by WP64 Tue May 24, 2016 5:26 pm
Soma wrote:U're gonna run out of unique things to say by the 4th piano-lounge album if U cover Waits's entire career. Bowie would be better.
Oddly enough this actually been what has been attracting me more and more to people like Tom Waits (and Leonard Cohen). I'm just sick of the way in which think-piece culture co-opts Bowie's personas and creates this faux-narrative where he was some big ambassador of LGBT rights. I know it is super conservative and reactionary to think that way but it really pisses me off actually. I had friends who went to the Bowie museum thing last year and all they wanted to talk about is how Bowie realized that gender was fluid all the way back in the 1970s. I don't know. That might be true but it is really suspect to start thinking of cultural icons in that way because he also went through a drug-induced psychotic breakdown where he was doing the Nazi salute in public places so that kind of throws a fucking wrench in that.
I just find it boring and so I have become attracted to figures that can't be politically or sociologically reduced to progressive causes. Leonard Cohen is another perfect example. His life has absolutely no parallels to my own so it becomes impossible 4 me to appropriate. He is a trust fund baby who never had to work a day in his life, is an academically trained poet who spent a lot of time in monasteries, and performed 4 the Israeli Defense Forces. I can't relate to any of that and there isn't an interesting spin that I can put on that biography. He doesn't speak to me or 4 me in anyway but his music has a beautifully transcendent quality that pails in comparison to a lot of hipper artists.
Intransigent
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