Re: Underrated things
Surreal? Do elaborate.
Maybe "surreal" was the wrong word; it just seems so strange and unlikely a pairing. Bowie's so... modern. Or postmodern. He's interested in things like artifice, irony, the avant-garde, sonic texture, androgyny, visual art, fashion, shifting personae, etc. That's not to say that he's ironic in the meshed trucker-cap/ironic moustache sort of way. More like his work tends to have a certain self-awareness or self-consciousness about what he's doing (hence the "plastic soul" of Young Americans, and wearing a dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World). It seems like he spent the 70s (brilliantly) exploring all the ways in which pop music could be a more artistic endeavor than people had suspected.
SRV, on the other hand, was a good ol' Texan boy who just wanted to bust out the great blues riffs on his Strat, like his heroes Albert King, Jimi Hendrix, and others. The most straightforward, meat-and-potatoes type of musician I can imagine. I'm not trying to knock the guy, just put him in context. He was actually pretty important to me as a young guitarist and music fan at the age of 11-12, but someone whose stuff really doesn't reach me now, with the possible exception of his instrumental of "Little Wing." My friend oce commented that his band, Double Trouble, was so bland that SRV might as well have gotten a programmed Casio keyboard to provide his backing tracks.
I was trying to think of an appropriate analogy, and decided that the photo inverse of this would be the following: 1980 rolls around and Dr. John* decides he wants some fresh young talent to lay the guitar tracks down on his new record. So he rings up Thurston Moore and says, "Son, I'm cuttin' some rekkids next weekend, how's about you come on down to the Big Easy and do your thang on tape for me, ya hear?"
*Note: These days I much prefer Dr. John to SRV.
