#I could have drawn punk from any era tbh and it would have been funny | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

master-hand-official · 6 years

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music recs and thoughts on how to “get into” Joy Div, Bowie, Roxy Music, and some history - for @team-ez but I figure anyone could benefit! so here ye go

Ok once again bare with me being long winded. And sorry if this doesn’t show up as a read-more on mobile! (I hate that it just like, doesn’t for some reason ._. maybe someone can tell me how to fix it!)

Also, they were asking about the band Japan, but I honestly don’t know anything about their music (yet??) so maybe someone else can help. lol But I sure know a lot about Joy Division! So I’m gonna actually write about them last (and surely make the other recs seem half-assed, which isn’t the case, I’m just obsessed with JD and related.)

Bowie For Starters: For ref, I am still working through bowie. I was told to start by just listening to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and go from there as an introduction. Idk, that album is a masterpiece it’s true, but in my opinion, it’s a better bet to start off with a CD called “Best of Bowie (2002)”. That has a lot of hits, many you will recognize from the radio. It spans everything up to that point so you can figure out what “era” of bowie you’re drawn to (and there are many eras I am not an expert on!) - in cases like this, reddit might be a better resource for how to proceed after you’ve gotten a taste of what Bowie sounds like.

But anyway, Bowie songs I personally like the most are:

Golden Years

Ashes To Ashes

China Girl

Changes

Space Oddity (This is like, “required listening” and it is on BoB but not Ziggy)

Starman (That’s not on BoB)

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ROXY MUSIC: lol I envy someone who’s about to discover Roxy for the first time!!!! Keep in mind I am by no means an expert on them (look to my friend roxy-music-lover-1996 for the real know-how, although tbh kas would probably get bored writing an unnecessary essay like this! lol! plus she has a lot less free time than me.)

They are very glam. Saxaphones+guitar+piano+ Eno synths+Bryan Ferry’s effeminate voice=excellence. Just look up any pictures of them as a group (With Brian Eno still in) and you’ll see what I mean by glam. The music sounds like how they look. Eno (one of my FAVE! solo artists) left after the second LP (i think) but the music was still good into the early 1980s.

Roxy Music songs to get started on:

Virginia Plain

Do the Strand

She Sells

Out of the Blue (the cover to the album Country Life is NSFW! Be careful! You can find it on “Best Of Roxy Music” too)

More Than This (this was my first Roxy song. so dreamy! so 80s lol)

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JOY DIVISION - Get ready!!! Starting with a quick plug, IF you like music biographies and anecdotes, you GOTTA read Peter Hook’s memoirs. He is a very funny writer and you don’t have to like the music to appreciate all the antics he got into with the lads. It will give a much better account of what those punks were like than I can. Anyway, Joy Division was a band that ran from 1978-80 (at first under the name Warsaw. But all their tracks have since been released under Joy Division). They only have two LPs, +one compilation of otherwise unreleased tracks/singles called Substance, and one collector’s disk called Still. You may know their first LP as Unknown Pleasures, aka that shirt with the wavy white lines everyone has.

JD is kind of like the bridge between punk and post-punk. They’re recognizable for their spacey gothic sound, bass-guitar-led melodies, and Ian Curtis’ haunting voice. Their engineer was a total pioneer and made sure to isolate EVERYTHING down to individual drums, so the LPs are famous for that really precise sound. I think for them, since there’s so little content, it’s fine to start with Unknown Pleasures, move on to Closer after that, and listen to bits off of Substance throughout.

Tracks to look out for/try first because they’re the most popular or exemplify their sound:

Love Will Tear Us Apart (an absolute ANTHEM!!)

Disorder (incredible album opener!)

Transmission (the best JD “dance tune”)

She’s Lost Control (there’s a couple versions of this)

A Means To An End

Shadowplay

Also, you should look up videos of them playing. Unlike most bands of the time, they insisted on playing live even on crappy tv soundstages, plus you need to see Ian Curtis dance. It’s rather spooky but very iconic. Also Hook plays so high on a bass that he wears so low!

After Curtis died in 1980, the band re-formed as New Order and started to focus on trying out new synth technology. And they’ve been around for ages so, I think the “New Order & Friends” recs post will have to be its own whole post someday! lol!

Thank you for reading!!!! enjoy!!!! I take requests for more music recs lol maybe this is what my blog was really meant for all along!!!

#Music Recs #im SO SORRY to you mobile users who have to scroll #i swear i put it in a readmore!!!!!

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