I've attempted lists of this sort so many times and it never gets easier. However in celebration of his birthday (Wednesday Jan. 8th 1947 at... 10:59 pm) I'm going to try again! Bottom up!
10. Time
This is such a great song... it takes a while to get used to though, but it's sooooo worth it. It starts out really dark and cryptic but somehow Bowie ends it in his signiture whimsical "lalallalalas." To this day I have no idea how he pulls it off.
9. Sound and Vision
"Don't you wonder sometimes bout sound and vision?" Seriously? Just listen to the song, he's got such a bizarre way of looking at everything even without the cocaine.
8. Ziggy Stardust
Great song but the truly fascinating part is Bowie's transformation into the character... He says he completely forgot about David Bowie and became Ziggy. Sometimes, when I realize I haven't listened to anything else except Bowie for the past week and I start to wonder about my mental health, I have to ask myself why I like this guy so much and this is part of the reason. He doesn't just sing the songs then go home to his family, he actually becomes the characters he's singing about. It's really weird, but it works.
7. Width of a Circle
I'll never figure out this song which I think is probably a good thing for Bowie. It's filled with sacrelige I'm sure and further complicates his already confusing sexuality. If you don't think to yourself "He couldn't possibly mean..." at least once during the song then you're not really listening to it.
6. Queen Bitch
I love this song, great guitar... it's really catchy and glam-rockish. Along with Ziggy, I'm pretty sure it made the eighties possible.
5. Young Americans
For so long I never understood why people liked this song then one day I just realized how amazing it was. I still can't really explain it.
4. Rock and Roll Suicide
Speaks personally to pretty much everyone. Great song to grow up to.
3.Heroes
Watch this song live at any time during Bowie's life... it's soooooooooooooo good! It's probably his most universal song, it's not necessary to understand some complicated character or decode any of his drug-muddled thoughts. OMG I'm listening to it right now, I think I'd fall in love with anyone who sang me that song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYjBQKIOb-w
(about 40 of those views are mine)
2. Station to Station
I don't listen to this one as much as I should because it's such a commitment! It's got the longest intro ever but when Bowie finally comes in (albeit 3 or 4 minutes into the song) it's so cool "The return of the thin white duke!!" I think it's somewhat autobiographical, when he was in a reall weird state though. Someone once told me that he was so addicted to cocaine when he recorded the album that he doesn't remember any of it. Anyway, the song contains my favorite Bowie quote of all time. "It's not the side effects of the cocaine, I'm thinking that it must be love!" GENIUS!!!!
1. Five Years
My ultime favorite Bowie song. Opened the Ziggy Stardust album... without a doubt his most intense phase. He detached himself so much from humans, I don't know how he ever came back. Anyway, the song is incredible, the buildup ranks up there with Stairway to Heaven and the lyrics are really interesting.
Thanks Chris, I'm honored to post! And don't forget to do something really cool today in honor of David's birthday!
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
JLB's List of American Literature
I'm honored to be one of the inaugural contributors to Dr. Love's "Lists." As with all "top-ten" lists, it is important to take mine with a grain of salt. As Dr. Love was wise enough to specify in the "assignment," this is a list of the top-ten works that "matter to me," with hopefully some explanation of why I think they matter. That being said, for whatever it is worth, here is a list of ten works ("work" being variously defined) of American Literature. Since "blogs" are read from the top down, I offer my list from the bottom up:
10. James Madison, The Federalist, No. 51
This installment of the Federalist Papers argues for the importance of the separation of powers. Wise as that is, what makes this a grand literary essay is its unequivocal claim that “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” Madison thus makes that amorphous American shibboleth, "freedom," subordinate to the higher end of Justice—a lesson from which some of our recent “leaders” might have benefited.
9. Henry David Thoreau, "Resistance to Civil Government"
Few American texts have had such a global historical impact. Cited as inspiration by both Ghandi and Dr. King, Thoreau’s fiery insistence on justice over expediency is as pertinent a warning for our age as for his. Reflecting on his famous night in prison for refusing to pay his taxes, Thoreau channels the sentiments of Madison, declaring that unjust laws hold no sway over the individual who lives by her conscience, and that “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her — the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.”
8. Toni Morrison, Beloved
Morrison claims this is a story better left untold. In doing so, she is playing on the trope of unspeakability, and reinforcing the book’s status as testimony to our unspeakable history. Beloved the character, like Harriet Jacobs in her attic, is the unconscious of slavery. Addressing a culture that ceaselessly builds monuments to its own magnificence, Beloved the novel is the ironic anti-monument par excellence.
7. The Poems of Emily Dickinson
I will let the elusive and enigmatic Dickinson speak for herself. The following poem, it seems to me, describes fairly well the “superb surprise,” which is never far from the wondrous terror of the sublime, we experience while reading it:
He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,
Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow
Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool,—
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.
When winds take Forests in their Paws—
The Universe is still.
6. Henry James, The Golden Bowl
This exquisite novel is a scathing portrayal of the moral bankruptcy that underlies the American imperatives to expand and accumulate. The characters in this novel are no run-of-the-mill Jamesean aristocrats or New York “men of business"; they are, apparently, the richest people in the entire world. Perfect embodiments of the spirit of imperial capitalism, the Ververs—wittingly or unwittingly—transform the landscape of the heart into a barren wasteland of commodity and transaction; the cost of this corruption is measured in the conclusion, where we find a truly unsettling array of human wreckage.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
In a larger list I would include all the works of Emerson. I’ve chosen The Conduct of Life because it shows us the so-called Sage of Concord at his most skeptical, and the intensity of this skepticism gives to the dialectic between "Fate" and "Power" a heroic, even tragic aspect we find nowhere else in his writings. The final essay, "Illusions," concludes with an instance of the skeptical sublime, a poetic-philosophic image worthy of his mentor Plato:
Far more than an ironic critique of the racist conventions of the “plantation tradition”—which it surely is—Chesnutt’s collection of “conjure tales” unsettles the very foundations of our national mythology. The apparently generic form of the tales, which fatally obscured them for a mostly white readership, belies their stunning originality. To my mind there are few (if any) works in our tradition that demonstrate so powerfully (and simultaneously) the traumatic history of slavery and the moral catastrophe of post-Reconstruction America. In "Po' Sandy," for instance, we witness a slave who becomes a tree to escape slavery, only to be cut down, ritually murdered (as he is run through the saw-mill to be turned into lumber), and re-assembled (re-enslaved) as a kitchen in the backyard; the wailing of his voice as he is tortured to death haunts his wife, who was forced to watch the white men cut Sandy to pieces, just as it haunts the plantation, the text, and the country.
3. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
As with most of these authors, I would choose multiple works if I could: Pudd’nhead Wilson is perhaps the most penetrating critique of racial constructions in the 19th century; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court offers a hilariously grim view of our notion of “progress”; and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, Twain’s final novel (published posthumously), is a swan song in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Tempest and Pope’s final Dunciad. But I must go with the most obvious choice: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Thoreau follows Madison, Huck follows Thoreau, and his decision to “go to Hell” rather than live by the rules in America still resonates as a moral exhibition of the highest degree.
2. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
I wouldn’t be the first to rate this novel the best of the American 20th century. Layered and multiform, Invisible Man is matched in political salience, dark irony, unsettling humor, and allusive depth perhaps only by Melville’s Moby-Dick. In this seemingly bottomless text, Ellison signifies on so many works, traditions, and varieties of political and religious piety that it truly dizzies the imagination. To my mind, however, the most interesting structural parallel is to Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; both of these texts acknowledge in their conclusions (which I read as valedictions) the fundamental function of literature: the transmission of the stories of ourselves to one another as if they were gifts—gifts that are, in the implied double-meaning of the word, priceless.
1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
In the tradition of the Archbishop and the Reverend Mother Franzo and Marina King, who communed with the Holy Ghost at a John Coltrane concert (and founded a church in his name), I confess that Melville is the closest thing I have to a religion. And the comparison is a fair one, as Coltrane, if only in his tendency for sublime excess, was a Melvillean player. With apologies to Whitman (whose “Song of Myself” would have been #11 on my list), Melville is the poet-prophet of America. And indeed he possessed many attributes of the inspired. Considered in his time blasphemous, un-American, and nuts, he proved, as he wrote of his quasi-autobiographical character Pierre, “a little too radical altogether to your fancy.” Written with the passion of a Jeremiah and the poetry of a Shakespeare, Moby-Dick has rightly been called the American Apocalypse -- and I can think of no other novel so dedicated to revealing the Truth beneath the opaque veil of bullshit. But what is most inspiring—to me, anyway—about Melville, is his clear-eyed awareness of the foolishness of such an errand. As he wrote to Hawthorne about his quixotic dedication to the art of telling the truth: “So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth—and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers almost universally laughingstocks? Why so? Truth is ridiculous to men.”
10. James Madison, The Federalist, No. 51
This installment of the Federalist Papers argues for the importance of the separation of powers. Wise as that is, what makes this a grand literary essay is its unequivocal claim that “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” Madison thus makes that amorphous American shibboleth, "freedom," subordinate to the higher end of Justice—a lesson from which some of our recent “leaders” might have benefited.
9. Henry David Thoreau, "Resistance to Civil Government"
Few American texts have had such a global historical impact. Cited as inspiration by both Ghandi and Dr. King, Thoreau’s fiery insistence on justice over expediency is as pertinent a warning for our age as for his. Reflecting on his famous night in prison for refusing to pay his taxes, Thoreau channels the sentiments of Madison, declaring that unjust laws hold no sway over the individual who lives by her conscience, and that “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her — the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.”
8. Toni Morrison, Beloved
Morrison claims this is a story better left untold. In doing so, she is playing on the trope of unspeakability, and reinforcing the book’s status as testimony to our unspeakable history. Beloved the character, like Harriet Jacobs in her attic, is the unconscious of slavery. Addressing a culture that ceaselessly builds monuments to its own magnificence, Beloved the novel is the ironic anti-monument par excellence.
7. The Poems of Emily Dickinson
I will let the elusive and enigmatic Dickinson speak for herself. The following poem, it seems to me, describes fairly well the “superb surprise,” which is never far from the wondrous terror of the sublime, we experience while reading it:
He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,
Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow
Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool,—
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.
When winds take Forests in their Paws—
The Universe is still.
6. Henry James, The Golden Bowl
This exquisite novel is a scathing portrayal of the moral bankruptcy that underlies the American imperatives to expand and accumulate. The characters in this novel are no run-of-the-mill Jamesean aristocrats or New York “men of business"; they are, apparently, the richest people in the entire world. Perfect embodiments of the spirit of imperial capitalism, the Ververs—wittingly or unwittingly—transform the landscape of the heart into a barren wasteland of commodity and transaction; the cost of this corruption is measured in the conclusion, where we find a truly unsettling array of human wreckage.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
In a larger list I would include all the works of Emerson. I’ve chosen The Conduct of Life because it shows us the so-called Sage of Concord at his most skeptical, and the intensity of this skepticism gives to the dialectic between "Fate" and "Power" a heroic, even tragic aspect we find nowhere else in his writings. The final essay, "Illusions," concludes with an instance of the skeptical sublime, a poetic-philosophic image worthy of his mentor Plato:
There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, -- they alone with him alone.4. Charles Waddell Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman
Far more than an ironic critique of the racist conventions of the “plantation tradition”—which it surely is—Chesnutt’s collection of “conjure tales” unsettles the very foundations of our national mythology. The apparently generic form of the tales, which fatally obscured them for a mostly white readership, belies their stunning originality. To my mind there are few (if any) works in our tradition that demonstrate so powerfully (and simultaneously) the traumatic history of slavery and the moral catastrophe of post-Reconstruction America. In "Po' Sandy," for instance, we witness a slave who becomes a tree to escape slavery, only to be cut down, ritually murdered (as he is run through the saw-mill to be turned into lumber), and re-assembled (re-enslaved) as a kitchen in the backyard; the wailing of his voice as he is tortured to death haunts his wife, who was forced to watch the white men cut Sandy to pieces, just as it haunts the plantation, the text, and the country.
3. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
As with most of these authors, I would choose multiple works if I could: Pudd’nhead Wilson is perhaps the most penetrating critique of racial constructions in the 19th century; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court offers a hilariously grim view of our notion of “progress”; and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, Twain’s final novel (published posthumously), is a swan song in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Tempest and Pope’s final Dunciad. But I must go with the most obvious choice: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Thoreau follows Madison, Huck follows Thoreau, and his decision to “go to Hell” rather than live by the rules in America still resonates as a moral exhibition of the highest degree.
2. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
I wouldn’t be the first to rate this novel the best of the American 20th century. Layered and multiform, Invisible Man is matched in political salience, dark irony, unsettling humor, and allusive depth perhaps only by Melville’s Moby-Dick. In this seemingly bottomless text, Ellison signifies on so many works, traditions, and varieties of political and religious piety that it truly dizzies the imagination. To my mind, however, the most interesting structural parallel is to Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; both of these texts acknowledge in their conclusions (which I read as valedictions) the fundamental function of literature: the transmission of the stories of ourselves to one another as if they were gifts—gifts that are, in the implied double-meaning of the word, priceless.
1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
In the tradition of the Archbishop and the Reverend Mother Franzo and Marina King, who communed with the Holy Ghost at a John Coltrane concert (and founded a church in his name), I confess that Melville is the closest thing I have to a religion. And the comparison is a fair one, as Coltrane, if only in his tendency for sublime excess, was a Melvillean player. With apologies to Whitman (whose “Song of Myself” would have been #11 on my list), Melville is the poet-prophet of America. And indeed he possessed many attributes of the inspired. Considered in his time blasphemous, un-American, and nuts, he proved, as he wrote of his quasi-autobiographical character Pierre, “a little too radical altogether to your fancy.” Written with the passion of a Jeremiah and the poetry of a Shakespeare, Moby-Dick has rightly been called the American Apocalypse -- and I can think of no other novel so dedicated to revealing the Truth beneath the opaque veil of bullshit. But what is most inspiring—to me, anyway—about Melville, is his clear-eyed awareness of the foolishness of such an errand. As he wrote to Hawthorne about his quixotic dedication to the art of telling the truth: “So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth—and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers almost universally laughingstocks? Why so? Truth is ridiculous to men.”
Sunday, January 4, 2009
The Scott Love Top Ten Hip Hop Album List
1.Wu Tang-36 Chambers
One of the most original raw albums of all time. The Rza, Gza, Inspectah Deck, Raekwon the Chef, Ugod, Ghostface killer, and Method man flow over the Rza's insane sampling skills are what make this album my number one of all time, and is what got me in to hip hop in the first place.
2. Deltron 3030
Del and Dan the Automator are an unstoppable duo tackling the issues most important to them during the apocalyptic year known as 3030. Del is one of the best MCs from Hieroglyphics and introduced Deltron 0 and automator.
3. Visionaries-Pangaea
The LA underground group featuring: 2mex, Zen, Danu, LMNO, and Key Kool all have impeccable styles over the classic DJing by DJ Rhetmatic. I listen to this album at least once a weak and each time keeps me equally impressed.
4. Hieroglyphics-3rd Eye Vision
My favorite underground hip hop group from Oakland. This album got me inspired by Del for the first time and features Souls of Mischief, Pep Love, and Del the Funky Homosapien. It is flawless from beginning to end. Although Hiero had been at it for a long time this was their first album under hiero imperium.
5. Josh Martinez-Midriff Music
Josh Martinez is one of the best MC's of all time. This is his best album. He says he is now retiring hip hop to be a lawyer which makes all of us hip hop fans immensely frustrated. He has a very melodic style and can sing a chorus as well as he can rap.
6. Beastie Boys-Ill Communication
What can I say, I guess it's debatable whether this is actually a hip hop album but don't debate it with me. They really show off their lyrical skils and give us an insight as to why they got the ill communication.
7. 2mex-Bboys in Occupied Mexico
2mex is my favorite LA artist. He has a self proclaimed Chicano style that can not be matched. I do not understand a lot of the words since he does not use spaces in any of his sentences but either way it all sounds really cool. After listening to the visionaries "Pangaea," there was just no way I could not check further in to his skills.
8. Hieroglyphics-Full Circle
Another flawless Hiero studio album. Del and others really step it up on this CD. The beats are also once again off the chain. I can't stand how good they are on this album. Although I have seen everyone on this list but the Beastie Boys, Hiero is the best life performance.
9. Swollen Members-Bad Dreams
Mad Child and Prevail show me that Vancouver must really be the shit. Enough said.
10. Atmosphere-You wouldn't believe how much fun we're having
Slug kills it over Ant's beats. Although a little bit less underground each year and with every album, one dare's not call them sell outs. I can never get enough Atmosphere.
Thank you for listening
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