Station Identification

[Otto]

Register, Roots & Spirit

Structuralistically of course you can compare literature to music to some
extent and with no doubts Pynchon and Bowie both belong to the "register" of
the postmodern culture of the seventies. Both are considered as "icons" in
their area, the one in postmodern literature, the other in contemporary pop
music.

Our man himself makes the comparison between his "job" and the contemporary
music at the end of the "Slow Learner"-intro where he's referencing to the
liner notes of Zappa's "Cruising with Ruben & The Jets" from 1968. We've had
that on the list before, if my memory serves me well:

"This is an album of greasy love songs & cretin simplicity. We made it
because we really like this kind of music (just a bunch of old men with rock
& roll clothes on sitting around the studio, mumbling about the good old
days). Ten years from now you'll be sitting around the same with your
friends someplace doing the same thing if there's anything left to sit on."

What I mostly liked about this short text is the last thing, "(...) if
there's anything left to sit on." I bet Pynchon, whose fiction, as Douglas
Fowler says, "takes place in the moment just before apocalypse" (Companion,
p. 17) liked it too:

"What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not
the still photograph but the movie, the soul in flux. Maybe this small
attachment to my past is only another case of what Frank Zappa calls a bunch
of old guys sitting around playing rock 'n' roll. But as we all know, rock
'n' roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams sez, keeps going
on forever."
(T.P. "Slow Learner", 1084, p. 23)

"Station to Station" after all is rock 'n' roll in the tradition of blues
and rhythm & blues, perfectly played in the spirit of that time with
phantastic guitar work by Carlos Alomar. It is a powerful record because you
can still hear it today without feeling ashamed that you've once liked that
kind of music.

Besides, the title song opens with train-sounds and ends with the
apocalyptic "mid-to-late 20th century human condition" line:
"It's too late . . ."

Otto


> How to compare literature and music?  Do Bowie to Pynchon fall in the same
> register even?  Does Bowie embrace the high-culture to pop-culture
spectrum
> the way Pynchon does?  Does Bowie get as deep into the roots of
contemporary
> culture the way Pynchon does? Does he offer a "voice" that gets inside the
> head the way Pynchon does and speak as directly and fundamentally to the
> mid-to-late 20th century human condition? I don't reject the "as powerful
as
> anything by Thomas Pynchon" forumulation, but it doesn't seem to say very
> much.