Reviews
 Keep It Simple
Van Morrison
Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
Emily Saxe @ the Allen Room/Jazz at Lincoln Center - April 5, 2008
Another Country
Tift Merritt
Be Your Own Pet
Get Awkward
Paul McCartney – The McCartney Years (DVD)
Juno – Music from the Motion Picture
Various Artists
Yes - Their Definitive Story
Day and Night Driving
Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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David Bowie
This was just too weird. After me spending most of my high school years trying to appropriate the look of David Bowie as best as I could without violating my Catholic, all-boys high school dress code, things came full circle and Bowie started to dress like me. What fun was there in that? Gone were the outrageous glam duds. In their place was a little Lord Fauntleroy version of a Sears shopper. How could this be Bowie? After the lame and very disappointing “Diamond Dogs”, I had already abandoned Bowie, so Young Americans seemed totally extraneous to me at the time, and wrongheaded to boot.
I had jumped to conclusions. While the hit singles from this album (“Fame”, co-written with John Lennon, and the title track) still sound a bit stilted to me, there is a sense of purpose here that flies in the face of convention, a characteristic that I had originally missed completely. By co-opting ‘ordinary’ dress and borrowing heavily from a well-known musical style (Philly soul, the real precursor to disco), Bowie launched himself light years away from his Ziggy persona. That in itself was worth a fortune, especially to Bowie, who knew he’d be doomed to the typical shelf life of a ‘genre representative’ if he didn’t break out. Young Americans moved Bowie about as far away from that persona as he could have gotten at that time, and although it was an extraordinarily awkward transition, it worked, but it didn’t work as a change in style as much as it worked as a musical change.
Futuristic references and alien poses were transposed into a middle American, lowbrow ideal, causing an entirely new frame of reference for Bowie’s music. As a result, tales of backseat romance and relationships in transition take the front seat. Names of bandmembers that had become second nature to Bowie fans (Mick Ronson, et al) were nowhere to be found here, either, replaced with slick studio musicians and backing vocalists. The best tunes weren’t the ones getting the airplay, either. Radio fans might have drawn conclusions from hearing “Fame” and “Young Americans”, but the real story for this album was told in emotionally direct songs such as “Win”, “Somebody Up There Likes Me” and “Can You Hear Me”. Each of these three recordings marked something brand new for Bowie, proving that he could stretch his boundaries beyond the already broad territory that he had covered, with very moving compositions about (to paraphrase Jimi Hendrix) love and confusion. In retrospect, Young Americans still doesn’t stand out as one of Bowie’s most cohesive efforts, but isn’t half-bad, either, especially if you’re willing to listen past the hits.
Grade: 
 
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