Going it alone

[boxedjoy]

Dunno where I read this but I read quite recently about Bowie making Iggy Pop's album in Berlin and being unable to eat anything cos he was so strung out. And I believe it climaxed with Bowie dribbling an egg into his mouth from a spoon and passing out on the floor.

This makes me think this is definitely going to produce an album worth listening to, yes

 

[IdleRich]

The thought of eating raw egg makes me feel sick.

 

[IdleRich]

But it is the symbol of re-birth and creation I guess so...

 

[woops]

im removing all nuance from my position cos it makes it more fun. in reality i really like sound and vision. and some of his hooks are really good.

i was just thinking the very moment before i saw corspsey's let's dance post - the point of these dissensus threads is not to say actually i think he's really good, or, what about this though, it's to all pile on and say awful, never liked him, worst thing ever, beyond the human capacity to enjoy. people are not looking to be persuaded.

 

[luka]

i certainly dont want to be persuaded. do you? its like someone fiddling with the inside of your brain. we want to maintain our integrity and self-image.

 

[IdleRich]

It should be obvious to anyone that when you see a thread titled "Going it alone" it's code for "Bowie is the worstest artist of all time".

 

[sus]

to be fair I think the point of this thread, specifically, is whether collaboration helps more often than it hurts

edit: Rich beat me to it

 

[luka]

its great when @version makes a thread for a new artist he likes and we all join up to go fucking hell thats so terrible i had to cut my ears off and throw them in the bin, and whats more, its not just bad music its a syndoche for everything thats rotten and mean in contemporary culture and youre a vile and horrible man for subjecting us to it. those make for great threads.

 

[woops]

There are two commonplace ‘pictures’ of what art is that we use to justify the pursuit of art. One pictures says that great art describes the human condition, or expresses our innermosts experiences, or connects us to our unattended thoughts and feelings, or allows us to reflect on our life and memories and circumstances, or to empathize with others or to commune with the cosmos or to understand material conditions of life or whatever. Apart from being kind of old and uncool, this picture’s inconsistent with how crucial ‘gaming’ the cultural moment is for making good art… the second picture says that there’s a thing called ‘culture,’ which is a sort of social structure that’s formed out of the interaction of everyone’s world-views and desires and beliefs and in turn structures the evolution of everyone’s world-views and desires and beliefs, and making art is a way of intervening in that structure. So on this picture art is a form of politics, in the sense that making art is making a historical intervention in a collective structure.

alright, you made a good post about innovation there, no need to get carried away

 

[luka]

alright, you made a good post about innovation there, no need to get carried away

i remember the first ever time i done acid me and my friend were sitting up on some balconies overlooking Auckland University quad and there was a lad down below singing and he hit this note that energised people and made the crowd go woooo! and you could see him swell up and realise, oh, ive found something there so he done it again but leaned into it a bit heavy, and so soon after the first one the effect was diminished so you the woo was very half hearted but you could see/hear the feedback learning relationship in real time

 

[sus]

alright, you made a good post about innovation there, no need to get carried away

this forum is never ready for Peli Grietzer... but one day, it'll be ready

 

[luka]

i love music is the place to go for that sort of thing. thats been the party line there since 2001 or whenever they were set up.

 

[blissblogger]

It's strange—what use is innovations if no one uses them? Why is the use of innovations "theft" instead of "tribute"? Isn't the entire point of innovations to expand the toolkit?

there is a great Bowie quote on precisely this, it goes something like "It doesn't matter who did something first. What matters is who did something second"

another version of that would be - about getting a party started - that it doesn't matter who is the first person to step on the dancefloor, what really makes the difference is the second one.

the history of music - and art - possibly science and technology too actually - is full of lonely innovations that just sit there, unadopted, not taken up, of interest now only to scholars who made a specialty of locating lost innovators and turning into a field of study

i suppose Bowie is a bit like Steve Jobs, didn't come up with anything himself, other people had the all the breakthrough ideas first (various proto-Ipods for instance long preexisted the iPod) but he put it all together in this irresistibly consumable series of packages, knew how to hire talent, knew how to delegate, put the overall finish to the product etc

that said i would continue to insist that the melodies are unique and there is some cry of longing in there that gives some kind of edge of realness to the artifice - a sort of soul-less soul - precisely the emptiness of the English suburban petit-bourgeois looking for things to fill the existential void - that's the chase that takes him through the drugs, science fiction, the fame quest, the magic, Germany in the 1920s, etc etc - whatever he can find to fill up his hollowness and take him out of himself, to some absolute elsewhere

his relationship with black music is the classic English one - the soul-less drawn to the soul-ful

 

[woops]

people are not looking to be persuaded...

except by blissblog!

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah spot on I think. And also, it's not like I dunno... countless other people who really think they are doing actual soul music. That distancing makes a difference.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

and again, this is the weird modernist/avant inclination, where the only worthwhile step is inventing something new, and talent-scouting/integration/deployment of innovations can only be interpreted as "appropriation" or "theft"

this is a strange way of thinking, seeing as almost all enduring "Great" works are syntheses of existing innovations and styles, be it Shakespeare or the Parthenon or Michael Jordan's playstyle or Beatles' Revolver. the "mere" innovations, meanwhile, tend to fade from memory because "doing work" in a sheer, human-friendly way—i.e., putting innovation to use—is just as important a step as the technical or formal innovation itself.

It's strange—what use is innovations if no one uses them? Why is the use of innovations "theft" instead of "tribute"? Isn't the entire point of innovations to expand the toolkit?

that's all premised on a false dichotomy on innovation vs synthesis

literally all cultural production is a "synthesis of existing innovations and styles". in culture, ex nihilo nihil fit.

and I'm not making some defense of avant-garde over popular, which is another false dichotomy the best usually being both at once i.e. jungle.

I did literally say "there's nothing with being a popularizer". Bowie art isn't terrible because he was a popularizer, it's terrible because it's terrible.

there is a problem with accreditation but it's not about record nerd cred (saddest shit in the world to be proud of, btw), or a fake avant/popular split

the problem is the same as always - he who takes credit takes the material (and cultural capital) rewards

the pro-Bowie argument is that by recontextualizing things, as Rich said, for a broader audience he broadens normative pop tastes and potentially blazes a trail for the more marginalized and/or outre to follow him

the anti-Bowie argument is that he cynically exploits for his own personal benefit

where your position falls in that argument is loosely related if at all to whether you think his art is "good" or not

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

but it's not like there aren't examples that exist of other ways to do it

if you want an artist who had a healthy relationship with her queer audience look no further than Dusty Springfield

 

[sus]

he who takes credit takes the material (and cultural capital) rewards

credit isn't taken so much as given, in these things

Please show me somewhere Bowie ever claimed to have come up with someone else's idea

The idea that using an idea is implicitly "taking credit" for it is exactly the problem!

 

[luka]

wasnt she an actual lesbian?

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

about getting a party started - that it doesn't matter who is the first person to step on the dancefloor, what really makes the difference is the second one

my answer to that would be that there were a million better second on the dancefloor people

Bowie knew that as well as anyone - why else did he go to Niles Rodgers?