Post a controversial music opinion

I don't really get more of an 'escape from theatricality' from "Cornflake Girl" than from "Running Up That Hill", though. I sort of get that there's more of a guts-spilling autobiographical quality in Amos's work and more of a third-person storytelling quality in Bush's but I don't know that I agree that this quite maps onto the binary you're setting up. I like Bush a lot more because I think she has a better voice, songs that say more to me, and more interesting music (but I like things by Amos).

Just to be clear, I don't conceive of confessionalism as an escape from theatricality – on the contrary. Authenticity for me means a) that inauthenticity is an insuperable condition; b) that it nonetheless falls short; c) that art must acknowledge this insuperability while simultaneously yearning for something beyond it, which is the impossible itself. Confessionalism often misses the first point in my experience. So it's more of a porous binary (as all are).

(i.e. Amos's delivery and presentation strike me as very affected.xp)

When I listen to Kate Bush, I don't get the sense of a 'beyond' (she merely foregrounds the theatrical tautology of existence) at all. But that's just me, of course – I don't think there's any kind of rule to be wrung from this.

look i don't like ange

Kate Bush is a seriously honest musician with a tendency toward moments of theatricality that rub me the wrong way-- sometimes it's just an "I like mime" kind of note ("Babooshka", many of her videos), other times it's an "I like to put on funny accents" kind of note ("There Goes A Tenner", "The Dreaming"), other times it's just like "wow I'm going to be silly silly silly" ("Wow", "Army Dreamers"). But she is oftentimes writing "honestly" and when she does ("The Man With The Child...", "Breathing", "Sat In Your Lap", "Hounds Of Love", "Running...", "The Sensual World", most of "Aerial") she is untouchable. I can't honestly say that I enjoy any of her albums front-to-back aside from "The Sensual World" but writing off her entire catalogue because of her tendency sometimes to chew-the-scenery is not my beer

Tori Amos is kind of the opposite, I've typed endlessly about how I think there was an irreversible shift that occurred in her song-writing as her star rose, imo a response to the obsessive traits that her fans embodied, and thus in Tori mk. 2 a kind of "closing off", a deliberate move toward obscurantism ("Boys For Pele" onward). "Leather", "Happy Phantom" and "The Wrong Band" aside, I hear little-to-no points of comparison between Tori and Kate-- Tori is brutal where Kate is not, Kate is theatre where Tori is not.

Both artists are consigned to being tied to former experiences and former selves for me, (Tori was my teens, Kate was my early 20s), and neither have an active part in my current listening habits. Comparing the two isn't really a game I enjoy, I think both are very important in different ways

Kate Bush and Laurie Anderson seems a more apt comparison than Kate Bush and Tori Amos

writing off her entire catalogue because of her tendency sometimes to chew-the-scenery is not my beer

This thread requires that we sacrifice something to it every few days or so.

Those theatrical things are some of my favourite songs by her, more than a lot of the 'honest' ones!

Nick Cave = probably 2 or 3 albums worth of good stuff

hell no

also people should really watch Once More With Feeling before they accuse Cave of being all theater, it's intensely theatrical also a deeply felt expression of grief over the death of his son, just killed me

I realise I'm being harsh on him but I never really want to listen to him nowadays

Still enjoy the gleeful sproinginess of the Birthday Party tho

cave is way more complicated and earnest than he’s being classified here

waits too but like y’all are EXTREMELY wrong about cave

booming post, fgti

I love Kate Bush's mime-y videos, but have never found a way into her music.

YMP, I think that's like saying "Led Zeppelin and Mahavishnu Orchestra seems a more apt comparison than Led Zeppelin and Guns 'n' Roses." I can see how the case can be made but I don't think the latter comparison is unreasonable or unfair.

Man, the title track on "The Sensual World" is pretty much the greatest thing I could ever imagine music having to offer tbh

Mmmm yes

Also I don't think Nick Cave is so much about theatricality as he is about selling an id with music attached to it

there is something I find off-putting about the more fanatical ends of Tom Waits/Nick Cave fandom (this whole exchange puts me in mind of an argument I had years ago w some guy who claimed the three greatest songwriters in the world were Cave, Waits and Cohen) where there's this kind of romanticizing of drunken nihilism.

I realize this is strawmanning a bit, not saying anyone here is doing this.

Drunken nihilism is actually kinda fun tho

Cave Waits and Cohen are precisely the greatest songwriters in the world for "some guy". I don't think the three songwriters have much common ground aside from coming up from the same plot of land as Philip Roth and John Berryman. They write accounts of straight white (and/or Jewish) male ("some guy") aging and decay, and drunken nihilism is definitely a part of it, but their appeal has more to do with "some guy" finding a moment of recognition in these male songwriters over 40. Learning how to be an old white dude with grace and drama. (Nobody could ever say Cave, Waits or Cohen were ever young, even when they were young)

I don't think of Waits as nihilist, like at all...he's a romantic

I don't think of Cave and Cohen as drunken

I feel like a lot of people just stopped paying attention to Cave sometime in the early 90s

Nihilism (cf. 'Dirt in the Ground') can be darkly Romantic.

maybe not so much nihilism as an eagerness to wallow in the darker recesses of humanity - violence, depravity, depression, poverty, old-fashioned gender politics etc

also old time relijun obviously

Cave was definitely young when he was young btw.

I don't think of Waits as nihilist, like at all...he's a romantic

I don't think of Cave and Cohen as drunken

I feel like a lot of people just stopped paying attention to Cave sometime in the early 90s

Waits is absolutely a romantic. He writes like 90% love songs. And people stopped paying attention to Waits (as in, stopped seriously engaging with the work and trying to figure out what he's doing because they've "already got him figured out") in the 90s, too.

Cave's past couple decades of work has been a mostly astonishing creative run, super diverse and complex and interesting.

Cohen from I'm Your Man onward was the best version of Cohen.

Waits stopped being a this so-called beatnik cliche back when Reagan was in his first term.

(probably even earlier)

I was going to say I prefer the earlier funnier work of all three but I don't like any Tom Waits tbh.

There's no way a nihilist writes a song like "Cold Water" never mind "Chicago."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAtdaCki-zA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huwf-MwdmuQ

love a lot of Waits' recent work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5X4N2exOsU

Was gonna start going over my deep thoughts about Cave's artifice, then realized I'd captured them pretty well here

http://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/150358081791/nick-cave-and-the-bad-seeds-skeleton-tree-bad

Thirty years ago, Cave was my fav songwriter. He lost me by Murder Ballads, precisely because it was all theatrics. He has clawed his way back close to the lead in recent years, mostly because he doesn't try to recreate "Mercy Seat" or "Tupelo" at all. Tracks like that are over-the-top, but still fueled by empathy and exploration. They risk devolving into shtick, and that's what's occasionally happens to him (and Waits, and Cohen...) Bush, while not aesthetically similar, presents the same challenges. She has been cautiously unprolific enough to avoid the same problems though. Waits won me back with Bad as Me, which I didn't even give a listen until a few years after it came out. But the Bush-like sabbatical served him (and Brennan) well, allowing them to refocus.

I'd place Gillian Welch in this group as well, though she's a generation later, so a different context for the same costumes and criticisms. (More parallels: Welch and Waits are songwriting duos that maintain singular personae.)

booming review

thanks

Was gonna start going over my deep thoughts about Cave's artifice, then realized I'd captured them pretty well here

http://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/150358081791/nick-cave-and-the-bad-seeds-skeleton-tree-bad

Well-crafted treatise; as a long time fan i seem to always find something redeemable in everything he touches (soundtracks and screenplays included). Cave is still a live draw and must feel pressure to produce rave-ups alongside his more tender ballads in order to keep his audience engaged. The swingin' dick illustrated below is artifice, but oh, what fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLKgUu7QqpM

Great post bendy

Lyre of Orpheus/Abbatoir Blues is the best Cave record

Sometimes I think so! That's where he won be back from Murder Ballads, specifically, "frappucino in my hand..."

the part where he manages to crack up the backup singers in "Hiding All Away" always makes me smile

(Nobody could ever say Cave, Waits or Cohen were ever young, even when they were young)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5I2vEcVC_I

CO: The best thing about any Nick Cave project is Tracy Pew, The Birthday Party bassist who died in '86.

C'mon Bendy, "The Kindness of Strangers" makes me ball everytime i hear it,,,, every time.

ball don't lie

I'm assume you mean bawl?

😏

I'm trying to listen to Scott Walker. Even when he seems to be trying his hardest his voice has as much soul as Dean Martin's.

they should have a song called "I'm limp for you"

Surrender is the best Chemical Brothers LP

I don't care about voices having 'soul'.