I will be rating songs on a 1-5 scale (5 is highest), and participants are encouraged to provide ratings as well, although rating songs is not required to participate. I will be going through all the songs by David Bowie, one song per day, to include all principal album tracks, bonus material that was included on reissued releases, b-sides, non-album singles, demos, cover songs and other unique entries from the large number of compilations released over the decades.Įach day I will post a song for discussion/comment. It's hard to imagine a fan outcry for a DVD filled with decent to muddled performances.In the spirit of recently launched big-name-artist career spanning song-by-song threads on SHF, the purpose of this thread is to discuss the music of David Robert Jones (i.e., David Bowie) on a song-by-song basis ( hopefully this thread has not been done, at least not in recent years - I searched and didn't see one). Don't major labels have enough problems with venerable and archaic media formats without working hard to invent new ones? The substance of this reissue seems indebted to a famous name instead of adding significantly more insight into a famous and intriguing career. A DVD with a companion CD that doesn't bother to separate the songs from storytelling or include the bonus tracks makes it an audio recording of a television episode. It's part of the puzzling DVD/CD element of this release. Two of the extra tracks, "Always Crashing in the Same Car" and "I Can't Read", provide a slightly more-well rounded look at his career, but none come with additional commentary, making them four modest live performances, nothing else. Two of the tracks on the original broadcast, along with two more of the bonus tracks on the DVD, come from Hours., not many fans' first choice. Musically, things don't go much better, occasionally sliding into cheesy, cabaret-lite renditions from a band that looks like a casting call for session player stereotypes. What's especially frustrating is that he's charming and self-deprecating, tossing out casual references to a meeting with Abbie Hoffmann and doing an amusing Marc Bolan impression, suggesting he could actually tell dozens more interesting, relevant, and revealing stories if he felt like it. His storytelling continues in this vein, jumping between the Paul Anka connection to "Life on Mars", an Eartha Kitt obsession and the shocking admission that the mid-70s was a dark, drug-fueled period impervious to recall. After a hushed retelling of a story about a story- Iggy Pop, over coffee, recalling a 1970s Berlin punk show where German artists built and destroyed a replica of the Berlin Wall- he says, "this is a song I wrote with Jim at around that time, and I guess this one's also about invasion and exploitation, take it away, Mike." There's no mention or insight into Nile Rodgers, the Nazi reference in the song, or the then-controversial, award-winning music video- just a somewhat interesting little tale followed by a piano intro better suited to some low-budget made-for-TV movie. Standing at the center of what looks like a bad community theater stage set, entertaining an overly polite audience while donning a gray hoodie, Bowie comes off likable and very off the cuff. Sadly, only flashes of his wit and gregarious storytelling come out during this CD/DVD release of his television performance. Bowie was running on the fumes of what was a disappointing decade- between albums like Earthling, Outside, and the then forthcoming Hours.- but if anybody had an iconic back catalog, a colorful personal narrative (or narratives), and an amazing supporting cast to draw stories from, it was Bowie. Broadcast in August 1999, a quarter-century after he hung up his Ziggy Stardust kimonos, this episode teased fans with a rare chance to hear the shape-shifting artist discuss and deconstruct part of his mythology.
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