Christgau's Consumer Guide Grade List: A+

oh yes

there is probably more good than bad here on balance but rme @ merritt, AF, VW, shadow, moby, all the boomer icons

at least he kept listening to jazz unlike many others but did he only follow people he already liked in the 60s?

I’m assuming his love for the dead was an acid thing since they don’t fit in very well with his later preferences

I have a hard time going along with this sort of thing. Plenty of great artists go to shit for a variety of reasons, and unless it casts their other work in some horrible, sordid light, I never bought the idea that their worst work somehow devalues their best.

Yeah, I thought that was weird. “The old records I used to love are now bad because the new records are bad.”

xp
oh that's great! Vol. 1 is super high on my list of go-to music to put on when I have people over, just absolutely charming music. The Francophonic collections are also very worth your time

I suspect you know this one already, breastcrawl, but just in case King Sunny Ade: The Best of the Classic Years [2003, Shanachie] is rad too, though more intense than the Congolese stuff

Be sure to scroll down to Gone But Not Forgotten! (I dunno why he put them there)

Those were records that were out of print when he was compiling the Core Collection list (circa 1990 apparently). The Core Collection list seems much more conventional rock canon than his A+ list. Perhaps just by virtue of being out of print the Gone But Not Forgotten list is a bit more idiosyncratic.

you’d be surprised how unfamiliar I am with so many of the African old school classics. my knowledge of KSA is very shallow as well. I mean, I love it when I do hear it (Yondo Sister’s “Wapiyo” felt like the best song ever when I played it last week after it was posted on the Old School Afropop thread, for instance), I just prefer listening to current stuff most of the time.

xp to rob

(I feel like I’ve written similar posts on these threads more than once before)

that makes sense, and your service in that dept is much appreciated!

Be sure to scroll down to Gone But Not Forgotten! (I dunno why he put them there)

Those were records that were out of print when he was compiling the Core Collection list (circa 1990 apparently) That's what I thought, 'til I noticed Station To Station, although *possibly* there was a Bowie-mandated hiatus between the RCA and RKYO editions?? And possibly, I guess One Nation Under A Groove(1978) and Into The Music (1979) were already cut out.

Dunno if it was a Bowie-mandated hiatus, but Station To Station was definitely out of print in 1990; the Ryko CD came out in mid-‘91.

RCA shenanigans. Most of his catalog was hard to find outside used record store in the late '80s, I keep hearing.

it's so weird how some stuff that is totally canon now was hard to find

i know the cowboy junkies cover of "sweet jane" by velvet underground is that way because it's based on the slow and mellow version from the 1969 live comp that was apparently the only thing you could really find back when they were in school

Jeff Rougvie of Rykodisc actually posted about this several years ago. It's an interesting read for Bowie fanatics. In short, RCA seriously undervalued the worth of Bowie's catalog (which Rougvie discovered when looking over their sales projections), and Bowie could probably tell from the way they were handling things, which is why he took back his catalog to license elsewhere. It took a while (a full year?) to get Bowie's inventory at RCA shipped to Rykodisc in Salem, MA and properly sorted out and accounted for, and I imagine that's when the Bowie catalog was allowed to fall out-of-print. RCA no longer had the rights, so they wouldn't be pressing any more copies, and Rykodisc wasn't going to put out a shoddy product (the old RCA CD's were NOT done from the masters, far from it), so they needed time to audition and track down every tape and then properly master it, as well as all the other shit like picking out bonus tracks, designing artwork, etc.

Yeah. Hell, the Feelies based their sound on the "What Goes On" riffing in that live version.

Ziggy Stardust appeared on so many best-of lists through the late '80s (including Rolling Stone's) because it was one of the few Bowie albums RCA kept in print. The reputation of the Berlin Trilogy and STS came later.

Weird, I thought I had heard that Loaded was the one VU album that was never out-of-print.

I started buying Bowie Rykodisc editions at mall record stores in the summer of '93 and the moment was for sure a wtf thing: this dude had THIS catalog?

The Rykos are what I still own.

I bought Live 1969, VU & Nico, and Loaded, all new, in the summer of 1981 (I think, maybe it was 1982) in Tuscaloosa.

don't the audio maniacs on the hoffman forum prefer the early rca bowie cds? they're not easy to come by.

Weird, I thought I had heard that Loaded was the one VU album that was never out-of-print.

don't the audio maniacs on the hoffman forum prefer the early rca bowie cds? they're not easy to come by.

Yes, they collectively drove up the value of those CD's to ridiculous prices. I've come across two and copies of the others...there's no way in hell I'd recommend them to anyone, especially for more than a few dollars each.

The Rykodisc reissues aren't perfect - they shaved off the bass cloud and they're too trebly for my tastes - but you can at least re-EQ them. The Virgin reissues from the late '90s and early '00s are terrible. The new Parlophones are hit-or-miss because they used very different approaches in mastering on different albums (partly because they were done by different mastering engineers over six or seven years).

So I was right about Bowie-mandated hiatus, b-but y-yall it's Rock Library: Before 1980, not 1990, which is why I was like eh,One Nation Under A Groove(1978) and Into The Music (1979)? although, yeah, maybe they were already gone, as Glenn and Don would put it.

Bowie took the masters back, as basis of this:
Bowie Bonds

Bowie Bonds are asset-backed securities of current and future revenues of the 25 albums (287 songs) that David Bowie recorded before 1990. Bowie Bonds were pioneered in 1997 by rock and roll investment banker David Pullman.[1] Issued in 1997, the bonds were bought for US$55 million by the Prudential Insurance Company of America, or about $88.7 million in today's dollars.[2][3][4] The bonds paid an interest rate of 7.9% and had an average life of ten years,[5] a higher rate of return than a 10-year Treasury note (at the time, 6.37%).[4] Royalties from the 25 albums generated the cash flow that secured the bonds' interest payments.[6] Prudential also received guarantees from Bowie's label, EMI Records, which had recently signed a $30m deal with Bowie.[4] By forfeiting ten years worth of royalties, Bowie was able to receive a payment of US$55 million up front. Bowie used this income to buy songs owned by his former manager.[5] Bowie's combined catalog of albums covered by this agreement sold more than 1 million copies annually at the time of the agreement.[4] Shortly after launching, however, the rise of MP3 sharing caused music piracy to rise, and music sales to drop,[7] which was one of the factors that led Moody's Investors Service to lower the bonds from an A3 rating (the seventh highest rating) to Baa3, one notch above junk status.[8][9] The downgrade was prompted by lower-than-expected revenue "due to weakness in sales for recorded music" and that an unnamed company guaranteed the issue.[10] Despite this, the Bowie bonds liquidated in 2007 as originally planned, without default, and the rights to the income from the songs reverted to Bowie.[11] from "Celebrity Bonds," though "Bowie Bonds became the general term at least for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond

yeah that was a huge story in 1999. It mattered more than hours

he Rykodisc reissues aren't perfect - they shaved off the bass cloud and they're too trebly for my tastes - but you can at least re-EQ them. The Virgin reissues from the late '90s and early '00s are terrible. The new Parlophones are hit-or-miss because they used very different approaches in mastering on different albums (partly because they were done by different mastering engineers over six or seven years).

It's especially noticeable on Young Americans, on which every instrument has a resonance I hadn't heard: a transformed album.

In a good way? I've never heard any version of that album.

I want to, though never liked the title hit---"Win" is a lot better though, right? (Must check that new DB trib w We Are KING et al)

wait, after all these years? It's one of his best!

I didn’t like Young Americans when I first heard it, which was the Ryko reissue. I didn’t dislike it, I just felt neutral towards it, so I ended up selling it. Some years later, I bought the Parlophone reissue, and now I love it. I dunno how much of that is due to the mastering, or how much is due to how my feelings about it have changed over the intervening years, but I find it thrilling in a way I definitely didn’t before.

(Also, the Ryko CD was hilariously packaged in a CD holder/display unit, coupled with a “bonus” CD of “Fame” remixes, which were all essentially worthless.)

so many damn rhythm guitars recorded!

"Fascination," my favorite album track, is essentially transformed.

Cool, I'll try it, thanks! A strange gap for me, but yknow 70s and here came all the young dudes, flooding the news, and I was ballin' on a budget (though I did manage to buy or hear everything else from that era, mostly for better, sometimes for worse)

Every other Bowie album from that era, I mean.

Looked for Parlophone version on Amazon, seeing customer reviews of several editions all together: Are you referring to, say, the 2016 remaster, also associated w Rhino? If so, favorable comments on that.

I should look at discogs, but the ads have been crashing my old computer lately.

2016 yeah

The 2016 Parlophone remasters were distributed by Rhino in the U.S., but yeah, same mastering.

The new 2016 remaster is also the best digital mastering of Young Americans because the Rykodisc CD accidentally used alternate mixes for half of the tracks. Rykodisc used what they thought was the best-sounding tape without realizing the mix was actually different. (The songs with the original mixes were sourced from a production copy. It's possible the original master tape for Young Americans has been lost since the '70s or '80s, unless they found them for the new remaster - I was under the impression they hadn't.)

Very cool, thanks, guys.

OMG, yall are right! Just listened: Phlly Soul as proto-alt.r&b, Bowie and Vandross and other voices swimming in the bass, in the buttermilk, developmental and accomplished. Ancestry of BlackStar, even.

Really some peak work of Vandross, seems like, though I'm far from expert. Anybody heard his 70s (60s?) band Luther?

Judge for yourself how much of Vandross' composition Bowie used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plr5r-RmFp4

Oho, never heard him do anything like that before, can imagine Nicky Siano spinning it at The Gallery (hopefully there's more on the album, and this is the radio edit, developing to a peak, sticking around just long enough to make sure it's registered, then "Get up" and gone).
Maybe Young Americans got mixed reviews because it didn't sound like the 2016 mix? Wild details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Americans#cite_note-CG81-49

Just to clarity, the 2016 reissue is a new mastering, not a new mix. In fact, it's the original mix that was used on the original LP as well as most CD releases.

The only exception is the Rykodisc CD which used alternate mixes on some (but not all) tracks.

FWIW, mastering is just the process of cutting the final mixdown on to a vinyl record or "encoding" it for digital release. At minimum it's just transferring to the relevant medium (and in the case of vinyl, making sure it can play back properly since it's much more complicated to do). But mastering can also entail a lot of aesthetic choices (or destructive revisionist choices, sadly) like EQ, additional compression, and other processing. Mixing is kind of like editing in a movie, and mastering is kind of like the color correction and finishing you need to do when creating the DCP or film prints.

Thanks. Seems like this 2016 master might possibly have been an influence on the new Bowie trib Modern Love, which also has me imagining a 90s Red Hot + Bowie, with cosmopolitan R&B voices x synths gliding through each other--and, right after hearing this remastered original, was esp. struck by the way Khruangbin's cover of "Right" stands on its own (unlike several fairly meh tracks before it).
Contributors seek to bring out the Bo's soul, funk, jazz and gospel traits---this last in the nay-saying, yet "Get me to the church on time" of the title track so gospel not gospel?!
Mostly they go for less-obvious, and often less-well sung originals, a or the major exception on both counts being We Are KING's "Space Oddity," with fun production, but the cool voices keep a lid on excitement, as his herky-jerky fervency def didn't.
Modern jazz development of "Heroes" (centered around also cool but affecting singing of Michael Taveres) is the damndest thing/honors the original (this would be yer Hal Willner 90s track)(Not jazz but also w appropriate and decided difference from orig.:Léa Sen's "Golden Years."
Since I'm in this deep, Ill say that my favorite playlist from this, because cohesively eerie and intense and mobile, is:
2.Sound and Vision – Helado Negro 03:21
7.Right – Khruangbin 05:08
10.Move On – L’Rain 04:00
14.Golden Years – Léa Sen 02:56
15.Fantastic Voyage – Meshell Ndegeocello 03:58
17.Heroes – Matthew Tavares 08:41
Also like these, which can work interspersed with those:
8.Silly Boy Blue – Nia Andrews 02:37
9.Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family – Foxtrott 03:11
11.Modern Love – Jonah Mutono 03:19
12.Where Are We Now – Bullion 03:31
13.Tnght – Eddie Chacon, John Carroll Kirby 03:35
https://bbemusic.bandcamp.com/album/modern-love
Also RIYL Moses Boyd's jazzoid Dark Matter, which suggest some shadings of early Massive Attack and Soul II Soul and maybe Bowie-Eno

I liked this line in his Lou Reed (covers) CG review today: "Equally impressive is the lyricism of such varied female admirers as June Tabor, Rachel Sweet, Tracey Thorn, and Susanna Hoffs all singing as if Nico has never crossed their minds."

FWIW, Christgau now says he's downgraded Marshall Crenshaw's Field Day to a solid A, but suggests he'd add two Beatles albums, writing "How could I not nominate the two I put on my Rolling Stone list: Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles’ Second Album, the latter of which most Beatles scholars don’t believe counts [because it's a Capitol/US reconfiguration of a UK release] if they even acknowledge it exists?"

Fab! My own fave rave US Beatles cobble---in late 70s, used to play it at parties between Bollocks and B-52s debut:

Beatles VI includes two tracks featuring searing John Lennon vocals, recorded specifically for the North American market:[5] "Bad Boy" and "Dizzy Miss Lizzy", both covers of Larry Williams songs, and both recorded on Williams' birthday (10 May 1965), marking perhaps the only time that the Beatles recorded material especially for North America. "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" was part of the set of their 1965 US concerts and was soon included on the British release of the Help! album, but "Bad Boy" was not released in the United Kingdom or anywhere else in the world until 1966, when it appeared on the compilation A Collection of Beatles Oldies. These two songs, along with "Act Naturally" the following month, were the last cover songs recorded and released by the Beatles until "Maggie Mae" appeared on the Let It Be album in 1970.

Beatles VI also included:

the remaining six tracks from Beatles for Sale (i.e., those left off Beatles '65, although 2 such songs had been released on a single in February 1965)
"Yes It Is", the B-side to the single "Ticket to Ride". This is a "duophonic" stereo remix from the original mono track, with additional echo and reverb.
two other tracks from the forthcoming UK release of Help!: "You Like Me Too Much" and "Tell Me What You See"
As on Beatles for Sale, the "Kansas City"/"Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!" medley was originally listed only as "Kansas City". After attorneys for Venice Music notified Capitol of its error, the record label was soon corrected, although the album cover never was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatles_VI

Note wiki links to reviews; it did not always go officially unappreciated.

Guitar Paradise of East Africa [1991, Earthworks]

Amazingly found an ancient blog post on this album from January 31, 2007 that also included a download link:
http://whatsinmyipod.blogspot.com/2007/01/guitar-paradise-of-east-africa-kenya.html

And one of the compilers ("Dave") caught wind and posted this comment 1 year and 8 months later:
"Thank you for daring to post this. As one of the compilers of this release it does my heart good to see that others enjoy this music as much as we did, sitting in dark rooms for months arguing which are the essential tracks to include. Viva Earthworks!"

Links were refreshed in 2014 - the "uloz" one still works.

I think I have that on cd.