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Some musicians also refine their style and grow with age. David Bowie's got great music lineup spanning every decade of his career from the 1960s to the day he
by fiblye 6y ago
Some musicians also refine their style and grow with age.
David Bowie's got great music lineup spanning every decade of his career from the 1960s to the day he died. I think people who enjoy his music can easily pick out a definite classic from every decade and everyone has their own favorite period.
Tom Waits started out as an okay musician, and he grew into his own sort of music with age. He's known for his grit and grime, and it's much more profound in his later work than his earliest stuff. A song about being a worn out old drunk on the side of the road hits harder when you hear it from a rugged middle-aged man than a young 20-something.
With these two, Bowie constantly updated his image and tried new things. Tom Waits simply advanced the atmosphere he built up in his earlier work. I think a lot of other popular musicians put more energy and liveliness into their earlier works and can't keep up with it as they get older, or they end up following some music trend that they think will get them pop success instead of just doing their own music.
Virtually every indie band does the latter as they start to get fame, and it often turns off their old fans immensely when they see them become just another soulless pop band.
- bitwize 6y agoSome bands do the opposite: have a smash hit, and then they experiment and innovate and come up with new stuff, and it's difficult to have as large an audience as they did when they were cranking out crowd pleasers and floor fillers. "Weird Al" Yankovic's "crowd pleasers" are his parodies of popular songs, but he and his band have been playing them to a standard of musicianship that only got better with age; and he has also developed more and more original material that is as innovative as it is a fitting pastiche/homage to other artists.
- rikroots 6y agoI want to add Kate Bush to this list. She's always seemed fearless to me, both in her exploration of music and in her visual interpretation and performance of that music. Kate Bush homepage - http://www.katebush.com/home http://www.katebush.com/home Completely unrelated, but does anyone else get the impulse to open the inspector when they visit an interesting website for the first time? KB's site is built using Drupal (according to Wappalyzer), but there's some fascinating stuff going on in that page - it's been a while since I've come across an image <map> element used on a production site. There's also a lovely old-style carousel on the 'discography' page, using both <img> and <canvas> (for the img reflection) elements. Strange choices for 2020, but I was kinda happy to see them.