Bowie does prog

"The Man Who Sold The World"

Loving this one lately!  So heavy, so cheesy!  Sounds strange but I'm hearing a lot of similarities with some of the lesser known prog acts from the same time period (like New Trolls, Kyrie Eleison, VDGG) and of course heavy doses of Sabbath, Queen, Zeppelin, Spinal Tap....  I'd have to research as to who was copying who but can guess.  Anyway, it seems like he just "went there" briefly and quickly moved on to the next thing, glam, etc... 

All The Madmen...

Cheesy in the absolute best way.  Madmen is certainly cheesy and pretentious in places but again, great!

Yes he did a lot of genre hopping (& prog has a lot of sub-genres) but nothing I've heard him do sounds like this.  Dated but timeless.  Covering a Nirvana song 20 odd years before they did, brilliant...

I'm a fairly big fan of The Running Gun Blues although it's not really a progressive track.

It's a great album

The labum he released in 1995, 'Outside' is rather experimental and mixes a lot of musical genres : indus rock, jazz, techno, pop...This is one of his most outstanding albums.

The Berlin trilogy of Low, Heroes and Lodger....prog all over the place.  Even in his blue-eyed soul period Bowie was doing proggy stuff....Station to Station also has prog all over it.  Of course, it was the sound of the times and Bowie was definitely a genre jumper....whatever worked (and sold).

tarkus1980 wrote: "The Man Who Sold the World" (the album, not the song) = Big Fat Ehn.  Half good, half not.

Actually that's a good way to put it.  In fact all the Bowie albums I've heard (even Low, hell, even Let's Dance) contain some really great tracks and some not so great, annoying even. 

I would agree he is generally about as progressive as an artist can get in the most literal terms, touching on various prog styles often along with many other.  But there are 5-6 songs on this album that (given the year, 1970!) could have been just as influential on the big prog wave to come as the bands we always refer to.  Even soon to be A list bands like Queen and Led Zep weren't rockin' this hard and this trippy in 1970.

Soon after, Bowie came to be identified with the glam crowd, which influenced the punk crowd (aka, the whole anti-prog thing).  Probably one reason why he's not often thought of as a "prog" influence.  That is until you start thinking about it.

Anyway, that's what I was trying to say but probably still haven't done a very good job...

 

thechrisl wrote: (thread moved) Guess we know how the admins feel about Bowie & prog...

The thread was moved to the Prog-Related lounge (possibly by me) because Bowie is included in Prog-Related.  I think he has merit for Crossover Prog (especially for the Berlin trilogy), though I'm fine with him in Prog Related, and if he were ever moved to that category, then this would be better suited to the Prog bands/ artists Appreciation lounge. It has to do with how we organise the categories.

I like his Krautrock influenced music.

By the way, a couple of tracks I like muchly off of "Heroes":






Edited by Logan - November 02 2010 at 15:50

Bowie is truly progressive music, but not "progressive rock" as a genre. In other words, progressive approach, not prog by style.

BTW this was a pretty good book:

http://33third.blogspot.com/2005/08/low.html