meets up with her in the afterlife I'd guess at least his ears will be burning.
I listened to the music vid at the official site of his last album which the morning financial news tells me is "jazz tinged". Michael Mantler was doing a lot more along that line back in the 70s, with better lyrics and better composition. Perhaps that's why I didn't care about Bowie's stuff, I already knew the stuff he might have been copying. If there's a problem with what of Bowie's music that I know it's that it's essentially pop music with mere tinges of more sophisticated stuff, much of it obviously copied from more challenging composers, none of it very deep or really challenging. I do rather resent his use of gay identity of a very stereotypical and very superficial kind when he was essentially straight. His various walk backs of that in later decades leaves you to wonder if it wasn't all gay for pay. And, then, there is the sister of the woman I used to know.
Hey, David Bowie's fans include the coolest astronaut of all times, he doesn't need me, especially as he's dead. There are a lot of people, not everyone needs to like the same things, despite what the merely kewl kids think, not everyone has to go with the in-crowd conformity. As I thought while listening to "Suffragette City" years ago that's what that kind of commercial outlaw stuff turns into really fast. Nothing ages faster than some "new sounds" do. That the Morning Report business show is where I heard the news of his death, they went into his innovative means of selling himself, seems as fitting as any of it, to me.
How come you guys aren't going on and on over the death of Pierre Boulez? Now there's an
innovative composer whose music is just about certain to last.
Update: Stupid Mail: Oh. Please. I don't find pretty boy Brits attractive. About the only exception to that is David Tennant and he's a Scot.
Boulez sure to last? Oh joy.
ReplyDeleteSeriously -- "Le marteau sans maître"??? There's a real toe tapper. Saw a performance of it once in the 70s.
There's forty minutes of my life I'll never get back.
:-)
Oh, let me guess, a music apre class you took your Freshman year and you faked listening to it.
DeleteHe did write more than that one piece you were assigned to listen to.
It's not as if you've ever sustained any worth while activity for as long as 40 minutes. You went to Youtubes to get the timing, didn't you.
I don't think anyone's ever accused Boulez of being derivative of other peoples' music.
ReplyDelete"I pretty much stopped going to see movies late in the 70s. I figured
Hollywood wasn't making movies for adults, much, and I didn't need to
see them."
Thus freeing you to spend the next four decades deriding movies you couldn't be bothered to actually see. So it's kind of a win-win thing for you.
I knew you'd never get over me dissing Sleeping in Seattle and, especially your favorite, As Good As It Gets.
DeleteI can say I've never slammed a movie without having seen it. Unlike you who has no problem mocking music you've never listened to.
Of course I checked the timing. My memory of it was that it lasted for several weeks.
ReplyDelete:-)
No I know you're lying, your memory doesn't extend past the -3 minutes of the typical pop song.
ReplyDeleteYou know, there isn't a context in which you can come up with something that I can't make a relevant comeback to, the cost of you so extensively exposing your so limited personality at Tiger Beat on the Delaware.
The measure I apply to Bowie is nostalgia: I grew up with his music on the radio, I have an affection for it as I do for my own youth.
ReplyDeleteBut my daughter finds it no more "influential" than I found Elvis Presley, who was fading by the time I was paying attention, and who never seemed all that important to me. I've since reconsidered, but still, he's pop music, just like the Beatles. I expect the music of Philip Glass will last longer than anything Elvis sang, except as it's available on recordings to people who grew up with Elvis.
Bowie was popular, but that doesn't make him an important musical figure. He was a performer, and like Sandra Bernhardt he may be remembered in the future by a few, but only because his performances are recorded and preserved (to the extent they are. The irony of the digital revolution may well be how much of recorded history it wipes out, because of the very revolution of digital technology, one that already makes LP's and recording tape incompatible with the present, and what in the present will the compatible with the future?).
I have to say I find Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk more meaningful as composers, and I would add Charles Mingus to that list. I didn't grow up with them, but I learned about them later; and that has made all the difference.
Most of the music of my childhood is nostalgically appealing to me now, but little more than that. Most of the music I listen to is the music I learned to appreciate. It lasts longer with me.
Bet lots more people turned out for Beethoven's funeral.
ReplyDelete