naill_renfro
anonymous
October 10 2006, 04:19:42 UTC
Cool, beyond question. When I was a teenager in London I was an obnoxious music snob -- I once refused to have anything to do with a perfectly pleasant classmate (despite the fact that I was a teenage boy, she was a teenage girl, and mutual friends assured me that she Liked Me) for no other reason than that I had once seen her wearing a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt. (Springsteen fans: I have seen the error of my ways, and learned greater tolerance for other belief systems!) But David Bowie was the only musician whose awesomeness sufficient to overcome even the fact that *my mom* was (and is) a huge Bowie fan.
Andrew Goodwin, in Popular Music and Postmodern Theory, divides musicians not by era or genre but by degree of artifice. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he says, belong to the same era and genre, and get played on the same boomer radio stations, but they're poles apart; ditto the Talking Heads and the Clash: "It would be much easier to make an argument in which the distinction is made between the 'artifice' of the Beatles and Talking Heads and the 'authenticity' of the Rolling Stones and the Clash."
Bowie is definitely at one end of this spectrum: Pure artifice. (And that's good, BTW: The root of artifice is art, after all.) At the other end, perhaps, would be the late (and equally awesome, in a totally different way) Johnny Cash. Like the endpoints of an inverted bell curve or two towers holding up a suspension bridge -- two high points of awesomeness with a vast expanse of less-awesome musicians in between, gradually increasing in mediocrity as one gets closer to the center. (But I won't name any names... it would undermine my claim to be tolerant now. Besides, there are some misguided soles out there who might mock me for liking David Bowie, or Johnny Cash, or both.)
Oops, sorry, that got a bit boring... got carried away. But you've inspired me to open my Bowie folder and discover that somehow I don't have MP3s of Boys Keep Swinging, TVC-15, or I'm Afraid of Americans. I'll have to go remedy that.
Re: naill_renfromollyringwraithOctober 11 2006, 01:21:08 UTC
Not boring at all! Wonderful food for thought. I love the idea of the artifice/authenticity spectrum. I was in fact thinking that Johnny Cash would probably be voted "cool" by almost as wide a margin of the population.
Makes me wonder where The Cure would fall on it--a band I was obsessed with in my early 20s. Tempted to say "artifice," what with Robert Smith's makeup and swoony posing, but then again, the appeal was all about the raw sincere angst, so maybe they had some authenticity going too. Can a band choose some of both without being mediocre? Of course, some of the Cure's albums, especially more recent ones, *were* mediocre, so there you go...
Andrew Goodwin, in Popular Music and Postmodern Theory, divides musicians not by era or genre but by degree of artifice. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he says, belong to the same era and genre, and get played on the same boomer radio stations, but they're poles apart; ditto the Talking Heads and the Clash: "It would be much easier to make an argument in which the distinction is made between the 'artifice' of the Beatles and Talking Heads and the 'authenticity' of the Rolling Stones and the Clash."
Bowie is definitely at one end of this spectrum: Pure artifice. (And that's good, BTW: The root of artifice is art, after all.) At the other end, perhaps, would be the late (and equally awesome, in a totally different way) Johnny Cash. Like the endpoints of an inverted bell curve or two towers holding up a suspension bridge -- two high points of awesomeness with a vast expanse of less-awesome musicians in between, gradually increasing in mediocrity as one gets closer to the center. (But I won't name any names... it would undermine my claim to be tolerant now. Besides, there are some misguided soles out there who might mock me for liking David Bowie, or Johnny Cash, or both.)
Oops, sorry, that got a bit boring... got carried away. But you've inspired me to open my Bowie folder and discover that somehow I don't have MP3s of Boys Keep Swinging, TVC-15, or I'm Afraid of Americans. I'll have to go remedy that.
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Makes me wonder where The Cure would fall on it--a band I was obsessed with in my early 20s. Tempted to say "artifice," what with Robert Smith's makeup and swoony posing, but then again, the appeal was all about the raw sincere angst, so maybe they had some authenticity going too. Can a band choose some of both without being mediocre? Of course, some of the Cure's albums, especially more recent ones, *were* mediocre, so there you go...
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