2024 Rock & Roll HOF screechfest

Many are equating Bowie with Ziggy Stardust Bowie, but he had so many personas and styles, there is no one truly doing "Bowie" nor could anyone.

Now I'm off to justgladtobehere's joint with an axe.

 

exactly. How they’re overlooked for other contemporary bands like Duran Duran escapes me.

 

Duran Duran gets in just for the bass/sax solo in Rio. That is some mad mad music.

 

And the video for Girls on Film

 

Meow.

 

The Bowie comparison that always comes to mind for me is Madonna. She's the only one I know of who reinvented their image as often as Bowie did. Of course, he reinvented his sound more extensively than she ever did, from The Man Who Sold the World to glam rock with Mick Ronson to Philly style blue eyed soul to the Thin White Duke to the Berlin trilogy to Blackstar.

 

After my atypical hyperbole @PCLoadLetter I realized a pretty good Bowie comp is Annie Lennox (albeit a decade earlier). She did the androgynous look as well as Bowie on the Sweet Dreams and Touch records and then vamped it up thereafter. She also went all-in on the diva motif for her first solo record. (It's sorta jarring that she's 69 years old)

 

What's the t-shirt? "It's weird being the same age as old people."

 

Sir I am not 69.

But being older than any active athlete is depressing as shit.

 

If only Bartolo Colon hadn't retired ...

 

Well, I'm 67. It's not just the people who were cultural icons of whatever stripe when I was a kid passing, it's the ones who are ten years younger who just up and die.

Willie Nelson has been an old guy ever since I started following him in '74 or so, but he's 90 now and looks ancient.

 

I hope I haven't done that to my kid (a college freshman now ,but as a teenager I ragged on the awful mumble rap shit he was listening to). As for Foreigner, I wouldn't say I was exactly a fan, though Juke Box Hero is a banger. But to say they're "not very good" is a little harsh. Even if it's in the context of defending them.

I've said this before -- it is not easy to write a catchy tune with good hooks that millions of people like. Not easy to write just one, let alone 15 or 20 across several albums. It's even harder to perform those songs at a true professional level with the type of musicianship that entails and to perform it on stage in a way that engages an arena-sized crowd. Even if they're not really my cup of tea, I will posit that Foreigner -- as basic and vanilla and "corporate" and Papa John's/Applebee's as people might think they are -- is a much, much better band than so many bands that the critics love but who couldn't break through because they weren't (sniff) "accessible." No -- it's because those band's songs weren't a lot of fun to listen to because they were either kind of boring, too precious or twee or had something naggingly annoying about them. Or their songs were competently written and performed but just didn't "pop." What Foreigner did may be mainstream and pedestrian and basic and all that. But I'm sorry -- I've listened to all the "influential" critic's darlings like Big Star and Television and the New York Dolls and Laura Nyro and all the others in the RRHOF who never had much broad-based commercial appeal, something the critics like to blame on "philistine" tastes. And I'm sorry -- Foreigner is actually more enjoyable to listen to. So is REO Speedwagon, Styx and Cheap Trick, and to a lesser degree, Kansas. But all taste is subjective.

And they're also better than the less successful mainstream rock artists who cemented local legend status in their own market and maybe had a nationally recognizable song or two, whose loyalists that grew up in their respective markets seeing them headline the Summerfest at the riverfront shell or the New Year's Eve show at the hockey arena sponsored by the local classic rock station or opening as a one-off for bigger bands that came through and whose fans always claimed they should have been as big as Springsteen or Mellencamp or Seger or whatever. Think the Hooters in Philly. Buffalo Tom in Boston. Michael Stanley Band in Cleveland. Donnie Iris in Pittsburgh. Crack the Sky in Baltimore. None of those acts -- as skilled as they were -- could do what Foreigner did. They just didn't have the songs or the stage presence. Even if they were still better than 99.99999 percent of those who have ever picked up an instrument. Someone like Steve Fireovid was a better pitcher than 99.99999 percent of people who ever picked up a baseball even if he was missing whatever ingredient it was that would have given him more than 71 innings pitched over 6 seasons.