I picked it up at Whole Foods of all places. Pretty good!

Here's the best song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH7dMBcg ... r_embedded

The video is weird as hell though.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

This thread needs Curious. Come back CH!

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

I picked up the new David Bowers album at Aldi... not bad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_umaFUjQX60

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"All crowds boycotting football games shouldn't care who sings or takes a knee because they aren't watching." - Nas

Hi. I've been given a new lease on life. For all you young message boarders out there, if you think a thread should be functionally closed instead of just proclaimed to be closed, hold your tongue! It may seem like the admin doesn't know how to lock it, but he does know how to ban you!

I've been hearing "The Stars Are Out Tonight" on XRT a lot, and I'm just not feeling it. It feels like some sort of David Bowie Stew: little bits of everything else, picked from the bones and slow-cooked into edibility. I'm not an uber-devoted Bowie fan, just a huge fan of the run from Station to Station through Lodger (if anything, this is more a subsection of my uber-devotion to Brian Eno), and so it doesn't mean anything to me to know that he made another album and it doesn't totally suck, the way people sort of half-heartedly cheer on Neil Young when he records forty minutes of rock-loaf without wetting his pants (and talk about irony w/r/t the conscious and contrary decision to fade away, huh?).

The cover art is lazy and not as meta and edgy as it was ostensibly hoped to be. I mean, if you're trying to say that this album is a half-assed rewrite of "Heroes", I guess you kinda did, but I know everyone will be like "this is a brilliant deconstruction of Bowie's ever-changing image, some argue in a way drawing a mustache on the very concept of drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa," but oh god, shut up.

The best thing to come from this is that I've been listening to Low again. "Subterraneans" and "Be My Wife" are his best songs ever, no question.

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I found the fact that a 66-year-old man can put out a decent album pretty inspirational!

I loved Let's Dance, so what the hell do I know?

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

But see, this is the whole Bob Dylan/Neil Young/Rolling Stones thing. Why are we applauding people for making mediocre music at an advanced age? If anything, you should be making your most demanding and complex music at such an age, having outgrown youthful indiscretions and having learned more about music throughout life. Do you think people would give Philip Glass (he of the Low Symphony, after all) a condescending pat on the head for simply daring to create music while old? Now, if Bowie made an album at 66, while fucking every woman, man, and object in sight, while painfully detoxing from hard drugs, that's inspirational!

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Couple random thoughts:

1. people inherently pine for the days of their youth. To recall something 30 years ago fondly is comforting for a minute or two until you realize how fucking old you are.

2. Most "rock" stars careers' are pretty much done by the age of 30. I mean WTF did Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, John Fogerty, Roger McGuinn, etc etc ever do out of their 20s? Crap mostly. Rock is a young man's game.

A fruitless exercise: list all the 5-star albums done by someone in their 30s or later. Maybe Graceland.

3. XRT is a wasteland. I'm disappointed they play the new Bowie. I will have to reconsider my evaluation of it. Although Lin Brehmer knows his old shit. Too bad they won't let him play any of it.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Bowie released the Berlin trilogy after he turned 30. All but three or four of Frank Zappa's albums were made after 30. Wayne Coyne was in his late 30s for The Soft Bulletin. Achtung Baby was after 30. Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs were after 30. "Rock is a young man's game" is the sort of thinking that was destroyed by the art-rock movement of Eno, Fripp, Cale, and Bowie himself. That's the great thing about sitting down to make actual music and not just plucking some blues riffs and doing a chicken dance. You can do it at a high level virtually indefinitely. Bowie didn't here, but it can be done!

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I'll disagree with you slightly on Dylan. Although his last two albums have not been as good, the three previous
he did at an advanced age ( Time out of Mind - 56, Love and Theft - 60 and Modern Times - age 65 ) were very
good. I know everyone gripes about the voice but just the song lyrics themselves were as strong as ever and
his voice actually lends itself to a lot of his music on those albums. I am enjoying your breakdown of the aging
rockstar as well as the younger acts in the other thread though.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

Bottom line is people like their "guys." Frank Zappa gives me a headache. Tom Waits, I'll just kill myself now.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

We are enemies now, you and I.

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completed "smile" at 62.

and john lennon wrote "woman" when he was 40, and that is a great song.

i heard some of bowie's new record and thought it was pretty good.

Well, I don't think it was destroyed. Rock is a young man's game. By necessity. I would applaud most of those you mentioned for achieving a level of sophistication in their musicianship while being able to maintain the visceral qualities that make it rock in the first place.

I think you're too dismissive of the rawness of what I'd call real rock. Maybe that's because you're a musician. But I would suggest that when a rock musician strays too far from that basic paradigm, he is no longer a rock player. He's something else. And whatever Frank Zappa is, if we're going to judge him on musicianship vis-a-vis Yo-Yo Ma or Itzhak Perlman, he loses.

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Don't take it personally.

Zappa is just Zappa to me, but I can't say he's not a rock musician.

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I'm not sure what he is. I'm not a fan. But I'm sure anyone who is familiar with my views on rock music is aware that I'm not a guy who regards instrumental skill, chops, or virtuosity as a particular key to great rock music.

I'll argue with you all day long that Ziggy is Bowie's best record. But I have no issue with something like Heroes when it is put across with the type of emotion that it was. That's why, even though I am not a big fan of Wilco, I will never be too critical of Tweedy. His ability to cut through all the nonsense he and his band create with raw emotion is a highly mitigating circumstance. I might suggest there is a reason why Tweedy's solo shows are so popular. The noodling of Nels Cline is unnecessary, regardless of how impressive it might be to his fellow guitarists.

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Don't take it personally.

y u no like Zappa? I think the guy was brilliant. Whenever he could be said to be going too far into instrumental wankery, he'd drop some balls-out, woman-objectifying rock album to remind you he still knew what it was all about, if it could be said to be all about that. I have all but a few of the albums he released in his lifetime.

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He was just too weird for me. I don't hate him. I think he was a funny guy. He could rock at times, yeah. I just feel like he wasn't really putting honest feelings out there. It was more like, look at this, look at me. I even feel like Flo and Eddie- guys who could break your heart- were clowning to a certain degree when they were with Zappa.

He flirted with being a joke band, although I wouldn't really call him a joke band. That's a fine line. Take something like They Might Be Giants. I like them. They can write a pop song. But they're definitely over the line and are for sure a joke band, a novelty act. Whereas something like Ween manages to stay just on the other side.

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Don't take it personally.

Flo and Eddie was my least favorite period of Zappa. Too much going up their own ass. When they sang songs, it was fine. "Sharleena" is beautiful, but the rambling skits just don't work for me. I tend to like the fusion and Third Stream stuff the best, stuff like Burnt Weeny Sandwich or Uncle Meat.

I agree with you on Zappa not really having a conventional palette of emotions. He never could write honestly about love or sadness, in my opinion. He could make beautiful music, but he was too smart about what he was doing for it to be an honest expression. He just knew which notes to play to elicit such feelings in mere mortals like myself. Still, I just love his music so much.

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you represent everyone that doesn't even scratch the surface with They. the genius of them is that they're not at all a novelty band, they just seem like one. their lyrics are brilliant.

actually there have been times ween has been so legitimate that it pains me when they got "too goofy". once they did "the mollusk", it was time for them to realize they are a real band. "white pepper" seems like their most genuine effort to make a real record.

I've more than scratched the surface with They Might Be Giants. They are brilliant songwriters, but they've chosen to be a novelty act. I think it's a conscious choice. I believe they could connect on a deeper emotional level if they wanted to. It's just not their thing. They're cute and clever and twee.

But you know, on second thought, maybe they can't do anything else. Great songwriting is one thing. Nobody can deny them that. But for the type of emotional reach I'm talking about, the vocalist is important. And I just think Ween can put a song across in a way that They Might Be Giants can't- or at least never has.

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Don't take it personally.

There is so much truth in this statement. Every guy that I would consider great that I have known was- I don't want to say dumb (though some may have been)- but lacking a certain self-awareness that just allowed them to put the emotion out there.

It's a leap of faith. Nobody wants to express real honest feelings and have people laugh at them. To me, a guy like Zappa was going to make damn sure he was the one doing the laughing. Someone like Tweedy gives you everything. He has overcome his fears.

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Don't take it personally.

yeah but a novelty act is like weird al. weird al is lyrically and musically jokey. TMBG somewhat use the novelty music as a ruse. there's something a lot deeper there that you have to really listen to in order to reach it.

Fair enough. I agree with that.

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Don't take it personally.

It's hard to write a love song. And certainly it's a lot more difficult for the Gen-X musicians who grew up cloaking themselves in irony and building a hard shell than it was for the Boomers who immediately followed the Beatles.

That's why I love "Letter To Memphis". You probably can't find a guy more detached, sarcastic, or ironic than Frank Black, but he reached down and wrote and sang this. "Tryin' to get to you. I said I'm gonna get to you."

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Don't take it personally.

This is good stuff. Certainly true, but I've never really put it together in my mind. Guys like Brian Wilson, Joe Strummer, John Lennon. They put out the dirty laundry. I mean this shit was/is raw and emotional. It brings forth an emotion in me to listen to it.

Look at a guy like Randy Newman. As talented as anybody, but as BF would say, "too cool for school." He's probably too well adjusted in life (yeah he did do some good stuff no doubt). Guys like Zappa and Waits mentioned above. I'm not going to rip them because I don't know them that well, but they just sound too calculated. The stuff is too esoteric, like the restaurants that only let the cool people in. Sometimes I think people listen to that stuff because they think its good for you like Grape Nuts, not because they really enjoy it. Give me some Super Sugar Crisp. I could eat a whole box of that shit.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Haha, I love Randy Newman and Tom Waits, too. I don't think Waits is calculated, though, at least not at his best he's not. And even if he's not baring his soul, why does he have to, anyway? Storytellers don't have to be autobiographers. Rain Dogs is an all-time great album even if Tom himself has never sailed for Singapore.

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You know CH, you're lucky you didn't grow up 20 years earlier, when the only way to actually hear this shit was to buy an album/cd/cassette for $15. Back in the 1980s, that was a lot of scratch for a high school kid. I started exploring more in college, but still, there was only so much I could buy. If something didn't catch my ear or I didn't read some fabulous review, it wasn't in the budget. Frank Zappa never made it to my shopping list. I'm sure he has some good shit.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Yeah, I know. Soulseek and friends to share music with have been great. I bought every Frank Zappa album I have, though.

You want some Zappa? I'll compile some stuff for you. What have you heard so far?

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Well, what's his most "approachable" stuff? Let's start there. I have Rhapsody, which pretty much has everything.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest