The two hundred and fourtieth album: #240 David Bowie - Hunky Dory
And with David Bowie entering the room, we see another piece of the seventies music fall into place. We're due to see a lot of different sides of his work, but the first on the list (his fourth studio album) both has a fairly singular identity - they feel like they sound as a single album - but show a variety of emotions, with the upbeat 'Kooks' followed by a slower, more depressing Quicksand. There's still a lot of production in it and it ends with the upswing that feels typical of the album's sound to help with that. Add to that the references to folk rock, with Song for Bob Dylan being the closest, towards artier rock, playing with glam influences, and it's it's a mix that not only sounds good, but has a lot of content in the lyrics as well to make these a lot more meaningful.
It's a delightful album, with something new hiding in each album in a burst of creativity that I feel we see in few artists - similar to the period of the Beatles working together and trying what they can do in their albums without having to worry about what others will say. Add to that the silliness showing through a bit in the start of a track like Andy Warhol - both a dedication to perfection and a moment of levity (at least to the listener) that punctures the mythical legend a bit to show the humanity underneath it.
The ninety-third classical recording: #397 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Piano Concerto no. 1
While the name of this piece may not be as descriptive, the opening few bars are familiar with a horn theme and various motifs that seem to have been used in a lot of other places. Oddly enough, it also feels like it stands apart from the more delicate rest of the work, the proper first movement relying more on just piano and strings and making for a gentler journey.
The piano work in this piece is obviously the focus and the performance of that is as amazing. There's a great focus on it in the first movement, but it's a constant presence that sounds complicated in a lot of places and clearly requires skill to pull off as well. This is strongest in the march of the third movement, which drives relentlessly forward. On the whole, this is a classic piece, but with more layers than you'd hear if you only listened to that famous introduction.
The eighty-fifth comic: #184 Uncle Scrooge: The Second-Richest Duck
Thanks to my grandparents' giant collection of Donald Duck magazines when I was growing up, I've read a lot of Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck stories. Coming back to it today then makes for a nice and comfortable restart on the comics list.
While I'm not sure I've read this story before, there are certainly a lot of familiar elements that these stories end up having, with this one being the first appearance of Scrooge's rival Flintheart Glomgold. The amount of ground it manages to cover in twenty pages is quite amazing - not just the two rivals meeting, but also their lengthy competition to determine who wins on the last bit of the test, the fowl with the longest piece of string (as their wealth is equal everywhere else). It's fun, following cartoon conventions, wiht a bit of tension built in even if you know who'll win it at the end by comic logic. For me, it really is a return to a familiar world and familiar art and this is a good entry in that series.
The two hundred and thirty-ninth album: #239 T. Rex - Electric Warrior
I see this album cited as kicking off the glam rock movement, the band's appearance on Top of the Pops setting up that idea more than anything. While I'm sure this played on trends that had started, there's something different about the rock played here. It's subdued, without the big flourishes from before, but still more produced than those early rock albums were. It differs somewhat between tracks, of course, but the well known Get It On is a good example of this - a fairly simple rhythm, relying on some harmonies but creating a sound that's clearly intentionally produced to create crescendos. Plenty of the other tracks beyond that don't necessarily stick with you, but they're fine to listen to, a decent album but I know glam rock will go further than this.
The one hundred and fifty-second TV show: #94 Top of the Pops
While originally a British show, Top of the Pops transcended borders and for some time some decades ago I watched the Dutch edition. It gave away the trick of the show quite quickly, as the show has an identical studio in each country it records in so they can share performances. For a Dutch boy, Wyclef Jean singing about '999' when the version played on Dutch radio used the American '911' was a dead giveaway.
This doesn't appear to have been as widespread as I thought, based on the lack of international editions in general, but it always stuck in my head as a bit of TV magic - the same sets everywhere with some editing magic did a lot of the heavy lifting there.
As to the show itself, while we are going to cover more of its genre in the future, this does feel like the ur-example of a show like it: several performers record a performance, a presenter links them and you get access to see these artists perform without having to get to a concert. It makes complete sense, especially in the time before music videos as a way to see these performances. At the same time, with the way technology has changed we don't need them when you can go on Youtube and see all of these performance, recorded legally or not.
We saw some random editions for this, thanks to BBC 4 repeats, but looking at that is just as much commenting on the music of the day as it is the show. The stages, after all, are what you'd expect from the day, abstract so it doesn't distract too much, while the show gives you the music I've discussed on plenty of other posts. The lack of adornment does it a big favour in that sense - not having to deal with other distractions means you just get a show that's as good as the music that contains it. The episodes we watched did still have the dance troupe performances, with Legs & Co in the episodes we saw. They make sense in the context of the show early on, since when a band can't or won't perform you still need to show something on TV, but these days the hastily created routines seem cheesy and unnecessary. As a show, though, this sets a template and I wonder how other shows like Soul Train will do following it.
The one hundred and fifty-first TV show: #855 The Big C
It's hard to come back from it when the first episodes of a show leave a bad taste in your mouth. Having dealt with cancer in my family, the way Cathy deals with her diagnosis - becoming selfish and steamrolling people without telling people about her diagnosis and getting their support - infuriated me. If her plan was to hide it, it feels like a way to deny everyone else a chance to stay goodbye and come to terms with it. I get that it's how people would react. It's something she tries to make up for later in the series - sort of - but the selfishness of it was off putting, even more in the ways I feel she was harming herself with it. It was too much to be able to bear and I forwarded to later episodes to get past that moment. It still didn't feel quite right and it didn't feel like something good. It's a decent, well acted show, but I just struggled to connect with people in a way that doesn't work for me.
The one hundred and fiftieth TV show: #800 Man v. Food
The concept of Man v. Food can be described as the Travel Channel doing a food show - host Adam Richman travels around the US and in each city visits a couple of restaurants and, at the end of the episode, takes part in a food challenge. Usually it's eating a lot of food (17 hot dogs in an hour, a truly pizza and so on), but in others it comes down to eating the spiciest meals. It's a good concept, not to be watched when you're hungry because this will make it worse. This is especially the case in the main part of the episode, when you get a bunch of cuisines on show and see how these are made. The challenge at the end of the episode can be interesting for a bit, but feels like it stretches out a bit too far and at times just gets gross. The food still looks good, but you ask yourself what the point is - why eat this much food when it just makes you sick.
Still, weird intermissions aside, it's a nice, simple food show mostly focused on common food - sort of American, in that it needs to have made it over there. It's a perfect show to have on during dinner, as long as they don't go too far on the gross side, which is the risk.
The five hundred twenty-seventh song: The Winner Takes It All - Abba
It feels like there's little to say about Abba songs that hasn't been said already. The Winner Takes It All has multiple layers, something that shows Abba at their best as there's the victory, making it something you can dance too, but with that melancholic angle that's in there, with Agnetha's almost spoken word bridge having most of this element. It's an interesting song with a real life element that's there, even if it doesn't quite reflect reality. It's a sad celebration that feels like it's one of their best in showing what they can do.
The five hundred twenty-eighth song: Rapture - Blondie
Part of the reason this song is its historic significance, the first song featuring rap to reach the number one position in the US charts. It's a weird experience, in part because these days, Debbie Harry's rap would sound more like a parody of the idea while here it's them using a musical style that seems to have been in their world and using a new tool in the arsenal. Even so, it grows the genre in a way by using its own music rather than sampling others, even as rap was, or became, a black culture phenomenon.
The five hundred twenty-ninth song: While You See a Chance - Steve Winwood
It feels like with the eighties coming in and Abba and the like setting a direction for music, that others follow. While You See a Chance moves a rock star to perform something closer to electronic pop and here it feels like part of that shift. The song itself is some nice synth rock, moving towards that more pop sound. The song's quite good for that, but it's also not the most out there or impressive song, instead it's more of an indication of a moment in how music developed.
The five hundred thirtieth song: Heartattack and Vine - Tom Waits
It's clear that blues rock from the 1980s is a different beast from what we've seen earlier in the list, and while Tom Waits' vocals match that of the performers of the sixties, there's something sleazier and darker in there that's everywhere, from presentation to sound, with lyrics about the dark side of life and those who are poor, rather than hardship and more classic stories that feature in other blues songs. The constant threat is there, and it paints a world that'll be a shock to the middle class, feeling exaggerated but still also grounded in reality.
The five hundred thirty-first song: Kings of the Wild Frontier - Adam & The Ants
There is a lot to say about what followed punk as you can say about punk itself. Adam & The Ants come from that world, but clearly build on their own things. They feel extravagant, creating a performance rather than just playing the music, and while the critical and political lyrics are still there, the driving beat that they made their signature goes beyond the punk aggression to feel the base of something that sound more threatening, contrasting more jubilant and louder vocals that build to aggression in a way that moves beyond that of punk - using the punk vocal style to mix with a more intense hard rock style that creates a threat and a performance more than anything else.
The five hundred thirty-second song: Redemption Song - Bob Marley & The Wailers
While this is one of the last Bob Marley songs released during his lifetime, there's also something about this in here that's specifically his. Recorded with just an acoustic guitar, the constant sound of reggae is gone in favour of a sad ballad that uses a style of singing that follows what you get in reggae rather than in country or such. It's a show of artistry, a call for continuing to fight for freedom that comes across far stronger because it's just Marley playing a guitar. It's unexpected, but for me this does feel like it's his best.
The five hundred thirty-third song: Dead Souls - Joy Division
Dead Souls is an interesting pick for the list, a heavy metal B-side with lyrics evoking an emotional darkness that's the band's trademark but eerily prefigure Ian Curtis' passing a few months later. It's dark and haunting for those reasons and difficult to listen to in retrospect. It references regression and past lives, but also through that the spectres of his past that keep calling him back. It's a difficult song to listen to with that retrospect and an unfortunate story that this leads into, but it shows how well music can send these emotions at the same time.
The one hundred and fourty-ninth TV show: #328 The Young Ones
I've had the DVDs of this show around for a long time, waiting to unleash them for this blog. With it having been a decade since I watched the series, it was interesting to revisit and see how it holds up. Looking at it, it's not the highest of humour, and the first two episodes is mostly the characters being mean and violent to each other, without much more going on. It gets better later, as that tones down in favour of more absurdist plots, surrounded with loads of slapstick violence and at times terrible jokes. It's the weird cutaways and out of nowhere jokes that work best, with the slapstick violence working best when focused and smaller - in particular when it starts making fun of its own tendency to do so in the later episodes.
The second season seems to have had a budget increase, used for longer and bigger cutaways, including hiring an elephant or two, and a bunch more fourth wall breaking gags (including one where Neil's parents comment on him starring in this terrible show). There's still a lot of commitment to the characters, four losers and stereotypes of the groups of students that seem to have been prevalent in the eighties, but the show moves beyond them more often. It's not the most amazingly clever comedy, but as the 1980s equivalent of slapstick comedy, with its aggressive attitude and criticism of the attitudes at the time, is still pretty good. You just need to get past those first few bad episodes.
The ninety-second classical recording: #258 Frederic Chopin - Nocturnes
Starting off my prep for this piece, I saw nocturnes described as a piece inspired by night, played later in the evening and, hence, sounding smaller than other pieces. There's a lot of sensitivity in these pieces as the piano gently plays - they are neat little pieces, performed well here - something that seemed challenging enough. It's good accompaniment, not necessarily something you fully focus on, but work as good background music. They're lovely, simple pieces that work really well.