i like it too, but i know it's dumb and it has no place on Diamond Dogs. the good news is he took the best bit and made it into something so much better. Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing is Bowie at his very best.
it's better than the '99 and the '90 EMI/Ryko. not as good as the original US RCA CD, but that'll cost you a lot right now. that's the Japanese issue (you can just about read the small print on the back if you zoom in), not sure why they don't have the EU edition listed. ps: the japanese CD costs £13.75 here, so that price is ridiculous.
Amazon UK rob you blind when it comes to imports. I can get the CD you mention on eBay for around £15. Weird that Amazon doesn't have the UK remaster, though. It can't be OOP already!
Superb in places, Sweet Thing in particular. Yet I still think Ronno and the Spiders would have done a better job on it overall. Listening to them smoke on Aladdin Sane, it makes you wonder what could have been. Pretty good - worth recommending.
Ronno & the Spiders would have made it a Bowie classic , agree that their omission only makes it pretty good!
absolutely. the following year Young Americans, a year later Station To Station and then both Low and "Heroes" in '77. these albums wouldn't exist if he'd remained tethered to one group of musicians.
It's a lot better than Aladdin Sane! Side 1 is completely faultless and the 'medley' is just sublime. Side 2 is not as strong but still very solid. Top 5 Bowie album for me (in no order HD, Ziggy, DD, STS, Low).
It's Bowie's guitar style (and vocals) which makes this LP so good. I loved the Spiders but it would have been Aladdin Sane 2 with Ronson. Ahead of it's time as usual - did anyone play guitar like that before DD? It was the first album to really show the depth of his vocal range, which he would use more as the 70s went on.
For me, it has two great tracks -- Diamond Dogs and Rebel Rebel. The rest don't really do anything for me. Still, having two tracks that are that great is much better than a lot of other albums that are released with none.
Couldn't disagree more but respect your opinion. Without sounding patronizing, have you listened to the album much? IMO, it's a grower and a top 6 or 7 Bowie album.
I'm not one who subscribes to the "grower" theory. If the songs haven't hit me after two or three listens as something that I like, the more I listen to them the more I end up being completely bored, or hating them. Bowie's catalog is like that all the way through for me though. I don't listen to any of his albums completely anymore, because there is only ever one or two songs at the most that are really great for me, but the rest fall totally flat. Actually, the only thing of his I listen to anymore is my custom version of ChangesOneBowie where I deleted John, I'm Only Dancing, Young Americans, and Golden Years, and added The Man Who Sold the World and Heroes. That covers Bowie perfectly for my taste.
The title track is a rhythmic masterpiece, never quite captured on any live version for some reason, never quite worked live. Somehow, it all comes together on the studio version.
Not as bad as "Can't Help Thinking About Me"... "My girl calls my name/'Hi Dave'/Drop in, see you around, come back/If you're this way again"
Another page, let's have another blog entry from my favorite Bowie site: We Are The Dead We Are the Dead. The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. All around the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers…everywhere stood the same unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four. “We are the dead,” he said. “We are the dead,” echoed Julia dutifully. “You are the dead,” said an iron voice behind them. George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty Four. Of Bowie’s Nineteen Eighty-Four songs, “We Are the Dead” seems to have been the most rewritten after the musical was scrapped, as much of its final lyric is a series of William Burroughs-inspired cut-up lines. This technique, which Bowie used for other Diamond Dogs tracks, entailed writing a lyric on paper, cutting the lines into strips, drawing the strips randomly (say, from a hat), then pasting the rearranged lines together to make a new lyric. The goal was to use blind chance as a midwife, to create bizarre juxtapositions that the conscious mind wouldn’t have considered. So you get lines like you’re dancing where the dogs decay/defecating ecstasy or I love you in your ****-me pumps/and your nimble dress that trails or the legendary curtains/are drawn round Baby Bankrupt. This was an outgrowth of a ’60s obsession with the spontaneous, the random prized over the deliberate—a belief summed up in an Allen Ginsberg quote: “first thought, best thought.” For Bowie, using cut-up was a way to get out of a creative hole, and it generally worked well for him. After all, Bowie had never been much of a traditional lyricist, and his lines often sounded better out of context. (It’s telling that Bowie’s cut-up lyrics don’t seem radically different from ones he wrote out start to finish.) The problem was that Bowie was still committed to these conceptual LP ideas, and so was stuck trying to make a narrative out of a set of, in some cases, deliberately nonsensical songs. “We Are the Dead” is reminiscent of Bowie’s late 1960s rant-epics like “Cygnet Committee” in that it forgoes a verse-chorus-verse structure in favor of a rambling trellis of verses that, only twice in the song, culminate in a weak 4-bar refrain. The song, as all of Bowie’s Orwell pieces are, is a minor key (Gm): it opens with two eerie eight-bar verses, dominated by Mike Garson’s electric piano and sung in a stage whisper by Bowie—these first two verses move through nearly every pitch in the key, from Gm to B flat (III) to D (V) to E flat (VI), back to Gm until they end, unresolved, on F (VII). Yet just when you assume Bowie will move to a bridge or chorus, he instead keeps going with a new 14-bar verse, spewing lines over a circular harmonic sequence, his vocal mainly accompanied by grating bursts of guitar while, every second bar, the title line sweeps by like a ghost on a stairwell. As if to counter the randomness of his lyrics, Bowie keeps to a fairly strict rhythm, singing a six-beat line for each bar (though as he goes on, his timing gets looser—he starts cramming in more words). A breath, and then the entire sequence repeats again, with the refrain dragged out a bit longer for the outro. There are only traces left of the Orwell narrative—for instance, “I hear them on the stairs”—but in its way “We Are the Dead” is the truest of Bowie’s Orwell adaptations. Winston Smith, with the Thought Police closing in on him, hopes that revolution lies in the working-class proles, who keep alive the freedom of the body, while Smith’s class will somehow keep alive the freedom of the mind—a belief that Smith’s subsequent conversion shows to be a cruel folly. But as John Huntington wrote in The Logic of Fantasy, a study of the Orwell novel, “to transform a dystopia to a utopia requires discovering a different set of images.” Bowie’s bilious, chaotic lyric, formed by deliberate chance, could also be a passkey. Recorded 16 January 1974, never performed live. - © Chris O’Leary Top: Erik Van Straten, “London, Thames, 1974.” We Are The Dead
“I love you in your ****-me pumps” At what age does the female realize that the high heeled shoe is designed to subliminally entice the male mind into rear entry of the wearer?
You've got your mother in a whirl She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl” “Rebel Rebel, you've torn your dress Rebel Rebel, your face is a mess” Speaking of dogs, is Rebel Rebel a dog? I mean he/she cannot be very cute if mommy can’t even tell, right?
