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David Bowie talks about Technology and Music
nanuuq writes "Shift.com has got an interview with David Bowie.
" Bowie's a genius. Interesting perspectives on where art, music and technology collide with each other.
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Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
we know Major Tom's a junkie
Strung out on heaven's high
Hitting an all time low....
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Cool site. Thanks muchly!
And no! I made first post? Well, I never thought I'd see the day.
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.
I like David Bowie and (most) of his incarnations. But to say that he got by purely on talent and not his looks is to do him a disservice. Ziggy Stardust was as much about visual representation as it was the music and it influenced a whole generation. (Hence the poor copycat in Marilyn Manson) Bowie's look may have been non-traditional, but it certainly was attractive.
I will agree with you, though, that his time would be better spent promoting digital music of his ISP.
hmmm strange change of mind.. the last albume he put on the web was not available as mp3 but only in the propritary m$ audio and SDMI shit... the last concert was only broadcasted with the realmedia shit.. not mp3 there... and now he talks like he invented mp3...strange...
The man is the original pop chameleon.
Geek is cool, these days.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Has the so-called "MP3 revolution" had an impact on you?
Not even remotely. Revolution? I don't see it like that. It has been coming for a long time. I had a Rio last year! They've been taking my music and bootlegging my shows for ages. I know all the sites that have my bootlegs and all my MP3s. Actually, I don't give a flying fuck. I like the internet and I like the community. I think, to understand your presence on the net, you have to be a part of it and work within it. I thought it just looked so reactionary, for instance, of someone like Prince to clamp down on everything in terms of the lawsuits. You can't stop the sea from coming forward.
I think it's very cool that he is one (of the few) musicians who can embrace a technology, even though it has the potential to lower his profits (in this case, digital music formats like mp3) and use it to his advantage. I think Bowie is a smart guy, and he knows that one aspect of the music industry in the future is the internet. Instead of trying to delay the internet's role in music like other artists, he advances it's role, even going so far as to let his fans help him write a song. Now that is cool, and I hope that others (artists and labels alike) start to follow suit.
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"Insert witty quote here."
David Bowie is a publicly traded company. That's right David Bowie had his own IPO and like the rest of the public companies, he's got internet fever.
Why? Not because his 'digi-hip', not because he's ahead of his time, it's just the most cost efective way to reach the masses.
And these children that you spit on as they try to change there world, are a imune to your consultations, they're quite aware what they're going through . .
awwww wham bam thank you mame'
He also loves to drop names. I saw him on Charlie Rose blathering on about Basquiat, Warhol and other nonsense. He had absolutely nothing to say.
Look at his comment about Nietzsche, where he blames him for the atom bomb. Has he ever actually read Nietzsche? I bet not--he probably only knows that the man said "God is dead" and not the context in which it was said.
If you want to check out a musician who really has interesting things to say about technology and dystopian futurism, check out some old Gary Numan. Yes, his work has been forgettable since Telekon (here come the flames) but Replicas, Pleasure Principle and Telekon are brilliant. These three are available now on CD, remastered lovingly with bonus tracks and extensive liner notes.
Replicas is especially dense and meaningful to geeks. There is much in it that resonates with Burroughs and Philip K. Dick. The new songs on the remastered CD really add something to the mythology Numan crafted for this album. The liner notes on the rerelease are a must-read for fans.
This is a good example of why I like Numan. It's not a literal extrapolation of the future so much as a nightmarish whirl of poetic horror.
Groucho
Yeah, sure. He's a bit arrogant. But if I where him, I'd be arrogant too. (Heck, I'm not him, and I'm still arrogant).
Sadly, www.davidbowie.com is hardly what one would hope for. It should have been a lot lighter, or at least on a server that could take more. Half of the pages are always "Maximum users, try again later" or something like that (Not only now with the article, always). That's not very nice when every page has 20 frames.
Still, the music remains great.
Most industry icons tend to favor the status quo. It's very difficult to find anyone in the music industry who openly says they don't give a fuck about people dishing out their MP3s. Just look at the way most music labels try to clamp down instead of trying to understand how the net works.
In that light, what's surprising is how in-tune with the whole trading/dl'ing/mp3 culture bowie is, especially given the fact that he's from an older generation. I know *programmers* his age who have difficulty understanding the whole net culture and dismiss the internet as a fad.
Also, you need to keep in mind that celebrities are not particularly intelligent, smart people. When asked what she wished her computer could do, Jennifer Anniston wanted it to do her workouts. Scary Spice is known to have pointed to a monitor and ask if that was the internet. So....it's all the more admirable that Bowie is in touch with the whole net culture and actually grasps it much more than the industry executives. Even the frigging teletubby people have unleashed lawyers prohibiting fan sites from showing an image of Tinky Winky. Oh well.
w/m.
-- I'm not a freak show, I'm a mammal. --
Not to be too offtopic, but I found this article at the end to be more interesting.
9 9/7.1/html/jamaica.html
http://www.shift.com/shiftstd/html/onlineTOC/19
Stuff about kids and the spread of internet in jamaica.
and why does he keep saying it?
Tired of being another body in the flock? Linux ! We are not sheep anymore.
P.S. And what's with those lame-ass non-conformance HTML character entities for em dashes in the interview? Geesh. (You Windows weenies won't see the problem because your OS is subverting the standard and insidiously hiding the problem from you.)
Guess what. I'm stuck at work right now and had to read the article using Win98/IE4 and... I also got plagues with the "mdash" stuff.
There is a meta tag at the top of the pages that suggests that the pages were created with "GoLive CyberStudio 3". I would venture to guess that that software is the true culprit for the "mdash" entities.
K.
First of all,..Just so we're clear here.. No, my parents didn't name me after David Bowie. They actually picked my name out of a baby book. Lucky me, a transvestite pop star makes it big a few months after I was born in '74.
Secondly, i'm not a fan of David Bowie's music. I just felt the need to point out that he's basically full of shit. Bands that got their start in the early 70's like Neu, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Devo (and individuals *prior* to 1970 such as Oskar Sala, Raymond Scott, Bob Moog) were already heavilly involved in using elements of electronic music in their work upwards of 10-20 years before David Bowie and Brian Eno even began toying with the idea. The assertion that David Bowie is some sort of legendary pioneer of electronic music is absolutely laughable.
The whole concept of producing electronic music with machines stems back as far as the late 1890's, believe it or not. Go to Yahoo and look up "Telharmonium" if you dont believe me.
To make a very long and complicated story short, the first real application of electronic music popped up around the mid 1920's, with the introduction of instruments such as the Theremin, and the Clavavox (among others)
David Bowie's "contribution" to the popularization of electronic music stems from seeing bands like Kraftwerk and Devo in 1977-79 and doing his best to reinvent himself and base his gimmick around the same idea. Neither band owes their existance to him in any way.. In Kraftwerk's case, they'de been doing it since 1969. in Devo's case, 1972.
Read books. Everything else is a sales pitch.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
This is the same guy that when asked about how lengthy his Hours download was he replied something like, "But it only takes a few minutes at my house." Bowie's perspective is always going to be a rich man looking in regardless of how hard he tries to get in touch with the common bloke.
Now Bowie has reinvented himself as something like a modern philospher. Heh, its kinda cute, he talks about the inevitable tide of change while making pro-god and pro-religious appeals in the same breath.
The only really interesting and thought provoking part of his career was his SF themed songs from the last 60's. Which were quickly replace with his free sex/dj culture songs of the 70's, which of course were replaced by his yuppie culure songs of the 80's, *deep breath* which were replace by his techo stuff of late. Now he's going back and talking about his SF stuff in a Townshendesque 'I was geek before geek was hip.' Who would have thought the internet would bring dinosaurs back to life...
The entire Bowie mystique was partially SF based and partially occult based. For a little while in the 60's, psychedelic rock and SF had a fling going which a lot of musicians participated in. So I don't buy this 'I was the first guy to see the Mothership' mentality. Everyone was doing it, SF was ALL Jimi Hendrix read.
Now that he's older and his PR is wiser I'm sure he'll continue to pull an Al Gore, while showing us that, yes, he's a good vocalist/writer but a flake and opportunist.
But to me he'll always be the only walking corporation in the world!
Marking that post as a troll is really BS. Not approving of a /. stamped 'cool guy' is called the opposing opinion not a troll. Hopefully a cluefull moderator will fix this mistake.
Meta-moderators should be forced to read some guidelines before allowed access.
"Andy Walking! Andy tired.
:)
Andy take a little snooze-
Tie him up when he's fast asleep
Send him on a pleasant cruise.
When he wake up on the sea
He's sure to think of me and you
And to think about paint, and to think about glue
And a jolly boring thing to do."
*grin* if you hear it, you hear the contempt in it. Andy Warhol, what a plastic fellow.
Actually, he'd been reading Nietzsche as early as the 60s. He wrote a song about the Superman (NOT the DC comics character). I personally think the song sucked compared to his other songs, but he _did_ write it :)
This is freaky.
.. truly an awesome disc.)
:-)
I just got done throwing in "Children of the Night", a Nine Inch Nails bootleg that was recorded at a NIN/David Bowie concert. (It's got Trent Reznor and David Bowie doing duets of Reptile, Scary Monsters, and Hurt
So then I bring up Slashdot, and who's at the top of the list? David Bowie. Freaky.
Actually, it was pretty refreshing to see Bowie say that he doesn't give a "flying fuck" about the bootleggers. Bootleg CDs are a great way for fans of a particular artist or group to expand their collection. And if you think about it, concert bootleggers don't really take anything away from the artist. Who is hurt by somebody who's recording a concert, regardless of whether they're plugged into the soundboard or if they've just got some low-quality tape recorder near a loudspeaker? The artist(s) have already made their money off the concert; the bootleggers are simply providing a "permanent record" of the concert, so to speak. Seems like Bowie knows this, and is okay with it.
Interesting stuff.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
First of all, I don't care about being moderated down to "Troll", even though I was *not* trolling.
The fact that I was moderated *up* to +4 shortly after posting this article, and then subsequently back down to 1 (Troll) is just evidence that some moderator likes Bowie's music, and got offended that I might counter the party view that this Bowie interview is anything other than utterly boring. Big deal, the moderator system is what it is.
But the fact remains, this interview was utterly boring, and I fail to see the significance to the average Slashdot reader.
Is it not clearly obvious that Bowie is just Al-Gore'ing MP3, that he's Al-Gore'ing "geekiness", that he's just jumping on the bandwagon and getting some nice press to scare up a few more subscriptions to his IPO'd ISP?
To me, he's coming off as a tired old musician, who is attempting to cash in a few of his pop-culture chips. Sure, I appreciate his music (his earlier stuff, certainly), but I'm tired of hearing how he's responsible for all this wonderful new social change, when in fact he's had nothing to do with it.
This interview had *very little* to do with Bowie's artwork, his music. It had everything to do with Bowie getting up there on a bandwagon and Al-Gore'ing everyone about how wonderfully technologically inclined he is, how he predicted the future in the 60's, and how he was tragically 'with it' enough to have been part of the MP3 scene.
This whole interview gave me flashbacks to when Billy Idol was trying to come off as The Original Cyberpunk in the early 90's. How utterly droll.
Since Slashdot is often a host platform for incisive social discussion, I fail to see how this Bowie article was anything other than an opportunity for a few Slashdotters to get out there and get some warm fuzzies about their favourite musician - that's fine, but I find it humorous to say the least that there are a few moderators who can't recognize Bowie's grandstanding for what it is, and chose to Troll me down just because I don't buy Bowie's party line.
Bowie Al-Gore'd me to death. Bowie is boring.
Is this really a Troll?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
There are two other cool stories on Shift:
g 7.1.asp?searchfor=7.1hannah
a tures.asp?searchfor=artmark
Fourteen-year-old Makonnen Hannah is wiring his nation and leading it into the twenty-first century.
http://www.shift.com/shiftstd/SiteMap/frames/ma
Remember the folks who replaced Barbie's chirp with GI Joe's macho grunt? If you don't, It's because no one ever learned their true identity.
Now ®(TM)ark's back with a new strike against the corporate empire.
http://www.shift.com/shiftstd/SiteMap/frames/fe
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
My favorite rock star geek has always been Todd Rundgren.
He has been a known computer hacker since the 70's, fiddling with all manner of kit computers and so forth, especially those that had some musical or "media" orented accessories.
He was one of the very first beta testers of the "Newtek Video Toaster" (the coolest Amiga accessory card ever, IMHO), as well as numerous other computer based media orented products.
As for David Bowie, the interview certianly seems to indicate that he is more technologically hip than the average pop music star. Good for him!