Many fell along the way, but the two that meant the most to me by far were David Bowie at the beginning of the year and Leonard Cohen towards the end. The arcs of their careers had little in common, save both releasing a final album just a few weeks before shuffling off this mortal coil.
Bowie was still a teenager when he made his first record, and he'd produced almost all of the work for which he's best remembered by the time he turned 33 in 1980, the year of "Scary Monsters." He was one of the definitive artists of the 1970s - innovative, restless, batshit crazy, at the centre of everything that was new in the music. The world had seen nothing like him. But all of the flash aside, the whole thing wasn't that complicated. Bowie wrote great songs, and Mick Ronson was the heart and soul and brains of a wonderful band. Their run together was brief - 1970 to 1973 - and Bowie continued to do remarkable work afterwards - the Berlin trilogy with Eno, the magnificent "Station to Station." He didn't really fade away after that - he continued to make interesting records all the while, even if he didn't attract the same attention as in his heyday. But he had a heart attack on stage in 2004, and simply disappeared for almost ten years afterwards until unexpectedly resurfacing with two albums in the final three years of his life.
"Blackstar" sounds nothing like anything Bowie had ever done before. Musically, it's dominated by Donny McCaslin's jazz band. That's not entirely to my taste. The lead instrument is McCaslin's sax honking away non-stop, and Mark Guilliana's extremely busy drumming is definitely not my cup of tea. And still - it somehow sounds like no one except David Bowie. And the title track is just one of those all-time great Bowie tracks - everyone has a few, and yours probably differ from mine - but this is another one of them, mighty and awesome, completely original and unlike anything you've ever heard from him. Somehow still himself, to the very end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-JqH1M4Ya8
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment