★

too soon

After the "Pablo Honey" thread? I agree.

This album, damn, talk about an artist going out on top. Some days I think it's the best thing he ever did.

i can't giiiiiive everything

Yup. I'm listening to it right now it's certainly retained its potency for me. The back-to-back two-fer of 'Dollar Days' and 'I Can't Give Everything Away' gave me serious goosebumps this time 'round.

(x-post)

★★★

The 'Farewell Mix' (by NIN?) of I Can't Give Everything >>> original mix

The Cure-esque single string guitar runs in the intro to Lazarus

The 'Farewell Mix' (by NIN?) of I Can't Give Everything

I hadn't known about that mix, thanks!

"Heat", off of "The Next Day", was a clear indicator of where he was going, and it seems like he was planning on more of the same if the "No Plan" material is any indication.

Yeah, I can see what you mean by that. 'Heat' is undoubtedly one of my favourite tracks from that record, too. There really isn't a wrong answer to this poll, IMO, and I've really no idea what's going to top the poll, or even at this stage what I'm going to vote for - each of these tracks is a standout in its own way.

"I Can't Give Everything Away"

Voted Lazarus

Look up here, I’m in heaven
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen

Come on

A fantastic swansong

And as for Bowie....

this is really hard

what a goddamn great album

i’m sorry but the idea of turrican sucking all the enjoyment out of a discussion of this record on ILM is just too much for me rn.

dude why don’t you take a sabbatical. that way when you come back your abject shittiness will once more come as an amusing, if unpleasant, surprise — as opposed to the nauseating slog it’s now become.

just an idea

fuck that really belongs in the “second thoughts” thread

sorry

it's cool, we can talk about it now

1st or last track for me, voted last, something about the swirling background really gets me plus the vocal take is all time

"Heat' is just a bit too much in thrall to Electrician-era Scott Walker, whereas Blackstar kind of sounds like its own thing. Girl Loves Me is the only track here that I think is just OK rather than fantastic. I voted for the title track - it's right up there with Bowie's two other epics, Sweet Thing and Station to Station.

The "Farewell Mix" of ICGEA is actually Delia Derbyshire's music with the Bowie vocal, I believe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR2ibMBWsZ4

'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore – fantastic arrangement, beautiful melody

"Dollar Days" is the only OK track. The album belongs in Bowie's top ten if not five.

I could've voted for "I Can't Give Everything Away," but this morning it's "Tis a Pity She Was a Whore," as weird and wonderful in Bowie's demo, on which he played everything:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03GN-duIY2A

i still don't quite get the love for "i can't give everything away", the dissonant section in the chorus is too grating to me though the rest is very good

the first four tracks are the strongest and i think the title track is my favourite

The dissonant section in the chorus is what makes the song so heart-wrenching!

First side is basically perfect. “Girl Loves Me” is the first moment where the spell is broken for me. Voted for “I Cant Give Everything Away”, which is one of the peaks of his career imo

The "Farewell Mix" of ICGEA is actually Delia Derbyshire's music with the Bowie vocal, I believe.

Ah that's right, ty. God, her music is amazing.

I Can't Give Everything Away

trying to search for this thread will be interesting

david bowie blackstar poll

there, that way we can always search for that text and it'll hopefully show up in text search rather than thread search

just cross-posted to the main alb thread, maybe that'll help too

Tis a Pity

The "Farewell Mix" of ICGEA is actually Delia Derbyshire's music with the Bowie vocal, I believe.
That was early conjecture - it's Reznor/Ross:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9D4zOpP8kc

surprising myself and voting for “dollar days”

Yep, voted for "I Can't Give Everything Away", only place where Monder gets a moment to shine here, even if it's a quick Fripp impression.

"Lazarus" #2

xxp Hats off to Reznor / Ross then, it's perfect.
Every element of this album is amazing, it might be the most flat-out thrilling in his catalogue. I still can't believe he dug so deep, took so many risks and triumphed so brilliantly.

What I've never understand is what kept him from doing this earlier in his career, or at least sometime in the 90s. I mean, I guess "Outside" is quite daring in context, but he had even covered Scott's "Nite Flights", why didn't he take a cue and just run with it?

I haven't listened to ★ in a while. Now playing ICGEA. Try as I might, I can't detect the dissonant section in the chorus. I don't know what that says about me.

It doesn't exist. Can you guys hear the super high-pitched whistling-like sound? Maybe that is part of the harmony that you are missing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE1Zcngd3VA&t=4m59s
the whistle is isolated for like 5-6 seconds at this timestamp

(hmmm, I get a playback error on my work's internet connection when posting a youtube with a timestamp. try this redirect link to youtube: 4:59 into I Can't Give Everything Away)

I haven't listened to ★ in a while. Now playing ICGEA. Try as I might, I can't detect the dissonant section in the chorus. I don't know what that says about me.

― ilm jive mind (FlopsyDuck), Thursday, June 13, 2019 9:08 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the dissonance is harmonic. the part where he sings "i can't give everything" uses a tritone before resolving to the tonic chord on "away"

To quote the first music theory video that popped up when I googled tritone.

"We no longer hear the tritone as 'dissonant' as our 14th century counterparts did."

yeah and thanks to the blues, we don't really hear minor 2nds as dissonant either--doesn't mean it's not harmonic dissonance

Subjectively I can hear total harmony in the ICGEA chorus. To each their own, I guess. Most likely it will be my #1 song but I'm loving everything on my listen through today.

Those unstable passing chords are in a bunch of Bowie tracks, he’s the king of making daring chord progressions sound good

What I've never understand is what kept him from doing this earlier in his career, or at least sometime in the 90s. I mean, I guess "Outside" is quite daring in context, but he had even covered Scott's "Nite Flights", why didn't he take a cue and just run with it?

― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Thursday, June 13, 2019 9:57 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Didn't he get a lot of shit for Outside? Heathen & Reality were promoted as "return to form"'s right? Doesn't explain The Next Day though...

He had to find the band, right?

Subjectively I can hear total harmony in the ICGEA chorus. To each their own, I guess. Most likely it will be my #1 song but I'm loving everything on my listen through today.

― ilm jive mind (FlopsyDuck)

That *is* a tritone in the chorus. And tritones are regarded as dissonant to this day. It is a dissonant interval. But you might not hear it as such in this song.

Personally I don't get the love for "I Can't Give...".

I've written at this point thousands of words on behalf of Bowie starting with my college paper review of 1. Outside in which I called it the album of the year: its obscurity a

nd density were its attractions. I've been suckered by fake comebacks too -- until I learned to love, like, or dismiss albums on their own terms. I thought The Next Day a redundancy at the time and still think so; a couple songs are outright embarrassing. So what, right? Bowie is often embarrassing -- he takes risks, and an artist isn't taking risks if he doesn't court embarrassment. I thought his silence after the solid Reality among his canniest PR moves in a career full of them; why sully it?

Blackstar, however, astounded me. As with many syncretic talents, Bowie needed the right band: he couldn't have written this album in 1995 because he hadn't met these people in 1995. To his credit, though, he'd become such a savvy studio musician himself that his demos aren't much different from what winds up on the album, as every player has averred. God.

There are some decent songs on The Next Day but it's let down by some very unadventurous rock arrangements. Where Are We Now is beautiful, but imagine if he'd recorded it during the Blackstar sessions, it would have been so much better.

As with many syncretic talents, Bowie needed the right band: he couldn't have written this album in 1995 because he hadn't met these people in 1995

yeah this is the key for me - him and that band both propel each other to some astonishing places. There's such an incredible spark between him and that group, and you hear it right from the first notes, it animates the material in a really unique way. The songs are wonderful, but it's not hard for me to imagine a version of this record that doesnt work at all if he had just laid it down with some crack session players.

Tritones and m2's are definitely regarded as dissonances in the present day ftr, at least in the context of tonal music. The blues would sound less blue if we could not hear tritones as more dissonant than major thirds.

― All along there is the sound of feedback (Sund4r), Thursday, June 13, 2019 5:47 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think flopsy’s point (?) was that we don’t hear tritones as dissonant as our ancestors did

I think flopsy’s point (?) was that we don’t hear tritones as dissonant as our ancestors did

We have Les Paul and Jim Marshall to thank for that, I think.

Voted "Girl Loves Me". It's just what grabbed me today.

I have to work with Blackstar. It's a challenging 2016 record; I don't think the comparisons to "Station to Station" are 'superficial'. I do hear echoes of his self-destructive cocaine fascism. In early press for the record Bowie evoked the Vorticists; he would surely have known they went fascist. The European Canon is certainly a huge part of "Blackstar".

I don't know how to feel about this. Fascism is innately a music of death, so it makes sense that this part of him, which he persuasively debunked time and again ("Quicksand" also a sharp rebuke to his fascist aspect), would resurface once again. And his fascism was always personal, always occult. Blackstar isn't a prophetic album.

How do most people hear tritones in the present day? The whole discussion began because a poster said they find it grating in the chorus of "I Can't Give Everything Away".

Grove Online article by William Drabkin is p interesting, actually. The history of the interval and how it has been regarded is pretty complex, although tonal instability seems to be its basic characteristic.

...Since the beginnings of polyphony in the early Middle Ages theorists and composers have changed their attitudes to the tritone and its use more than to any other interval.

In the medieval system of church modes the tritone was most conspicuous as the interval between the final and the fourth degree of the modes on F, the Lydian and Hypolydian. Conjunct progressions that outline the ascending tritone or the descending diminished 5th F–B are not uncommon in Gregorian chant (although tritone leaps are rare; see Gellnick), and the introduction of B♭ in plainsong notation [done to avoid the tritone] seems to have been a relatively late development. The first known use of the word ‘tritonus’ occurs in the 9th- or 10th-century organum treatise Musica enchiriadis, though it was not explicitly prohibited until the development of Guido of Arezzo's hexachordal system, which made B♭ a diatonic note, namely as the fourth degree of the hexachord on F. From then until the end of the Renaissance the tritone, nicknamed the ‘diabolus in musica’, was regarded as an unstable interval and rejected as a consonance by most theorists. In the 13th century it was classified as a discordantia perfecta, along with the minor 2nd and major 7th; and by the 15th century the Lydian mode was understood as having a flattened fourth degree (Tinctoris: Liber de natura … tonorum, 1476), that is, as being a transposed Ionian mode, as Glarean defined it in the Dodecachordon (1547).

Since the 16th century the instability of the tritone has led to developments in two directions. On the one hand, its presence in the dominant 7th chord in four-part counterpoint has made the authentic perfect cadence an even stronger affirmation of the tonality, providing an approach by semitone not only to the tonic degree but also to the 3rd (ex.1a). However, because it divides the octave into two equal parts, the tritone has also assumed the role of the tonally most ambiguous interval, as opposed to the 5th, which divides the octave into unequal parts and is (apart from the octave itself) the interval most fundamental to tonality: in particular, the tritone has come to be recognized as a basic substructure within the diminished 7th chord and the whole-tone scale (ex.1b–c). In the chorale Es ist genug (ex.2) Bach used the tritone embedded in the major scale to create an ambiguity in the relationship between tonic and dominant. Both Mozart and Beethoven used tritones thematically or motivically to divide the octave into equal parts (exx.3–4). In 19th-century Romantic opera the tritone regularly portrays that which is ominous or evil; an early instance is in the dungeon scene in Act 2 of Fidelio, for which the timpani are tuned A–E♭. Its importance in dramatic music led to further developments in the extension and suspension of tonality, particularly in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal (see also ‘Tristan’ chord), the late piano works of Liszt and the music of Debussy (ex.5). In 12-note music, the fact that the inversion of the tritone at the interval of an octave yields another tritone (no other interval except the octave has this property) has proved fundamentally significant, both in theory and in practice.

For me, "Girl Loves Me" really communicates the dissociation and panic of an existential threat like knowing you have a cancer which will kill you soon. It commands my attention.

Played this lp last night and was again taken aback by how great it is. Also, I forgot how crappy the vinyl pressing is—very noisy. Is there a good quiet pressing?

As with many syncretic talents, Bowie needed the right band:

I was reading this interview with Matt Chamberlain the other day and he talked about the Heathen sessions, with just him and Bowie and Visconti, and how much Bowie fed off of what he was coming up with:

David is kind of like Tori, in that nothing is too precious and everything is permissible. You can try anything because if you don’t—and you just do what he wants—then what’s the point in having me there? He just let me go, and it was kind of mind-blowing. He would write a song and say, “Alright, what do you think”? And I would go, “Well, let me make a loop.” Then he and Tony would disappear and I would sit in the studio by myself. At the time, I was using a cheap Boomerang pedal to make loops and the whole time I was thinking, They’re letting me create the vibe of this song? This is a David Bowie record. Aaahhh!

It just occurred to me that people might be working with a general usage of "dissonant" as meaning something like "harsh/unpleasant/not belonging together". When discussing harmony, it refers to unstable harmonies that seek resolution and are an important element in tonal music. I don't believe that anyone hears #iv m7b5 as stable and resolved.

Harmony has multiple meanings as well

Man, she punched me like a dude

those last two WOOs! on ‘Tis a Pity
Damn

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I'm not a film star!

i'm not a gang starr!

we should do a ★ videos poll next

Tbh I feel like anyone not voting for the title ★ is fronting or taking it for granted.

the tension in the chorus before resolving with 'away' is the most magical part of the song IMO.

I saw NIN perform this on their last tour and it was pure magic.

Tbh I feel like anyone not voting for the title ★ is fronting or taking it for granted.

★★★★★★
★★★★★★
★★★★★★
★★★★★★
★★★★★★
★★★★★★

today i learned that a black star can be italicized

Like giancarlo esposito, sure

Title track through Sue is up there with Remain In Light for me in terms of all-time unfuckwithable Side 1’s

Er thru Lazarus that is, lol

3 hours left to vote

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

very surprised to see Lazarus so low (though i voted for ★)

Definitely surprised by those results. For me it's ★, Sue, Whore, Give, Lazarus, Girl, Dollar (the only song on the record I actually dislike).

glad Blackstar won

Black struck the kiss, she kept my cock
Smote the mistress, drifting on

and happy Tis a Pity placed so high

I still can't listen to this record though, I've barely revisited it since 2016. Just too much... I probably said this before but to face death with such dignity, strength, and risk. A truly remarkable man.

Sue is a really good song! Damn.

Yeah Sue is really something else. When I listen to the album straight through, by the time Sue is finished I usually need to turn it off for a minute and take a break to get my bearings

Is Turrican on holiday

You could put it like that.

it's more accurate to say that we're on holiday

Not banned is he? I assumed he was wisely stepping back from ILX for a while.

a little r and r at a ranch they call number 51

xp banned with extreme prejudice, I think he hit 55 before they pulled the plug

Oops.

The earlier version of "Sue", from the Nothing has Changed comp alerted me that Bowie was really back, and still much prefer it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NYgRuxO2sw

i was the only "girl loves me" vote?!?

i'm not decided between the "nothing has changed" versions of "sue" and "'tis a pity" and the blackstar versions. they're both good in their own way!

also "astronomy (8th light)" was robbed

I couldn't choose, but I might have voted for Girl Loves Me if I had been able to

xp, yeah i think the og version of sue absolutely destroys the blackstar version

It’s more highbrow, but I love the dirty drum’n’bass workouts of the album version. A little nod to Earthling which I still rate.