Finally falling victim to those oh-so-nasty synths

that's technically true, though since he had had two keyboardists in his band almost from the start, it wasn't really that much of a stretch.

it's actually a bigger stretch than you think. cf yes w/ wakeman* and yes w/ trevor horn.

(* = i don't count wakeman's occasional gaseous omissions to be true "synth" playing)

i also reckon that marilyn manson's mechanical animals merits at least a mention ... though he did use synths before that.

zz top, eliminator! (invented BOTH trans am AND miss kittin!!)

good point. but i still think it wasn't much of a stretch for springsteen, who jumped from piano-plus-organ to synths-plus-organ without switching personnel or songwriting style. the bigger jump, to my ears, was going to that cliche '80s drum sound for "dancing in the dark."

i smell a "defend the indefensible" thread here!

(so, xpost)

i'm not sure what that means - i'm guessing it's to do with the extent to which he saw them as another kind of k/board rather than an eno-esque 'processor' or ravenstine-ish metaphoric sound provider...?

while he may not have gone beyond the transducer/interface being a keyboard and then definitely been hemidemisemiquaverous in the keyboardy nature of his synth playing overall, he (like emerson, albeit emerson had more excitingly extreme moments (ref. BSS's 'toccata')) at least (generally) used them to make sounds/timbres in their own right rather than trying to impersonate other timbres/instruments with them - there are lots of high-q low-pass-filter cutoff-freq sweepdowns littered throughout JTTCOTE & King Arthur that were most definitely 'synth' sounding enough for some of us in the first half of the 70's
(who also did see the difference with and like the more sequencer-driven or abstract possibilities)
there isn't alot of lfo modulation of oscfreq or filter-cutoff in his playing, no - but that wasn't suitable for the form of the work (and i haven't heard alot of that from any other synth-heavy k/board player from the early-mid 70's either - although i am not as familiar with stevie wonder's work as i would like to be...)
and the beautiful abstract burblings/twitterings in the intro/outro of 'close to the edge' show it was not beyond him

(also- the extent to which he was sensitive enough to the uses of pitchwheel/portamento, and especially the re-triggering behaviour of the env generators on the minimoog during the solos/scaleruns show he was sensitive to nuances of the instrument in its own right - although they may not have been getting used in a way you like/approve of)

(would barbieri's synth playing in post-early japan be 'true' synth playing because it is sparser ? or because he spends alot of time getting a suitable delicacy of sound ? if so - isn't that just a side-effect of a later/different kind of music ?)