Promising a new record for years and failing to deliver it (Dr. Dre, The Stone Roses, Guns N’ Roses, etc.)
Promotional photos with all band members wearing sunglasses has always indicated this to me for some reason lol
I'd be surprised if Bowie was the opener. I don't think NIN would do that, but I can definitely see that young people would have been more interested in NIN than Bowie. Now Bowie is rightfully regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists in rock, it's easy to forget how little interest there was in his current music and how little credibility it had between the mid 80s and mid 90s. He was ridiculed a lot by the music press. I was in my mid - late teens in the early 90s and current Bowie wasn't credible to people my age. His old stuff always was.
The Earthling album wasn’t liked at all at the time and his excursion into drum n’ Bass was widely ridiculed.
We can safely assume that Dionne Warwick's and Frankie Valli's careers were in decline much sooner though.
I remember laughing at that album. I liked Little Wonder but then the second track was woeful. Having said that, I hated drum n' bass! Edit:. I've just remembered that how we had the album was that someone I knew had gone to buy the Little Wonder CD single, but was mistakenly given the CD album instead. She felt short changed!
Garth was declining so rapidly he added his own steps. How about change your name, look and genre, and then release the first album as your Greatest Hits. Exhibit A for sales figures don’t equal greatness.
Disagree about re-recordings. That’s just an attempt to own the copyright to their own masters.. Touring to celebrate an older album likewise is just fan service.
I thought 'Who's that? He looks like a dick!'. Then went to Wikipedia. There are times when you can judge a book (or CD) by it's cover and you should trust your first impressions. This is both.
There is, and the points are weighted towards ‘commercial decline’. If an artist is running short of an income stream, they don’t have the luxury of making ‘artistic decisions’. Unless they’re Lous Reed (and even then....)
I'm (half) serious about this by the way. IMO most rock/pop artists (with some obvious exceptions, like Leonard Cohen) do their best work before they turn 30. Look at their album ratings (and sales, indicative but not definitive). I use it as a rule of thumb, to encourage myself to listen to newer artists rather continuing to buy the latest releases from artists I used to like which, while okay, aren't as good, even if each new release is billed as 'a real return to form'. I can't listen to everything, so I think I'm better off trying to find something new that's good, rather than settling for okay. On a similar subject, there's an interesting paper on the subject of creativity in music and age on the NBER website: Innovators: Songwriters
The thing with re-recording hits for a new label is that usually when an artist leaves the label their biggest successes were on, that career decline is well underway.
Christmas albums... Is it a matter of career decline or jumping the shark? Or maybe they are the same thing. Scott
It certainly wasn't writer's block anyway. Bowie was consistently putting out one album a year in that era, and Pinups wasn't one of those. It was an extra album released midway between two album which were themselves about a year apart. Ferry did solo covers albums while Roxy Music were active since they got all his originals. Sure some writers are prolific enough to write two full albums of originals per year, but its pretty rare. He did cheat a bit though, in sometimes putting Roxy Music "covers" on the b-sides of his singles, to get some publishing money for himself on solo singles sales.
