Thursday, July 12, 2012

Take your protein pills...

Here's a fun way to waste a few minutes or hours on the Internet. Pushing Ahead of the Dame is a blog examining in (a lot of) detail every song from David Bowie's career. The blog's author, Chris O'Leary, started with David Robert Jones' pre-"Space Oddity" work a couple of years ago. Now he's up to Tin Machine II. A while back I discovered a blog that similarly examined Paul Simon's work. That project could go for a while, as Simon is still writing and recording music. With Bowie's apparent retirement after Reality, it looks like the primary purpse of "Pushing" will be exhausted in about a year. I wonder if he'll keep it going, repurposed. It's a good read in any case. O'Leary knows an intimidating amount about music, and he ties that knowledge to very opinionated and witty prose. Also he has nice taste in Flickr pictures.

2 comments:

susan said...

'Oh you pretty things'.. You're right that's a pretty fascinating project and the pictures are great. It may just turn out to be a singular tribute but if not, Eno has had an interesting career too.

There are a few good bands around now but none with that mixture of talent and charisma.

Ben said...

Eno has definitely had an interesting career, one which has intersected with Bowie's at various points. A number of bands (A Certain Ratio, Burning Airlines) have named themselves after his songs. That's influence.