:)

Un placer y más viniendo del supercompartidor

A mi lo que más me gusta es ver como en un país serio, la música ocupa ese lugar preeminente. Te copio pego un par de articulos más de la edición de ayer, este hombre ESTÁ dentro de ellos.

Y The Guardian también está lleno de cosas interesantes sobre el tema, pero como es en abierto que las busque el que quiera ;)


Bowie’s back and it’s all hunky dory: Thin White Duke returns to his golden years
Caitlin Moran


“Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz/You never knew I could do that/Just walking the dead,” comes the voice that, for those of a certain generation/persuasion, we will always attend to faithfully - like dogs with a silver dog-whistle.

In yesterday’s pre-dawn, David Bowie came out of retirement spectacularly. A surprise new single – Where Are We Now? – arrived overnight, like unexpected snow; accompanied by the news that it would be followed by an album, in March.

The first alert appeared on Twitter at 5am. By six, messages were speeding by, like rush-hour trainlines. Sitting and watching the world waking up to Bowie’s abrupt and unforecast return, after a decade of silence, was an oddly moving thing – adults reacting to that rarest of things: a newsflash of good news, not bad. People, still in bed, were checking on phones and laptops, and feeling the sudden bolt of warmth you have when an old hero comes, without warning, back into your life.

Re-started fans were Tweeting favourite Bowie videos, and playlists; pictures, and lyrics. A slow, happy wave of Bowie-love rolled over the world: Earth’s collective thought-bubble would have showed mis-matched eyes, and Rebel Rebel, and that life-changing arm - casually-not-casually slung over Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops. It would have had that dyingly-defiant cry of “Nothing!” in “Heroes?”, digging a million nails into a million palms as the adrenaline spiked, inexorably, for the thousandth time.

Before breakfast on a Tuesday – the Tuesday where most kids went back to school; a Tuesday that should have been grumpy with lost shoes, tangled hair and undone homework – the elders had had a small, unexpected Bowiemas.

And it was unexpected. After his emergency heart surgery nine years ago we had wholly, but sadly, understood why Bowie had withdrawn from the world stage, in the middle of a tour that kicked off, spiritually, at the Glastonbury Festival in 2000 - Bowie cutting through his hits with imperial glory. I stood on top of a bin watching him pulverise Let’s Dance – all angles, all the dance floor: the most impeccable, sharp-suited, laser-eyed, one-man city-disco, turning a cold arable field into Studio 54.

So after they sewed his heart back up, no one could begrudge him retiring, wounded, from “being David Bowie”, when he’d done pretty much everything the Beatles ever did - but on his own, and whilst being gay/bisexual. And ginger. And with a bost eye. David Bowie owes the world absolutely nothing.

However, here he was, before sunrise, being as contrary as he ever has: giving us a present, on his 66th birthday; showing us he still had something to say. “As long as there’s fire,” as he puts it on Where Are We Now? - a song that has him appearing, figuratively at least, back on the streets of Berlin - the setting for three of his greatest albums: Station to Station, “Heroes?” and Low.

He seemed to be quietly singing about how he has been walking the streets for a while now with no one recognising him – there is the elegiac air of being a wise onlooker, in a crumpled raincoat, sitting at a café, watching his younger self walk by – either coked up and pale, all cheekbones and sleeplessness; or perhaps just in his satin and tat - frock coat and bipperty bopperty hat optional. Where Are We Now? is a song that shows every year of Bowie’s age beautifully. It is a worn voice, a gentle voice; a voice with small burn-holes; slight foxing.

Of all the things, it most reminded me of David Attenborough - narrating some extraordinary murmuration of starlings, or a thaw. A voice that has a superior grasp of how large and unlikely the universe is; a voice that has come to appreciate the value in simply being alive.

And when millions of people heard that voice again – unexpectedly, in the dark, this morning – for a beautiful hour of generational assembly, they appreciated that, too.

Only David Bowie could make a song about using public transport in Germany, and thinking of the dead, so lovely.

David Bowie’s new single Where Are We Now: first listen
Will Hodgkinson Chief Rock Critic


Ever since his 1980 album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), there has been a tradition of hailing most releases by David Bowie as a return to form while secretly knowing they’re not quite as good as what came before. This surprise single breaks that tradition. Where Are We Now?, a mournful reflection on Bowie’s years spent in Berlin in the mid to late Seventies, actually does return to what Bowie does best: it delivers a sense of gravitas and quiet despair within a cloak of elegance.

Beginning with a simple, shimmering guitar and piano sound over a funereal beat, Where Are We Now? is a nostalgic look at a city divided by the Wall. “Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz,” Bowie sings, his voice aged but still distinct, as he references the square in central Berlin that was one of the first places where the Wall was breached. The lyric sets the song into the everyday, with the mention of a train pulling Bowie away from superstar status and down towards the street. He goes on to sing about “sitting in the Dschungel in Nürnberger Strasse” — the Dschungel was a nightclub that was a regular haunt for Bowie and Iggy Pop in their Berlin days, not an actual jungle — with a sense of nostalgia befitting a 66-year-old man reflecting on past adventures.

By the time Bowie sings about being “a man lost in time near KaDeWe”, an abbreviation of Kaufhaus des Westens, Berlin’s biggest department store, soaring strings augment this delicate ballad and add a sense of grandeur to the grey, rain-soaked atmosphere. “Twenty thousand people cross Böse Brücke, fingers crossed just in case,” sings Bowie with rising cadence; Böse Brücke was the first border crossing that allowed people through on November 9, 1989.

A rising, rousing chorus, in which Bowie sings “as long as there’s sun, as long as there’s rain, as long as there’s fire, as long as there’s me, as long as there’s you”, gives hope to this message of melancholic reflection.

Where Are We Now? feels as though it could sit easily on Low, Lodger or “Heroes”, the three albums Bowie made in Berlin, but with an added gravitas that only age can bring.

It also, funnily enough, sounds a little like the song Bowie performed on a 2007 episode of Ricky Gervais’ TV sitcom Extras, possibly titled Chubby Little Fat Man, which was arguably his last original tune. It’s an impressionistic piece of music, unforced and stately, and it augurs well for Bowie’s forthcoming album, The Next Day, to be released in March and recorded in New York with his long-term producer Tony Visconti.

UN CONTRAPUNTO A LOS ELOGIOS

Bowie: chameleon, Corinthian, comedian — caricature?


David Hepworth
Published at 12:01AM, January 9 2013

David Bowie’s new single has been greeted like the Second Coming. But hold on, says David Hepworth, it’s not that good

No matter what the world makes of the qualities of Where Are We Now?, the new song that David Bowie released yesterday on his 66th birthday, it underlines once again his unassailable status as the rock legend on whom flies are least likely to settle.

Where Are We Now? is his first new music in ten years and, as such, we might reasonably have expected that it would be preceded by the traditional extended warming-up period. A Girls Aloud release spends months in the ballyhoo machine beforehand. Instead this appeared, as the Bowie fan and songwriter Gary Kemp said to me via Twitter, “out of a clear blue sky”. I know a few people who live, move and have their being through the Dame, as even his biggest fans know him, and even they didn’t see this coming.

In March last year Kemp was unveiling a plaque on Heddon Street in London’s swinging West End to mark where the cover image of the 1972 Bowie album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars was shot. Like most of us he was getting used to the idea of thinking about Bowie in the past tense. Bowie, it was said, was remaining in New York, where he was concentrating on his family and occasionally counting the large pile of cash made from selling so-called Bowie Bonds in the late 1990s. Either that or his health was no longer good enough for him to be able to secure the insurance that so-called “heritage artists” need in order to go where the real money is nowadays, which is in touring.

All that changed yesterday when Bowie “dropped” (to employ an expression that wasn’t in widespread use when he put out the last one) Where Are We Now? on an unsuspecting world. Being newly tooled up with social media, people were ready to hyperventilate themselves into a state of hysteria which the record itself — a tricky-to-love rumination on the time he spent in Berlin in the late 1970s, delivered very slowly to disguise the fact that it doesn’t have much of a tune — doesn’t obviously warrant.

To most fans that didn’t matter. They just wanted a sign that Bowie is still with them. An older generation felt something similar in 1995 when the first Beatles Anthology was released. I dimly remember Radio 1 clearing the decks for the first play of the underwhelming Free as a Bird. Some music business hands say you can’t hype music any more because the gap between the message and the music has disappeared. Having witnessed yesterday’s reaction some would say you no longer need to hype people because they are quite happy to do it for you: witness the recent comebacks of Led Zeppelin and the Stone Roses.

In the wider world the received wisdom is that David Bowie has a unique ability to reinvent himself. This wisdom is the key message of David Bowie Is, an exhibition of his old costumes and related artefacts due to open at the V&A on March 21, which, funnily enough, is shortly after the new Bowie album comes out. I went to the press launch last year and was amazed by Bowie’s enduring ability to have the art establishment eating out of his hand, convinced they’re watching bold experimentation when what they’re actually witnessing is the same desperate thrashing around for a hit the rest of planet pop is engaged in.

“David Bowie is a proper artist. He releases records when there’s something to say,” commented my colleague John Wilson of Radio 4’s Front Row programme. Well, yes, he is an artist, but he’s also, as the most cursory examination of his CV will tell you, a beat boom chancer who owes every bit as much to Larry Parnes as William Burroughs.

His true genius could lie in making his biggest supporters overlook the number of very clunky records he’s made. The ten-year gap that led to this release may be the time it took to make people forget its immediate predecessor, Reality, which was released in 2003. In fact you have to go back to 1983’s Let’s Dance to find him having hits as a matter of course. Since then much of his output has been well-chosen collaborations with people such as Mick Jagger, Pat Metheny, Queen and the producer Nile Rodgers, who made one of the transformational decisions on Let’s Dance by persuading Bowie to start the song with the chorus. (If he’d been involved in Where Are We Now? Rodgers might have told him to begin with the end.) On two albums he attempted to pass himself off as a member of a group called Tin Machine, which even his most devoted fans find it hard to enthuse about.

Like most acts whose massive legend overshadows their actual output, his claim on pop immortality is grounded in a period of extraordinary cleverness and invention. For most people it’s only three years. But Bowie’s began with Hunky Dory in 1971 and, with the occasional misstep, carried on until Let’s Dance in 1983. That long purple patch included records as different as Life On Mars? and “Heroes” and as far apart texturally as Drive In Saturday and the album Low.

He was full of big talk throughout that time, but he also acted like a man who understood the central truth of the music business, which is that people buy catchy tunes. The majority of those customers who once slapped their money down on the Woolworth’s counter and now lodge their credit card on iTunes are interested above all in something they can whistle. That’s the true art of pop. No matter what claims the critics may make, the “a” remains lower case.