(Idea blatantly ripped from Tim Bray: if the title looks funky, here’s why.)
This track has just been leaping out from my so-called random playlists: Bowie’s over-the-top theatricality, some tasteful crunchiness from Mick Ronson, and words that seem up-to-date, perhaps too much so.
President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a Saviour MachineThey called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom‘Please don’t believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
or maybe a war, or I may kill you allDon’t let me stay, don’t let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I’ve seen
You can’t stake your lives on a Saviour MachineI need you flying, and I’ll show that dying
Is living beyond reason, sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign, I can steal every mindDon’t let me stay, don’t let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I’ve seen
You can’t stake your lives on a Saviour Machine
So much for faith-based whathaveyou . . .
I haven’t listened to the rest of the record as closely as this track or perhaps it hasn’t registered as strongly, but it’s early 70s Bowie, with the simpler mixes and intimate sound that is more widely associated with Ziggy Stardust. So it’s all very listenable, perhaps experimental at the time but now assimilated into the language. And hardly obscure, so you can find it wherever fine audio recordings are sold[iTMS | AMZN].
Now playing: Son’s Gonna Rise by Citizen Cope & Santana from the album “The Clarence Greenwood Recordings”
The idea of picking a single track stems partly from this which I read over this weekend: From Abba to Zamballarana, and from Mozart to Eminem, one of rock’s finest talents has identified 500 albums essential to a happy life. He picks albums but lists tracks that make the album irrestible. But we all know of albums where the wheat is outweighed by the chaff: do we need both?
I am more and more convinced the album, that arbitrary slab of content designed by record executives to maximize revenue, is dead. Oh sure, artists still make them, I hear on the radio that The Starving Juggler Quartet are holed up in the studio recording a new album, and I think “why?” Why an album, ie 10-12 songs 40 to 60 minutes of music? Sounds like a 500 word paper on the Huguenots: maybe you could do in 200 well-chosen words, or perhaps 5000 might be needed to really explore the topic.
I never listen to albums as albums, as in load the disc or select the title and play through: does anyone? I wonder why people still make them that way. It’s not like we’re seeing concept or thematic albums too much these days.
Do you listen to albums all the way through regularly? At all? And which ones compel that kind of listening?