![MI0002536529[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/0AJydkq.jpg "MI0002536529[1].jpg")
Give me an honest opinion.
Who has had a greater influence on rock music than this man? Are the haters just contrarians? I know that /mu/ loves this man, I was in the thread we had when he died. From my perspective, the only people that hold a candle to him would be Paul McCartney and Frank Zappa. McCartney struggled to make it post-Beatles (>muh Band on the Run), and while Zappa is a much more talented musician he never had the same appeal as a songwriter as Bowie.
I don't take this as absolute. In fact, I want to be challenged. I'm 22 and I've been listening to music "seriously" for six years and David Bowie is the only musician that I feel the same spark of passion for as I did the moment I clicked on "Five Years." Yeah, he sucked in the 80's and 90's, but he had close to 30 albums and at least 8 of them are 7/10+. You can't say that about a lot of people.
Who would you argue is better? What are your favorite Bowie songs? What is your favorite album? CAN WE TALK ABOUT DAVID BOWIE?
I thought I was done with his earlier stuff but I recently found the BBC double album with him doing his early stuff live with Mick Ronson and I fucking love how great he has always been.
>>63676684
>From my perspective, the only people that hold a candle to him would be Paul McCartney and Frank Zappa.
>>63676684
Neil Young
Van Morrison
Tom Waits
Zappa
Bob Dylan
are all significantly better and more influential
>>63676684
only #2 to McCartney, simply because he's like the elder statesman of rock music now, just as he was the (comparatively) level-headed Beatle. Regardless of whether he is making good music or shit, his reputation carries weight and he will be influential.
Personally I probably prefer Bowie but McCartney is still the king. The only person whose passing will create an even greater shockwave of posthumous appreciation
>>63676729
I'll admit, I haven't listened to a lot of Bob Zimmerman.
>>63676753
who has Tom Waits actually influenced?
I'm serious.
Besides, Van Morrison has an album. Bowie has a career
>The only person whose passing will create an even greater shockwave of posthumous appreciation
I didn't even think about this.
Is /mu/ going to pretend to hate the Beatles once Paul dies?
>>63676768
Well I won't steer the thread TOO farin his direction, since it's clear you wanted to talk about Bowie, but it IS worth mentioning that Bowie's ability to move from style to style and still retain his own creative individuality has its roots in what Dylan was doing in the mid-to-late '60s. He's the guy who proved that rock music could be about ANYTHING, and Bowie is probably the guy who took that notion and ran with it the farthest.
Zappa is the only answer.
>>63676795
there's gonna be a bunch of anons saying Wings is better probably.
And they'll all be 13 when he dies
>>63676788
A shit career, his only good albums are collaborations with Eno and Fripp who actually had talent.
What has Bowie even done that's influential?
His most famous album is a rock opera released as the trend was slowing down, not even during the beginning.
T. Rex alone was way more influential than any of his glam rock albums, so that covers through Young Americans.
Which isn't an influential album, nobody remembers plastic soul and it certainly wasn't a trend in the mainstream.
Station to Station is the one interesting and influential Bowie album he did on his own, I'll give you that.
Low - Lodger was a combination of Eno and Fripp that took the music to interesting new heights, not Bowie.
Scary Monsters is most notable for Fripp's guitar playing.
and he doesn't have any more good albums.
>>63676799
No...this is what i wanted. If you think Bob Dylan was a bigger influence on rock music please say so and don't pussy foot.
I've listened to a few of his albums...my favorite is Blood on the Tracks but i can never listen to more than a few of Bob Dylan's songs without being either annoyed with his voice or tiring from keeping up with the descriptions and narratives that he presents in each of his songs. I feel like i can't follow along without reading along with the lyrics.
I could put Bowie's discog on shuffle from Space Oddity to Let's Dance and be happy with whatever comes on. I may come off as a fanboy, but Dylan's music always came off with the same vibe. I would love you to prove me wrong, though
Bowie is a good answer if you're too pleb to follow the careers of people like Robert Wyatt, Tom Waits, Fred Frith, Eugene Chadbourne or Brian Eno or some shit, but there are people who have him matched pretty consistently like, as mentioned in this thread, Bob Dylan or Frank Zappa or Neil Young while also occupying radio conventions
>>63676892
dude was a cultural icon. He changed with the times. How many people had a unique and recognizable character like Ziggy or the Duke?
Then how many people had that many different characters? Hint: nobody. He influenced pop culture as much as he influenced music. He was a style icon, a pop star, a movie star.
And you're absolutely right, he picked great collaborators who helped him realize his vision of greatness. Eno didn't knock his door down and tell him he was going to make his music good, Bowie got him to elevate his game even more.
The haters just aren't moral degenerates is all
>>63676972
i like how you steer a musical discussion towards the question of who was a more iconic actor
pop theatrics are pleb bait and you fell for it
good on him for doing interesting characters. some of us aren't immature enough to get excited about stuff like that
>>63676892
>Low - Lodger was a combination of Eno and Fripp
If you read the 33 1/3 of Low you'd realize that Eno only gave Bowie the bare essentials to come up with the sounds he made. They worked together and it's ridiculous to assume that the success of the Berlin Era was solely due to Berlin and Fripp. Lodger is horribly underrated and Bowie has said it would have been better if it had not been for "creative differences" between him and Eno.
>>63676984
upvoted because aaron
>>63677001
Lodger is a shit album, who cares about proto-Death Grips
anyway Heroes is better than Low and that has both Eno and Fripp doing their work
>>63676992
dude you missed my point entirely
His music changed with his characters. A Ziggy guitar solo is nothing like some Young Americans soul. He influenced so many different veins and iterations of rock music, and set the stage for people later on down the timeline to bring in other styles of music (like ambient)
>>63677021
Lodger is most definitely not a shit album and I don't see any association with death grips. The first half of Lodger is awesome how can you not like Fantastic Voyage and Red Sails?
>>63677021
>proto-Death Grips
whoops showing your cards there anon
any album from 197-fucking-9, made by a notable popular artists, that can be described that way is important. Sorry to break it to you
>>63677049
If you actually read into music's history in the last century, even just a little, you'd see that basically everything Bowie did was primarily an extension of someone else's creation.
For example, T. Rex is way more influential than Bowie's entire glam rock phase and they're just the most well known glam rock band from the era.
That's not to say Bowie didn't make great music at times, but nothing he did was anything close to unique (Low, Heroes, and Lodger being exceptions).
>>63677049
>>63677049
This was something I didn't understand for a long time. It added to the "mystery" of his stage persona. For a long time he never was himself on stage but a character he created to portray the themes of his album. That, in itself, is a genius play. He had to craft his whole shtick to appeal to us Americans and everything because he knew how ahead of the times he was.
>>63677099
it doesn't have to be though, he gave it a popular stage and a wider audience, just as Byrne did with afrobeat
>>63677099
>(Low, Heroes, and Lodger being exceptions)
>his most influential albums being exceptions to the fact that "nothing he did was anything close to unique"
What point are you trying to prove? Marc Bolan was better than David Bowie? Fucking kek. Marc Bolan was stuck. His first three albums are indistinguishable from one another. He's lucky he died young enough to be immortalized. If he continued he would be a fucking hack like Lou Reed.
>>63676895
That's fair, Dylan's origins in the folk tradition definitely means that he leaned very heavily on his lyrics to support his work, which can make a lot of his "classic" work overly collegeiate or damn near impenetrable. For what it's worth, and this might sound screamingly, pretentiously artsy-fartsy, but I've found that it's best not to try to interpret every word or phrase and just let his imagery paint whatever picture it wants to in your mind's eye.
As far as his music itself goes, like I said, he was the guy who kinda started the idea that you could take the basic ingredients of rock n' roll - strong backbeat, electric instruments, youthful energy, etc. - and throw in whatever OTHER artistic stuff excites you, if it helps you achieve your vision. He threw in traditional folk music and modern surrealist poetry and Biblical parables and all other sorts of things, which makes his stuff exciting to hear, at least for me. I especially like his first electric album, Bringing It All Back Home because it just captures that ramshackle sort of "throw it to the wall and see if it sticks" spirit and lo and behold, most of it DID stick.
Now that said, he never quite had Bowie's gifts as a writer of melodies or chord changes. He couldn't have written Life on Mars? or Width of a Circle or even Starman, you know? That's the main difference that separates the two of them, I think. Dylan was more of a visionary, and Bowie was more of a craftsman. There's virtue to both.
