Throbbing Member
you know, it's just (possibly shitty) remixes so part of me doesn't care really. But the kind of crap is only beginning and that's what gets me about the recent sale, this surely is devaluating his music on the long term.Originally Posted by paul_guyet
Active Member
I think it's more likely just the German form of "Hello".
Administrator
Curiously, BowieSongs blog entry on Hallo Spaceboy has nothing on the meaning of the word. I have to say, not surprising, given the author's general dislike for 90s Bowie.
Active Member
Oh I get you. If it wasn't St. Vincent (one of my favorite artists) I wouldn't give a shit.
Active Member
Neil Young put in provisions that his stuff wouldn't be used in commercials, etc. Don't know about Bruce but I would think there's something like that. He did sell for HALF A BILLION though.
Active Member
Hallo is also just a British variant spelling of hello, such as in when it's said with a thick working class accent.
Throbbing Member
Each to their own I guess. 90s Bowie is my favourite personally. Especially Outside. I’m also just a sucker for Reeves Gabrels guitar work, as wild and dissonant as it is. Just clicks with me especially concerts from that era.
desperately chilled
I love Pushing Ahead of the Dame for the most part, but his personal feelings on Bowie's latter works are off-putting, to say the least. He drops the ball a bit with songs he doesn't care for, which is a real disservice. Even if the article is thorough, the tone is all I can remember after.
(Also it just needs to be said that it's a reeeeeaaaaaalllll stretch to link halo and hallo here. It's simply a British way to say "hello" and we all know Bowie often sings in strong, sometimes exaggerated accents, not to mention using bits of British dialect)
God is an American
O'Leary does have some dodgy ideas about 90s Bowie, but his blog did start the ball rolling on academic study of the latter-day period (brilliantly taken up now by Leah Kardos, whose new book Blackstar Theory I've only just started immersing myself in).
Active Member
Is he really that negative about later Bowie? I follow him on Twitter and bought his recent Bookk with all the analysis about the 90s/00s/10s) albums and I feel like he's rather on the "that stuff is very underrated" site, especially with Outside, Earthling, Heathen, Next Day and Blackstar.
Administrator
He loves 'Hours' and later stuff.
He thinks very low of the entire stretch from Tonight to Earthling (well, with some exceptions here and there). He didn't say it in so many words, but it was pretty clear at the time. I jumped onto his blog right as he was going from Let's Dance into Tonight era and beyond, and the change in tone and less attention was very noticeable. Looked very much like a job, unlike many other entries that are pure passion. He would sometimes spent 3/4 of a piece writing long passages about general era and environment around Bowie at the time, forced comparisons with other musician careers (Scott Walker most notably), rather than analyzing the actual song at hand. I suspect he may have polished or plain rewrote a lot of these entries for the book.
desperately chilled
I hope so! I purchase both volumes some time ago but haven't read them on my Kindle yet to compare them to the original entries. Funny he likes Hours so much... that's the nadir of the latter-era albums, imo.
Active Member
Three songs from the TOY radio session are up.
I was nobody. Nothing.
I.watched that as soon as it came up, and it's awesome, but all of this "TOY, BOWIE'S BRILLIANT LOST ALBUM" shit rubs me the wrong way.
Virgin didn't even think it was worth RELEASING when Bowie was ALIVE, and he took that VERY hard, from what I understand.
Surely a lot of this posthumous stuff is happening the way he intended, as it's coming from ISO, but it still bothers me. It's still the same music industry.
It's like something I read about the Brilliant Adventures 90s boxed set on Wikipedia: it said something like "critics and analysts saw this as an artistic return to form after the eighties output" and I was thinking, WHAT?
NO, they fucking didn't! I was THERE.
They ALL hated Black Tie; it got 1/5s and 1 out of TENS.
They pretended Buddha of Suburbia didn't EXIST.
Rolling Stone gave Outside ONE star out of five, for fuck's sake.
Earthling got a BIT more praise, but ALSO received one star reviews and wound up on "best to avoid" lists.
Hours got a shitload of harshly negative reviews, too.
Now they wanna revise history, I guess, because the box set is an 81 on metacritic.
Toy upsets me worst of all. If it was so amazing, (and it IS), why didn't these industry people tell him that when he was ALIVE?
Last edited by elevenism; 01-25-2022 at 07:49 PM.
Stubby Member
Your appreciation of something always grows once you realize you can’t have any more.
I was nobody. Nothing.
ON THAT NOTE, I'm still holding out hope for "post blackstar album."
Visconti has even stated that db recorded at least five demos for his next album, thinking he had "a few months left."
Personally, though, I REALLY don't think bowie intended to release another album on the heels of Blackstar: to ME, that record was a definitive goodbye.
I still have this theory that there were, you know, maybe 7 or 8 more songs, to be released in 2026, perhaps? And maybe they're finished?
Even if there ARE just 5 demos, they can certainly be worked into finished tracks with the proper engineer and producer.
Edit: here's what Visconti said about it in 2016.
I've always thought, though, that he was being sort of coy here, and keeping a cat in a bag.
Last edited by elevenism; 01-25-2022 at 08:44 PM.
Active Member
I'm completely with you. Now that he's gone his dick is getting sucked more than when he was here. Honestly, the 90s stuff is my favorite Bowie (not so much BTWN or BOS as Outside, Earthing and hours) and it pisses me off to see people suddenly giving it the attention and praise it deserves, but hey, people are listening now and giving it the attention and praise it deserves, so that's a positive.
Active Member
From my understanding Bowie didn't even intended Toy as a grandiose artistical statement. It was just a fun way of recording new versions of old songs with the band he performed at Glastonbury with. There weren't surprise releases back then, but Toy seems like a record that could've been perfect for a stunt like that. Like The Slip or something...
Active Member
I'm wondering if we'll ever get the full version of Blackstar. Originally over 11 minutes, was cut down to just under 10 because itunes.
Active Member
Toy review from the AMG:
3/5 stars
Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Heavily bootlegged over the years, Toy is an album David Bowie recorded in 2000, right between Hours and Heathen. The concept was simple: Bowie took his touring band into the studio to revisit a bunch of songs he wrote and recorded prior to becoming a superstar. Although "Shadow Man" comes from the Ziggy Stardust sessions, most of the songs date from the days before "Space Oddity," so they're grounded in British rock & roll and mod R&B -- a far cry from both his glam rock of the 1970s and the electronic-inflected art rock of the 1990s. It isn't too far from the classy classicism of Hours, though, yet it carries a looser, lighter feel. Hearing Bowie apply the overly polished aesthetics of Hours to swinging, moddish material is odd but appealing. He and his band have fun with the material, diminishing some of the stilted tweeness of the originals and revealing the nice compositional bones underneath. It's a record out of time, with the songs clearly from the swinging '60s and the production being very much a product of the slick Y2K era, yet that's also its charm: it's Bowie revisiting his past from a particular perspective that is as of its time as the original songs.
I was nobody. Nothing.
Right, BUT, according to Visconti, Bowie was "hurt terribly" by the label's refusal to release the album.
I'd assume he picked these songs for a reason- the reason being that he thought they were GOOD.
I've never had a record deal, but I've been writing and recording and playing the occasional show for most of my life.
And I could imagine the pain, if I handpicked a set of MY songs, that I was PROUD of, and then had someone tell me they weren't good enough to see the light of day.
desperately chilled
he mentioned something in storytellers about the abysmal lyrics of 'can't help thinking about me.' i think he had no doubt that the material was GOOD but not necessarily transcendent. i think it was meant to be an understated way to have fun with a tight live band that ultimately didn't work out and while i certainly can see where that might have been hurtful, i don't see it as terribly shocking that this album didn't take hold when it was proposed.
i've always enjoyed the material that comprised the album, from the original tracks ('conversation piece' is an eternal fav, and i love 'you've got a habit of leaving me') to the bootleg mix to these newly released and completed versions, but i can see where it might have been an extremely risky proposition for the label to put out. earthling was considered a passé record when it came out, hours got mixed reviews, and so on. as others have said in the thread already, his clout was pretty low in the 90s. a lot of people looked down on him post-let's dance (not me, mind you), and while musicians seemed to be checking him as an influence (scott weiland, corgan, bands like placebo and spacehog, and tons more), the new albums themselves weren't top-selling, critically acclaimed barn burners at the time, and it was fuck all embarrassing to be a massive bowie fan in the 90s. it's definitely revisionist history, even though i'm glad people are finally coming around, especially to buddha, outside, and earthling.
perhaps there's something to be said about this rejection putting a bit of fire into him to knock heathen out of the park, which seems to share some of the same nostalgic qualities (and two of the songs written around the era), but sounds more vital in the end.
(while i'm here, if anyone was gonna tune into that twitch livestream - i had to reschedule it to this saturday. 7ish hours of all-vinyl bowie. lots from this era will be played. deets here.)
Last edited by frankie teardrop; 01-26-2022 at 10:09 PM.
I was nobody. Nothing.
Risky by what metric, though, @frankie teardrop ? That it wouldn't be a massive pop hit?
Elektra was more than happy to release TWO of my friends' albums at that time, AND, their lead singer's solo project. (Coincidentally, this cat told me that the cure for writer's block was holing up in a hotel room for a week with the complete works of Bowie.)
While 2/3 of these releases found universal critical acclaim, these records biggest financial achievements were likely having songs appear in tv shows like Scrubs, and some TV commercials.
So they weren't exactly burning up.the top.ten, but the CRITICS liked them and the FANS bought them.
And Elektra released their next record, too.
But with Bowie, it was, well, DAVID BOWIE. And the label wouldn't release HIS album?
This band, composed of 4 of my friends, is one of my favorite bands of all time, but they certainly aren't on par with Bowie, commercially, or in terms of influence or fame.
I feel like I'm missing part of the equation, here.
Edit: Also, doesn't twitch cost money? Lemme get on the guest list, man!
Last edited by elevenism; 01-26-2022 at 10:47 PM.
Active Member
Maybe he was trying for another album post "Blackstar" but after a certain point with his illness he realized he wasn't going to be able to do it. Fucking cancer serves no one's plans.
Active Member
itunes...grrrrrrr......
Active Member
The music business is much more about business than music.
I was nobody. Nothing.
I'm still expecting a few more songs. Demos = vocals, and a sketch that could be filled in with studio magic.
Administrator
DB almost always fully rerecorded the vocals and rarely kept anything from demos in the final mix. Just sayin.
God is an American
I think we all are. The version of the story that goes "those friggin' suits at the record label rejected this album!" isn't 100% true, to my understanding. That's not exactly how it happened. Tony Visconti is surely right: Bowie had to be annoyed that Virgin/EMI (which was only a couple of years into its life as a stand-alone company at that point, after it de-merged from a weapons manufacturing consortium in the mid-'90s) didn't go along with his plan, but it's not like their executives heard it and said "no" to his face. It just kept getting delayed, to the point where he lost interest and had moved on to other projects with the vague promise of sneaking it out piecemeal on future B-sides and the like. EMI had only just re-released his studio catalogue from 1969 to 1989 on CD the year before, and probably felt their promotional money would offer a better return if they kept flogging those reissues a little longer, rather than embarking on a campaign for another new album of mostly unfamiliar stuff right away.
Bowie recorded the bones of the album very quickly with his live band playing all at once (to the point where he would do a first-take live vocal with them, and have his lead part completely done before they were even finished repairing the backing track). He was by then used to getting instantaneous feedback from his audience (after the small-scale 'hours...' tour, and Glastonbury and the other Summer 2000 shows with that lineup, they were definitely hot)... including from his Bowienet subscribers online. So it made sense to release it very quickly. But Mark Plati said that they kept tweaking it into 2001, and the record label never even heard a final mix. That's when Visconti came back into the picture, and they did the Tibetan Freedom benefit versions of the songs with his string arrangements, but also were looking at recording new stuff for Heathen, while Bowie was setting up his own ISO label, which had to have been much more exciting than pushing for a creaky old label too busy panicking about Napster to fit Toy into their schedule.
Last edited by botley; 01-27-2022 at 03:44 PM.
I was nobody. Nothing.
Ah, @botley , Knower of Things: thank you so much for finally clearing that up. THAT makes a hell of a lot more sense.
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