"Where's Doug Yule?" a DJ asked Lou Reed in 1972, during an interview with WLIR radio.

There was a pregnant pause. Lou answered: "Dead, I hope."

Most Velvet Underground fans have stopped short of wishing death upon Doug Yule, who played bass in the VU from late 1968 to the summer of 1970. But his reputation remains less than stellar—and when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, he was noticeably absent.

There are two basic reasons for Yule's low standing in the VU hierarchy:

1. Doug Yule is not John Cale, who co-founded the band with Reed and guitarist Sterling Morrison in 1965 and was forced out due to irreconcilable differences in 1968.
   
   
2. Yule is responsible for the existence of Squeeze, the in-name-only Velvet Underground LP  recorded long after Reed, Morrison, and drummer Maureen Tucker had jumped ship.

The first charge is easy enough to counter. Pretty much no one is John Cale, a Welsh coal miner's son, genius multi-instrumentalist, and fearless boundary-pusher whose solo career rivaled Reed's over the decades. The second one is a bit tougher. Squeeze is not a great album, by any stretch of the imagination. But it's not quite as bad as some say—and had it been released as a Doug Yule solo LP (he played everything on it except drums, after all), it might be enjoying a renaissance right now, perhaps being reissued by a tastemaking label like Light in the Attic with reviews reassessing its low-key charms. (As it stands, you can check Squeeze out for yourself on Spotify).

And yet Yule, an extraordinarily talented musician who was an integral part of some the finest rock and roll ever made, deserves recognition and respect. Here's why:

Exhibit A: La Cave, Cleveland, Oct. 2, 1968

Yule joined the Velvets immediately following Cale's departure in late September of 1968, and was almost immediately thrown into the deep end. The 21-year-old's first public outing with the band took place at the tiny La Cave club in Cleveland (where the Velvets had performed the legendary "Sweet Sister Ray" earlier that year). Now, as any of the thousands of garage bands who have covered the VU know, the songs themselves are not terribly complicated (Reed's famous quote: "One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz."). Performing them convincingly is something else entirely, requiring fluidity, flexibility, and, most importantly, a sense of adventure. Judging from the oft-bootlegged tape of the La Cave set, Yule delivered on all accounts, slipping easily from a vicious "Move Right In" to a startlingly beautiful "Jesus" and harmonizing beautifully with Reed on the latter. On a 10-minute rollercoaster ride through "Foggy Notion", Reed and Morrison almost seem as if they're trying to trip their new recruit up, blasting through the changes (and maybe making up a few new ones along the way). Yule is unflappable, locking in with Tucker's relentless 4/4, sounding right at home.

Exhibit B: "Candy Says"

Yule's trial by fire wasn't over yet, however. Just a few weeks after the La Cave gig, the Velvets headed west to L.A. to record their third LP. Having just joined the band, Yule might have reasonably expected to play a supporting role in the proceedings. Instead, he was asked to take the lead vocal on the album's opening track, "Candy Says", a song that stands as one of Reed's towering achievements. Once again, Yule stepped up the plate and knocked it out of the park. Reed later somewhat condescendingly claimed that his young protege had no idea what he was singing about (something Yule more or less confirmed later), but Yule's hauntingly fragile performance is perfect for Reed's empathetic portrait of Warhol "superstar" Candy Darling. Lou must have agreed—he rarely attempted the song in his solo career until he came across a vocalist capable of matching Yule in Antony Hegarty.

Exhibit C: "What Goes On," live at the Matrix, November 1969

During his time with the Velvets, the classically trained John Cale leapt from bass to viola to organ to piano. Yule couldn't take over viola duties, but throughout 1969, his keyboard skills were increasingly brought to the fore, especially on the VU's churning masterwork, "What Goes On". On a live recording included on Live 1969 and freshly remastered from the original tapes for the new Complete Matrix Tapes box set, Yule rides the neverending wave of interlocking guitar and drums for close to nine minutes, conjuring up a swirling celestial sound. Sterling Morrison later suggested that early, unrecorded live versions of "What Goes On" with Cale were definitive. But it's hard to imagine them—or anything, really—being better than this.

Exhibit D: Loaded

The Velvet Underground's swan song (discounting the aforementioned Squeeze) was, by most accounts, made by a splintered band, with Tucker on maternity leave and a disillusioned Morrison taking on a more muted role. That left Reed and Yule as the primary architects of the VU's "loaded with hits" stab at crossover success. And while Reed was undoubtedly still steering the ship, the demos, alternates, and outtakes included on the new, six-disc Re-Loaded box set show that the collaboration was a close one. Yule is all over the tapes, contributing bass, keyboards, drums, lead guitar, vocals, and even a dramatic string arrangement to "Ocean", which was left unreleased until 1995 (and powerful enough that it was originally credited to Cale). The songs may have been Lou's, but the sound relies heavily on Doug—and it's his voice and lead guitar that send the Velvets on their way with the album's slow, sad closer "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'". Brought in less than two years earlier as a mere replacement bassist, Yule had made himself an indispensable part of the VU saga.

Lowell Brams was married to Sufjan Stevens’ mother, Carrie, for five years in the early 1980s. She dealt with depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism throughout her life, and initially abandoned Stevens’ family when he was one. But after Lowell entered the picture, Carrie reconnected with her kids, and he seemed to provide Stevens and his siblings with the most stable times of their childhood, especially three summers they spent together with he and Carrie in Eugene, Oregon. Inside Carrie & Lowell, which features lyrics steeped in imagery from Eugene, there’s a photo of Carrie crocheting. You see the reflection of Lowell in a mirror, holding a camera: He has this gentle, observant, slightly out of the frame presence on the record, too.

In my review of Carrie & Lowell, I reflected on another photo in the liner notes depicting a young Sufjan eating a banana, and noted that Carrie’s eyes aren’t on him: "She's not looking at him, but she's there...It's a haunting feeling that this little kid, years later, would create a masterpiece so knowing about suffering, sadness, death, and loneliness." Shortly after its publication, I received a note from Brams, who wanted to make sure I knew that Carrie’s eyes weren’t on her son “because there were three other kids under 10 years old at the table. Quite a handful." I found it touching that, years after Carrie’s death, and the end of his marriage to her, he wanted to make sure I knew she wasn’t a bad person.

As a testament to his ongoing relationship with his stepson, Brams co-founded Asthmatic Kitty in 1998, and the two have recorded electronic music together, like on 2009’s Music for Insomnia. As the press blurb for that release reads, "Lowell Brams was raised in West Alexandria and Dayton, Ohio. He met Sufjan Stevens in Detroit, Michigan, in 1976, but Sufjan was eleven months old and doesn’t remember it. After Lowell and Sufjan’s mother married, they re-met in 1980 in Eugene, Oregon, have been friends since then."

Brams answered the phone at Asthmatic Kitty’s Wyoming office when I called to talk to him about Carrie & Lowell last month.

Pitchfork: Has hearing the album maybe brought any memories back?

Lowell Brams: No, I don't think I've forgotten that much about the summers he and his siblings stayed with us. Those are very vivid memories and the best memories from a marriage that ultimately didn't work out. So there wasn't anything I had forgotten. [On the album] he mentions being left in a video store, that I never heard about before, and I'm pretty certain it did not happen when they were visiting us. Because I would have heard about it, but I guess it happened somewhere else. Maybe in Detroit [where Stevens grew up]. I don't know.

Pitchfork: Did Sufjan talk to you about the album as he was working on it? Was it something you were aware was happening and have you talked about it since?

LB: We, no we didn't talk about it when he was working on it. I didn't really know what he was working on as far as his next album. But then I went to New York, and I think that's when we were finishing up another electronic noise album that we had been working on off and on for about five years. He told me about the album, and his idea of you know using the title and the photograph. And asked me if it was okay with me. And I said yes it was. And, you know, it’s not something I really had to think about too much. I understood immediately that here was something, there was going to be a little light shined on part of my life that was private, and just shared with a few people including him and his siblings and some other relatives of his mother's, and that it was his creative choice. I've learned if I'm questioning his creative choices, it later turns out I was wrong. I learned that some time ago, so, you know, I thought, Okay. And we talked about the album, but more in terms just in how it came about. He's said in interviews that the person listed as the co-producer, Thomas Bartlett, sort of came up with the idea after hearing a lot of material that Sufjan had recorded. So we've talked about that. But as far as what the songs are about, to me, it's kind of self-explanatory.

That's a real long answer to what really the answer is no. No, haven't really talked to him about the content. I understand what he's talking about. Most of the time. But of course I didn't know about everything on there. As far as what refers to his summers in Oregon with his mother and me, like I said, I didn't really need to ask him about that even if I'm not totally sure what he means.

Pitchfork: When you go to see him perform live, is it difficult, or at this point have you spent enough time with the record? I've gone and seen him perform it live, and the guy next to me was crying. People were getting very emotional, so I can imagine if the songs are actually written about you, it must be a complicated thing.

LB: It is. And the first time or two I cried as well. And then I sort of stopped crying. But it was, it never ceases to be, reaching very deep. And touches on emotions that are still pretty raw, during some of the songs that are most specifically about his mother. Do you remember how they were projecting films in the back, and other things? Well, the films of his mother, that's kind of hard for me to take. But I survived. It's a strange experience. But also fulfilling.

Pitchfork: Has the album changed your relationship with Sufjan at all? Or when you think back, has it changed the way you think of your time with Carrie?

LB: No I don't think it has really. Sufjan and I have obviously been working together on the label since ’98. So we've been in close touch, it hasn't really changed anything. And as far as how I think about Carrie, maybe, the one downside to it is that, here in our office where we do our shipping, part of the album coming out—photos of her were something that I saw once in awhile when I looked through my [photo] albums. So the album comes out, and here in our office every time I turn around I'm seeing this photo of the two of us, his mother and me, and that has been a little difficult. But it's all outweighed by the fact that the album is so good, and has been well-received. I'm turning 65 next March, and I'm in the process of trying to retire from day to day work at the label. And so it's a nice note to go out on. To have an album that's been successful in every way. And to have that link to it. That special link. But, to try to go back answer part of your question, no I don't think it's really changed how I think about our marriage. It happened the way it happened and it was too bad. But, hell, we tried. I’d already known her for 12 years before we got married. It was something we really thought would work but ultimately it didn't.

Pitchfork: What are your plans after retirement?

LB: Read and write. And try to make some more electronic music without having to go to Sufjan's studio in New York. It's great recording with him but I have to go to New York to do it. Those things—and just taking care of myself. I really thought I’d be able to retire when I was 70, that I was just going to zoom on through, but health issues came up and I can't do that. So I'm going to take care of myself, too.

The label’s been an incredible experience but also a burn out. We've had a lot of success, and artistically I think we've been a 99% success. I'm proud of pretty much everything we've put out. But, I'm sure you know enough about it: It's hard. You're very hopeful that a particular artist is going to catch on or a particular album and it doesn't happen. But that's the business. That's the way it is. And you can't really change anybody's mind; you just offer it and see what happens. So there’ve been disappointments, but artistically it's been great and I'm really proud of it, what the label’s released.

Pitchfork: You're going to build a studio around you so you don't have to go to New York all of the time?

LB: Well, we’ll set something up in whatever space I can find in the house. Maybe I'll set it up here in the office. And I've got enough books that I want to read that it'll take me another lifetime. Gonna keep doing that. And hope to do some writing, too.

Pitchfork: It must be satisfying to be spoken of so fondly by Sufjan in interviews, and to be a heroic figure on the record.

LB: Well, I don't know about heroic but...when his mother and I split up it was, it seemed to me that it was unlikely that he and his brothers and sisters were going to get to spend a lot of time with her after that. And I wanted to be a connection for them to her. It ended up oddly that I moved from Oregon and ended up in Michigan in the lower part of the state, and they were in the upper part, but it wasn't that hard to visit. And their father and stepmother were very gracious and always allowed me to visit. So I just wanted to be a part of their life; it was heartbreaking that those times that they spent with us couldn't continue, and heartbreaking that it didn't seem they weren't going to be able to spend much time with her, and she was not going to be in a situation when she was with me where she could have them sometimes. So, the album helped confirm that I did something right there. And it's gratifying he appreciated it. I know they all appreciated it. They're all grown up now. And have kids and all. But it was a confusing time for them. And most confusing for Sufjan because he was the youngest. He's with his mother, and then he's not with his mother, and then he’s with his mother again with me, and then that changes. You know, he was very young and it was really confusing. And then on her death, it just all came back to him.

Pitchfork: Do you like the album?

LB: Oh yeah. I'm proud to be associated with it, even though it's not my music. It’s just as good as anything he's ever done. And having seen the reviews, and having been at five of the shows where he played the entire album, it's clear that it's something that really reaches people, going beyond his personal story. There are so many universal themes on the album. It's just beautifully done, too. It was a while before I could listen to it without crying. But it also makes people cry who didn't know his mother.

Bill Murray's Netflix adventure "A Very Murray Christmas" is a playful reanimation of one of television's most easily mocked institutions: the light entertainment holiday special, with a star—preferably musical—and their showbiz mates pretending to celebrate Christmas together, just like the olden days. While often exceptionally cheesy, these specials were most commonly pitched somewhere between a sincere attempt at seasonal celebration and an entirely cynical move to dazzle sentimental fools with tinsel—just like Murray's offering. There's fake snow, fake sincerity, spontaneous get-togethers and singing, and a lack of irony, bickering, emotional reserve, and a sense of proportion. They are, in short, just like Christmas itself.

Here are 10 examples of the form for the uninitiated, from both American and British TV schedules past.

The Judy Garland Christmas Show

Every second of this is worth watching, and not just for the early song-and-dance appearance by a teenage Liza Minelli. This 1963 special, which makes a great show of depicting a comfortable family get-together, struggles to get past Judy's slight awkwardness as a host and the feeling that the kids were forced to take part. And yet it's clear everyone on camera is willing this thing to succeed. Still, the moment when Joey Luft (wearing a jacket that would look good on the Beatles a year later) yells "have a banana!" during "Consider Yourself" captures the alienating sensation of spending Christmas in someone else's home.

Johnny Cash & Family

In marked contrast to Judy's house of brittle family fun, Johnny Cash's TV shows never felt forced. His 1978 Christmas special could be about anything and it'd still work. He's Johnny Cash and he's more than capable of making a guest feel welcome. So he'll bring in some old friends—Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis—to do a party piece or two, start telling a few stories about old times, and end with a big sing-along, cups brimming over throughout. That's just a regular Saturday night at the Cash house.

Happy Holidays with Bing and Frank

In years to come, people will pore over the the hip banter between Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby in this 1957 seasonal special in the same way the quips of Shakespeare's comedies are decoded and explained for bored schoolchildren. "You wanna grab the drape there, Leon? Get the skimmer?" is such an opaque way to ask someone to take your coat and hat; it's practically impenetrable from the other end of time's telescope.

The Carpenters at Christmas

For all that the music of the Carps has been annointed with retrospective gravitas, their TV shows do tend to linger in the shallow end of the emotional pool (as also occupied by critically unrestored Osmonds and John Denver). The cheese runs thickest whenever Karen is not singing—her hallowed voice seems lit from within even during the most nonsensical of lyrics—and the narrative of the 1977 special doesn't help. The plot: Karen plans a party and Richard decides not to go. Will big brother ruin Karen's Christmas? Of course not. He's not a monster.

Elvis (NBC Special)

The 1968 comeback special is not often considered to be a seasonal classic, mostly because there are no trees, carolers, scarves, snowmen, candy canes, gifts or sweaters, and all the proposed festive songs were taken out at the planning stage. As this footage proves, it's not about Christmas and presents, it's about charisma and presence. Elvis doesn't perform any daffy skits or duet awkwardly with a close personal showbiz friend, but that's partly because he did most of that kind of stuff in his movies, which makes this special less of a holiday reminiscence and more of a sensible New Year's resolution.

Andy Williams

The first clip in this collection of snippets from Andy Williams' many seasonal presentations captures all that is good (and strange) about the festive TV special: a crooner in a scarf and top hat walking around a Victorian ice-rink in a Christmas card, dispensing logs and magic glitter and singing. He then climbs up two rolled-in barrels and doesn't fall off or slip even once, despite the clear and present danger from all that ice. That's how good at Christmas Andy Williams was. He was a singin', swingin' Santa, and just like Santa, there's a definite air of your dad about him.

Dolly Parton Home For Christmas

Leaving aside the voice, the downhome back-story, and all the dressing up, Dolly's least appreciated skill in this 1990 special is how she appears to be entirely honest, even in the most staged of all possible situations. Her Christmas special opens in the true home of all festive celebrations—a shop—and it's not a dig at rampant consumerism either. She comes in talking ("Listen, I think I hear me singing!") and proceeds to chat and sing her way through the most expensive-looking modest Tennessee family reunion you ever did see.

Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas

Everyone knows the most Christmassy Christmas is a Victorian British Christmas, and so for Bing Crosby's 1977 festive spesh, he headed for London. Outside, the freezing sleet of punk rock drenched the streets with spit and scorn, but inside we were all toasty warm with Uncle Bing and his guests, including Ron Moody, Twiggy, and David Bowie. You may be familiar with this clip from such common cringes as "OMG THIS IS JUST THE WORST" and "and then Bowie blew it all by duetting with Bing Crosby" but guess what? It's actually pretty good (with occasional hot flashes of pure cheese), mainly because it is entirely free of Bowie's constant companions, the ironic quotation marks.

Kate Bush

Also irony-free, Kate Bush's festive TV special from 1979 is unhampered by the need to dress every set as if it's a living room with a roaring fire and put everyone in stifling woolen sweaters. Instead she puts two dancers into costume as anthropomorphized double basses (which must be even hotter), sings her own Christmas song, "December Will Be Magic Again", as if it's a sober autopsy of the festive season, and does not speak to her live studio audience once. Even her introduction to guest star Peter Gabriel is sung like a Christmas carol. Still, at least her song about Egypt is geographically close to the original nativity.

The Star Wars Holiday Special

It might be a long time ago (1978), and it might be a galaxy far away, but somehow the spirit of Christmas has managed to reach the Chewbacca family back home on Kashyyyk—Malla, Itchy and Chewie's abandoned son Lumpy—as they wait for their gargantuan space smuggler to return home to celebrate "Life Day". Along the way, we see a tabletop circus; a demonstration of Wookiee cooking; an early stab at virtual reality. There's a space cabaret (starring that cantina band and a strangely alive Greedo) and tiny cameos from all of your Star Wars favorites plus Jefferson Starship (because, y'know… starship), in what must be the strangest festive presentation of all time. (Watch the full thing here.)

T-Pain's journey from strip club bard to NPR favorite started with the release of "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper)" on December 13, 2005. What first seemed like a sweetly risqué novelty hit that was too racy for airplay—radio settled for "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Dancer)"—it did quite a bit of work. It directly led to the rise of (and subsequent call for the death of) Auto-Tune, cemented the end of rock's reign over stripper anthems, and heralded a new, rich era of songs about the feelings and activities inspired by looking at naked women dance.

That's a lot to lay on one single, but the reaction it received bears out its impact. "I'm 'n Luv" got an answer cover, an art rock tribute, and received the most indisputable acknowledgement of cultural impact a popular song can get: A "Weird Al" Yankovic parody. Yankovic dresses like Gilligan to sing "I'm in Love With the Skipper" in concert. It's the only stripper anthem to be so honored to date.

Now, there's no percentage in being ahead of one's time, and to imply that T-Pain was plowing new ground would dishonor the work of 2 Live Crew, Three 6 Mafia, and countless others who rapped and sang about poles and booties and table dances. What T-Pain was was perfectly of the time, at the crest of a tidal wave of R&B and hip-hop strip club-set bangers. Every genre has its songs about strippers, from punk to country, but no other genre has been both chronicler and soundtrack of the business like the hip-hop of the last decade, and its ascendance coincided with T-Pain's.

Just five months after "I'm 'n Luv" was released, Billboard ran a cover story on the importance of the strip club to breaking new artists. Another five months later, the wider world was introduced to Fat Joe and Lil Wayne's "Make It Rain". The term itself would remain obscure enough to a general audience that the New York Times found it necessary to run a brief explainer in 2011, prompted by Super Bowl coverage that referred to the extracurricular activities of athletes.

Magic City is now in its 10th year of stories about how it breaks music. The last decade has seen enough strip club imagery in lyrics and videos and television and film that anyone still needing "making it rain" explained to them has a pretty rarefied media intake. What that means for the culture beyond a great popular art and hustle getting its due I will leave to others, save for this: would that if for every song about watching strippers, there was one like Gangsta Boo's classic "Can I Get Paid (Get Your Broke Ass Out)", a fantastic track from the stripper's point of view.

For a song with "stripper" in the name to be a top 40 hit, it had to work as more than a club anthem. Which it really isn't. T-Pain's biggest strip club banger is probably "Up Down (Do This All Day)", a much more uptempo song about throwing money at asses. "I'm 'n Luv" is a ballad. The story goes that it's based on the time he took that one friend to a club for his first time, and he, of course, fell in love with a stripper. So basically, this song is T-Pain busting on his lovestruck buddy, taking that ribbing and turning it into a massive hit in GarageBand in a couple of hours, utilizing a synth flute and Auto-Tune to huge effect. It's so sweet in intent and minimal in instrumentation it's possible to imagine the Flamingos singing it.

The ubiquity of "I'm 'n Luv" made it unlistenable for a while, a victim of overplay and its own catchy simplicity. But it stands up well in the field of slow and sentimental stripper songs, like Wyclef Jean's "Perfect Gentleman" and Usher's "I Don't Mind". "I'm 'n Luv" lacks the condescension in those—"Just cause she dances go-go/ It don't make her a ho, no." "I don't mind if you dance on a pole/ That don't make you a ho." Oh, thanks, that's awfully big of you, fellas. It also lacks the focus on money, booze, and partying in Tyga's "Rack City" or Juicy J's "Bandz a Make Her Dance" or every other song that, as Hannibal Buress puts it, is a variation on "shake that ass while I throw money that I made selling crack."

After 2005, rock radio continued to dwindle into a niche market. The strip club anthems of the 1980s—"Cherry Pie", "Pour Some Sugar on Me", "Girls, Girls, Girls"—and the nu-metal of the '90s were fading memories. The songs that history will record as the last butt rock stripper anthems came forth shortly thereafter in a death rattle of trying-to: Buckcherry's "Crazy Bitch" (2005), Kid Rock's "So Hott" (2007), and Nickelback's "Shakin' Hands" (2008).

Thank goodness that's over.

In addition to being at the edge of a trend in subject matter, T-Pain's use of Auto-Tune marked/caused a huge increase in the program's use and an accompanying backlash against it, uniting Jay Z and Death Cab for Cutie in their public stands against vocal processing. T-Pain is at least partly responsible for both 808s and Heartbreak and The Blueprint 3, one of which used a lot of Auto-Tune and one of which called for its death. T-Pain never used the device to make his voice sound unrealistically perfect. He used it to screw it up and make it do what the human voice technically could not.

When it comes to popular music, an art form whose entire existence depends on the unanticipated applications of new technologies, drawing the line at a particular effect is a mental feat. It resembles nothing so much as a strip club customer who goes on a tirade about how much he dislikes surgically augmented bodies even though he would not for one second stand for a woman who decided to leave her body hair in its authentic state. The creator of Auto-Tune has been quoted as comparing it to cosmetics, appropriately. Sometimes it's just a little concealer, sometimes it's neon pink fake lashes, and if it's going to be noticeable, might as well go big.

Last year, T-Pain recorded the most popular Tiny Desk Concert in NPR history, accompanied by a lone keyboard player and joking that his Auto-Tune had been surgically inserted. "Buy U a Drank" unplugged turned out to be a smash with NPR listeners. This could be due to the instinctive love a certain demographic has for R&B or hip-hop only when it's recontextualized and stripped down, but an audience who'd never heard T-Pain probably just saw an enchanting soul singer. Certainly the novelty was the draw for those who had.

To commemorate the 10-year anniversary of T-Pain's debut album and the one-year anniversary of his appearance, NPR invited him back last week for a command performance. "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper)" didn't make the cut either time. Probably even "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Dancer)" couldn't pass muster. There's still a few places that song can't go, because even a decade later, it's ahead of its time.

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Photo by Chris Tuite

(Listen to an Apple Music playlist with Motörhead highlights here.)

Four days after turning 70, Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister died. The Motörhead frontman hadn’t been in good health—heart trouble, diabetes, and a steady diet of cigarettes, speed, and Jack Daniel’s kept him on the ropes in recent months. His band’s shows were cut short and sometimes canceled, and news stories were written about his decision to (gasp) avoid brown liquors. Still, he seemed impervious to death—he’d made it this far, after all. At his 70th birthday party, rock star friends joked about how he would outlive us all. Two days later, doctors found cancer in his brain and neck; two days after that, he was dead.

There’s an unfillable void left in his wake. The man was a true original. Nobody has Lemmy’s voice—that loosely melodic subterranean growl was perfectly suited to songs about chasing girls and getting fucked up night after night on the road. Even the way he positioned himself in front of a microphone—neck craned back, facing upwards—was unique. There are many great bassists in the world, but nobody has Lemmy’s precise combination of tone, technique, and power. With his sunglasses, handlebar mustache, and bullet belt, he sang from a position of rebellion and strength. Motörhead’s was biker gang, street fighting, and war music—you put it on when you want to feel like you’re in control.

Lemmy Kilmister was one of rock’n’roll’s all-time underdogs. “Born to lose, live to win,” read his Ace of Spades tattoo, and he clearly lived that mantra. He was expelled from school because he beat his headmaster with a cane. He got a job as a roadie for Hendrix where his duties mostly involved scoring drugs. An outcast, an outsider, and by no means a pretty boy (more like a greasy swampman), he partied hard. That’s the cocktail that made Motörhead such a vital band—their dirtbag lyrics were being sung by a real-life deviant party monster. He was the spirit animal encouraging you to live to win, to do whatever it takes to enjoy life, and to fight everyone who tries to interfere.

Born in England just after WWII, Lemmy grew up in a world without rock’n’roll. At around 10 years old, he heard the music that changed his life—Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis. These guys were bold, brazen, uncompromising characters—a loose template to work from later in life. He saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club, appreciating their musicianship, sense of humor, and scrappiness. (In his memoir, he describes watching John Lennon knock a guy out during a show one night.) Watching early Motörhead footage isn’t all that different from watching old clips of the Beatles bantering with each other—they were quick and funny and tough when necessary.

Lemmy always seemed slightly out of place as a member of the prog rock band Hawkwind, but his contributions were excellent. He wrote and sang the meditative, spare, and acoustic “The Watcher” from 1972’s Doremi Fasol Latido, and it’s shocking to contemplate its sound in terms of Lemmy’s later career. Eventually, he was dismissed from Hawkwind. As explained in the 2010 documentary Lemmy, his taste for speed while the rest of the band preferred psychedelics created a rift in communication. When he finally started a new band, he reworked a Hawkwind song he’d written called “Motörhead”, stripping it back from Hawkwind’s more arch arrangements to keep it fast, loud, and simple.

In the song “Overkill”, there’s a line about how it’s important to “feel it in your guts”—to let the music hit you in the spine and force you to move. It’s almost like a mission statement—they’re actively trying to whip you into a frenzy with this galloping, triumphant, and aggressive music. Like the Ramones, Motörhead had a formula. Their music served as a bridge between the metalheads and the punks, pushing kids to play their own music faster, heavier, and louder.

Lemmy had a penchant for Nazi memorabilia (he insisted that his collection came from a place of historical interest, not ideological fascination) and wrote leagues of scumbag lyrics, but Lemmy wasn’t merely loved—he was adored. The wrestler Triple H, who has three different entrance themes sung by Lemmy, told a story about how he once saw Slash “starstruck” in the presence of his hero. Fans would make pilgrimages from all over the world to Los Angeles’ Rainbow Bar on the off chance that he’d be playing the game machine at the end of the bar. People love telling Lemmy stories, and there are a lot of them out there.

I made a trip to Sorrento, Italy, and my Airbnb host and I were trying to find common ground across the language barrier, discussing our respective hometowns and taste in music. After a couple of false starts, she asked me, “Do you like Motörhead?” I was not expecting this question. Excited, I said yes. With a huge, sincere smile on her face, she said, “I love Lemmy.”

Photo by Camille Blake

At the tail end of October, Autechre fans were treated to an unprecedented bounty: AE_LIVE, a concert album comprising not one but four live sets from the duo—Krakow, Brussels, Utrecht, and Dublin—all recorded late last year. Then, in December, five more from 2015 (Krems, Nagano, Grafenhainichen, Dour, Katowice) became available. It's a lot to process, but then, for Autechre fans, bewilderment just kind of comes with the territory.

These are, truly, uncharted waters for electronic music: Has any other act set out to document its live process this way? I actually wrote this entire piece based on just the first four live sets; it was only when I went to do a final fact check that I discovered that five more sets had been released that very afternoon. But to be blindsided by such a staggering quantity of music also feels like part of the experiment. The canon of concert recordings of experimental electronic music is not vast, but the format isn't unheard of, either. Here are a handful worth seeking out—once you manage to pry yourself away from Autechre's bounty, that is.

Autechre: AE_LIVE (Warp)

Listening to an Autechre live set at home or on headphones is one thing; seeing them live is another. Or perhaps "seeing" isn't the right word, because the duo's shows are often carried out in near total darkness, the better to subsume listeners. The live shows have the benefit of the full power of a massive, well-tuned sound system—not to mention the electrifying energy of the crowd. To get a sense of what the atmosphere is like, just listen to a fan recording of Autechre's 2014 live show in Krakow, in which intermittent shrieks and whoops punctuate not only the set's climactic moments but also, sometimes, its pauses and potholes. If Autechre's music is like a very wobbly piece of ultra-modern furniture, then the crowd noise is the fourth leg that keeps it upright. There's a soundboard recording of that same Krakow performance in the AE_LIVE bundle, and, stripped of crowd noise, it scans very differently. The room melts away, and you're plunged into a hermetic chamber of ricocheting electronic ping and squelch—headspace rather than meatspace.

No one does head music like Autechre. They're the rare act whose recordings thrive upon dryness and the live recordings are a welcome opportunity to experience their real-time number-crunching. If you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall inside a microprocessor, here's your chance. Nine chances, actually, and counting.

And while nine iterations of the same basic material might seem like overkill, the way they create their music makes AE_LIVE different from listening to multiple live sets from almost any other musician, electronic or otherwise. Rob Brown and Sean Booth don't play songs; they play software patches of their own devising, and while individual sounds and timbres routinely crop up, the permutations are always different. Each set is just one iteration of infinite possibilities. The boundary between writing, recording, and playing their inimitable strain of electronic music "is sort of gone now," Booth recently told the Portland Mercury, "because we want to get to a point where we can just spit an album out in real time. I'd say we are close to it, if not actually there already.” That's also why AE_LIVE isn't being presented as a complement to their last album, or a replacement for a new album—it is the new album.

Moufang/Czamanski: Live in Seattle (Further)

Jordan Czamanski (of Juju & Jordash) and David Moufang (aka Move D) have logged plenty of time on stage together as members of the improvising techno ensembles Magic Mountain High and Mulholland Free Clinic. They're no stranger to live albums, either: Magic Mountain High released a 2013 set as a full-length on Workshop, as well as selections of a set from as a white-label earlier this year. This document, released in October on Further Records, captures a 2013 Seattle appearance from just Moufang and Czamanski. With only four hands in the mix instead of the usual six or eight, it's a more streamlined affair than MMH or MFC, but the methodology is the same: all hardware, no computers, 100% improvised. It's a wild, woolly affair, full of mashed organs and acid basslines and crisp, swinging machine grooves. The 15-minute excerpt that comprises the LP's A side flirts with '50s sci-fi and radiophonic squeal; the more focused B side is a heads-down techno trip. No two bars are alike.

Pan Sonic: 19/01/995 20/01/995 and 05/10/995 (Jenny Divers)

Given that Pan Sonic's albums, especially their early ones, double as laboratory experiments conducted with arcane, obsolete electronic apparatuses, it's a miracle that their music can be performed in public in the first place. How can material designed to be heard in anechoic chambers be pulled off in a space as compromised as a nightclub? But their sine wave pummel works wonders in a live context. At a Pan Sonic show in San Francisco in the early '00s, I remember being lulled to sleep on my feet—not because I was bored; quite the opposite—their woozy bass vibrations sucked the consciousness right out of me. God forbid you should listen to that shit while you drive.

This pair of CDs documents a 1995 double-header at the Knitting Factory, when the group was still a trio, and a London show a few months later where it was just Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen twisting the knobs. Both discs cover similar terrain as Pan Sonic's 1995 album Vakio and Vainio's Ø albums from the same period: minimalist drum-machine thump, quarter-tone harmonies, tornado-grade squalls of white noise, and bass so thick you could cut it with a knife. There's some serious acousmatic headfuckery, too, especially on headphones. Some 10 minutes into "20/01/995", as an overdriven hum chugs like an outboard engine, a tiny little ghost note whippoorwills around the margins, sounding as though it comes from outside the music—I actually took off my headphones just to be sure that it wasn't something bleeping in my room. The 19/01/995 date tips more into techno territory; 05/10/995 is noisier and more abstracted, and it ends in a shuddering, slow-motion climax that must have been a thing of terrible beauty to behold live. Screwface for days.

Sun Electric: 30.7.94 Live (Apollo)

Sun Electric (Tom Thiel and Max Loderbauer) are responsible for some of the most intricate and sparkling recordings in IDM, but this 1994 live album, recorded at an outdoor performance in Copenhagen, is a masterpiece of pulsing, mostly drum-free ambient techno on par with Global Communication's 76:14. Across three 20-minute tracks, synthesizers shimmer, hints of percussion glint in the mist, and echoes bubble like running water. Fifteen minutes into "Castor and Pollux", the chorus of the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" inexplicably wafts into earshot, as though heard from the far side of the park, and dubbed out and half-harmonized with the surrounding chords; it's the last thing you would ever expect to hear in that moment, and for that very reason it works wonders. The third track, "Northern Lights #5", entertains a brief stretch of fast, 4/4 techno, but the beat is submerged in such a way that it comes off like a cool breeze on a hot day—and the second half of the track, anyway, is a confused tumble down a rabbit hole of haunted ballroom and cavernous reverb.

Fennesz: Live in Japan (Touch)

Several of Fennesz' live dates—solo, head to head with the improviser Keith Rowe, as a part of Fenn O'Berg, and alongside Ryuichi Sakamoto—have made it to disc, but this unbroken, 43-minute set from early 2003 is as pure and concentrated a blast of Christian Fennesz' method and vision as you'll find. Maybe it's because Fennesz is as much a guitarist as a laptopper, but something about the way he uses reverb actually lends the impression that you're hearing him in a big room, even as the precision of his digitally carved sounds is as vivid as that of any studio-created electronic music. (The set's been recorded off the soundboard, so there is no crowd noise or room ambience.)

Listeners familiar with the Austrian musician's catalog may recognize motifs reprised from previous albums, but there are few recognizable songs or even track divisions; the noisy, shapeshifting set is a largely lateral journey that twists like a slow-moving river through the high desert. It opens with burrs of static clinging to each other, and rubbed glass, distant string samples, and the buzz of what sounds like petulant bumblebees sketch out its textures. For some stretches, it feels like eavesdropping on intergalactic radio interference, straining your ears for some sign of life amidst all the randomized white noise. Elsewhere, there's fingerpicked acoustic guitar broken into digital shards, like a malfunctioning hologram of a campfire strummer. Towards the end, the music fades out and is followed by a brief silence (originally filled with applause, I suppose) before it ramps back up into a final fistful of fingerpicking, a melodic snippet of xylophone, and a crushing climax that feels like the previous 40 minutes being twisted up and pulled through the eye of a needle. It's a hell of a way to end a hell of a show.

Wolfgang Voigt: Rückverzauberung Live In London (Astral Industries)

I once got the chance to see Wolfgang Voigt play a live performance of his work as Gas inside the lower court of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí's Park Güell in Barcelona. You'd be hard pressed to find a more dramatic place to experience his swirling, sample-heavy drones, which smear German Romantic orchestral music into a dense, viscous strain of ambient, by turns blissful and dreadfully uneasy. While the Doric columns supplied plenty of gravitas, they also ended up making for some pretty crappy acoustics. Fortunately, this recording from a 2014 set drops you smack in the middle of Voigt's imaginary Black Forest. Despite being released as part of his Rückverzauberung series (the title translates roughly as "Re-enchantment"), it's very much in line with Gas at its darkest and most ominous. It's also freed from the four-to-the-floor kick drum that anchors so many of Gas' recordings, which lends it an even more psychedelic cast. In its final 15 minutes, bright strings give way to chopped-up vowels, and the climax is a rising swarm of voices reminiscent of the sound accompanying the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike so many live drone shows, which—no pun intended—drone on for-freaking-ever, the set's arc is clear, and gripping. Next time you feel like getting really lost, all you need is a free hour, a darkened room, and this.

Voices From the Lake: Live at MAXXI (Editions Mego)

The recorded work of Donato Dozzy and Neel's Voices From the Lake project never strays too far from 4/4 time; it's always techno at its core. The same can't be said of this October 2014 set from Rome's MAXXI museum, however. Rhythms come and go; drift is paramount. The first 10 minutes are just metallic scrape and the merest hint of a pulse; from there they plunge into the ricocheting voices and flickering static of "Dreamscape Generation" and the dizzyingly panned mouth-harp samples (anticipating Dozzy's 2015 album The Loud Silence) of "Richiami e Oscillazioni". The slowly pinging "Orange Steps", suffused in bright melodies and synthetic birdsongs, tips its hat to Global Communication's 76:14. Pitter-pattering hi-hats in "Max", the set's closing cut, put a little extra spring in its step, but you might not even notice, so dreamy is the synthesizer melody that carries us through to the burbling fadeout. It's as buoyant as ambient techno gets.

Jens Lekman's 2015 New Year's resolution was to write and release one song a week, so that we might all remember, "Where we were and when we were there, who we kissed and who we missed" last year. Statistically, most New Year's resolutions are broken by January 17, but Jens kept his word: Postcard #52 was released on December 31, wrapping up a year of songs that documented new love, ageing, friends' broken hearts, national tragedies, the refugee crisis, and realizing long-held dreams. On 2012's I Know What Love Isn't, Lekman pared back his trademark use of samples, but many of the songs here rely on a huge range of pre-existing songs, spanning classical, soul, and more, harking back to 2007's joyous Night Falls Over Kortedala.

Below you can find a guide to help you parse all 52 new songs, along with an email interview with Lekman about his Postcards series and its effect on his fourth studio album, which is due later this year.

Pitchfork: How does giving away 52 songs help the process of writing a new album?

Jens Lekman: I don't think that was the goal in the beginning. But I felt very stuck with the album last fall and needed to shake things up, do something different. I wanted to create a more spontaneous outlet for my songwriting to have alongside the more long-winded process of making an album. I wanted to have some fun. But now, when I'm at the end of it, I'm realizing that both Postcards and my other project, Ghostwriting [an installation-type project where he writes songs based on stories fans tell him], have started to influence the album in different ways.

Pitchfork: What was proving difficult about the album? Will it be out this year?

JL: I just got stuck and I think the problem was that I was working on it all alone, day in and day out. I've always done it like that but this time I needed to let in some fresh air, and both Postcards and Ghostwriting helped with that. And I realized I needed to work with other people instead of doing everything myself. Yes, I'm really hoping to have it out [this] year but it's not finished yet so we'll see.

Pitchfork: What did you take away from Ghostwriting? You've written quite a lot about your own friends, but what was it like translating strangers' experiences into songs?

JL: It was nerve wracking, I was terrified I wouldn't be doing these stories justice. It just felt so intimate and full of responsibility. And especially when I performed the songs in front of an audience at the end of each project and I knew the storytellers were in the crowd listening, that was hard. But I think it worked out really well and it was so nice to talk to them afterwards. Several people from the crowd came up and said "I really liked that one story," and then the author of that story jumped up and said, "That was me! that was my story!" That was very moving. All in all it was a project that I felt made me more humble, both as a person and as a songwriter. And the thought struck me afterwards that I would love to see other artists from completely different genres do it—like, what are the stories of Slayer's fans?

Pitchfork: With Postcards, beyond documenting your year, was there another end goal?

JL: Well, yes, to force myself to find magic when sometimes there seemed to be none at all. To be able to write about things that wouldn't make sense or matter a year later, things that seemed not very important at the time and that I otherwise would've discarded. And while it didn't occur to me until recently, I think also to find an escape route out of a music industry that is becoming more and more focused on making money.

Pitchfork: Has this process changed your approach to songwriting, or the way you observe the world?

JL: It's made me realize how the fate of a song is often established in the first 15 minutes of writing. As for observing the world, it struck me that I could've written songs about, for example, the Paris attacks as they happened and have the song out the day after, but doing this project and following the news made me realize how much I miss deeper nuances in the news reporting. There's already so many quick opinions and angles being thrown in your face, so I avoided writing about things like that and tried focusing on the smaller, more seemingly insignificant things. The things you would find in the back of the newspaper or the back of your mind.

Pitchfork: Has it been a challenge?

JL: The first weeks were tough, learning how to write quick enough and become confident enough to release it without listening to it a million times and changing your mind a million times. But after a while I wrote the song in my head while walking to the studio where I work on my music, and then I finished recording it in two to three hours. There's been a few times when it's felt like a burden, but mostly it's been my highlight of the week.

Pitchfork: Are any of these songs likely to appear on your next record in some form, or is it a complete clearing of the decks?

JL: The idea for me was to make it a completely separate project from the album, and I haven't imagined any of these songs to appear elsewhere. Of course, I might be inspired by or borrow a hook or melody from one of them at some point—they're my songs after all—but I already have about 25 to 30 other songs written for the album so I don't need these for that.

Pitchfork: Your last record came off the back of an aborted attempt to get married for a green card. What informed these songs?

JL: I wrote several songs for a close friend of mine who's had a hard year. Then there's some songs that deal with ageing. The concept of time seemed to be in the songs' nature—there's for example one song that is in the form of an interview with myself in the future where I left the second half blank so I can fill in the answers in 2020. And another song I wrote with Annika Norlin from Hello Saferide around the time the blood moon was happening that is about how those recurring celestial events put our little lives in perspective. Fear seemed to be something I was thinking about a lot too, that was something I explored in Ghostwriting too. And then there's some love songs of course, because you know, I'm Jens Lekman.

Essentials

November 28: Postcard #44 comes a month after the last instalment; Lekman has been in Cincinnati working on the Ghostwriting project. It also arrives a fortnight after the attacks in Paris, as Jens flies from "somewhere in western U.S.A." to the French capital. The flute from Baby Huey's "California Dreamin'" meets forlorn synths that recall Talk Talk circa Spirit of Eden, and the song shivers with desperate sadness. "It was a long time since the world felt this hopeless," Lekman sings. He identifies no causes or cures, instead quietly observing the dualities of each situation he encounters. The men denying climate change in the departure lounge sound like something out of The Onion, he thinks, but "maybe I'm just so used to hearing likeminded opinion." The mood in Paris is somber, but the repercussions of the terrorist attacks are more serious for people of color: "If you don't look European, you're a suicide bomber." It's just a Postcard, but it's also some of Lekman's most sophisticated and affecting songwriting.

February 7: Heavy sadness doesn't pervade too many Jens Lekman songs, and often he's best at conjuring it with sound, rather than words: remember the subtly gut-wrenching "F-Word", the way he deploys that Beat Happening sample in "Pocketful of Money", the chilly distance in "Cold Swedish Winter"? He distils that sensation here, a few days after his 34th birthday. After waving an intimate off with the gift of a Morse code chart, he says, "I'm sending you a message now/ Are you ready?" his voice full of anticipation. First he spells out "I miss you" in code ("two short, two long, two short…"), but then he just says it, plaintive and unresolved, letting the distance linger. Meanwhile he's spun a subtle sunset of disco: what sounded peachy at the start is purple and covered with cosmic sparkle by the end.

(Bonus "Jens Lekman is a song magician" fact c/o Doug on Soundcloud: the sample behind the Morse code bit is Hans Zimmer's "Cornfield Chase", from the movie Interstellar, and a scene in which Matthew McConaughey's character communicates via Morse code.)

October 19: As the year draws to a close, Lekman's Postcards grow ever-more melancholy. Perhaps it's a sign of the album to come, or a symptom of SAD; either way, here, he lists the ways that woodland animals know how to prepare for the cold system, implying the lack of such signposting currents and harvests for humans. "No matter what I do, the winter will come," he laments in this billowing, frosty number wrought through with saxophone from Frida Thurfjell. "Nothing I can do much about/ Keep swimming upstream like the rainbow trout."

October 5: Postcard #40 is a duet with Hello Saferide's Annika Norlin, and finds the pair comparing their respective experiences of late September's blood moon, over a luminous R&B slow jam that samples After 7's "Til You Do Me Right". Both agree that it was underwhelming ("We all updated social media/ Made fun of the moon," sings Norlin), but the anticlimax prompts a heavy realization (and a beautiful, soft chorus): This celestial event only takes place once every 18 years, and both artists are more confused now, in their mid-30s, than they were as teens. "There's gotta be more to this mortal understanding," Jens declares. "I don't know what I'm waiting for."

March 1: In the flush of romance, it's easy to get hung up on notions of forever. Lekman, however, isn't silly enough to waste time fantasizing about all the years he'll spend with his new love, but the way that, in her presence, "every hour is a minute/ Every minute has an eternity in it". He's deep in a "radiantly heightened mode of perception," as Eve Sedgwick would have love's ideal. He samples the shimmering lovers' rock of Intense's "You Are the One", which starts as if heard through a thick wall, comes into sharp focus, and then melts out again, mirroring his sweet, unending devotional: "I don't ever seem to get to the end of you," he coos.

January 9: A three-minute-long Nora Ephron movie, replete with sunny brass and touches of Brill Building piano over a hiccuping Abdullah Ibrahim sample. Lekman's friend has a baby, so he stops calling because he doesn't want to bother her. It transpires that everyone has stopped calling, and she's never felt so alone—after all, "Silence is a sad ringtone." So he sweeps in, offering matinee movies, gossip, and summer escapes for her and her cute little cabbage. In the wrong hands, this would be a Nice Guy nightmare. Instead, it hearkens back to "A Postcard to Nina," and the absurd yet charming lengths he'll goes to for a pal in need.

July 15: Here, the story of evolution is just the prelude to Lekman's newfound love, itself the product of him asking to borrow someone's bass guitar as an excuse to get closer to them. "One magic night in an empty backyard/ You grabbed my arm and kissed me quick/ Under a heaven full of stars," he sings as Jackie Stoudemire's "Dancing" romps behind him. It's a rare Big Bang moment from the usually lovelorn Lekman, and it's beautiful.

February 1: Set to banjo clucks (c/o Elin Piel) and swooning strings, "Postcard 5" is a country diversion through Lekman's dreams, and maybe yours, too: He always wanted to play tiny places, he says, but early on someone told him that's not how touring works. Fifteen years later, now self-sufficient and up-ending traditional structures of how you release and market music, he decides it's time. Should you have been wondering how to put on a show, he's happy to play guinea pig: just send him an email "and we'll explain it some more."

February 14: Lekman's last album, I Know What Love Isn't, was inspired in part by his aborted plan to marry a friend in order to get a green card. Sometimes it does not seem wholly unfair to wonder whether he sabotages his own love life because it makes for better song material. But here, for Valentine's Day, he's in devotional mode, serenading the woman who has thawed the chill in his heart. "So hang me, like a wet sock, on the heater," he requests, over soft synths that sound like the Northern Lights glimmering in a shallow lagoon.

January 24: In an unusually grave tone, Lekman takes a somewhat bleak spin through his synapses to contemplate the way that pleasure's spark dims in time. "The coarse feel of your jacket's Gortex/ All stored in the weave of the cerebral cortex/ But still lost in time's unforgiving vortex." But perhaps the fade of positive memory is something to be thankful for. He references James Olds and Peter Milner's psychological test on rodents, which revealed that animals would pick pleasurable brain stimulation over food, and eventually die of their choice.

Album-Worthy

April 25: It's surprising that Lekman hasn't produced records for anyone else over the years, given his evocative arrangements and apparently bottomless well of musical reference points. Here, he loops a forlorn phrase from Charles Mingus' "Myself When I'm Real" as he contemplates a nameless fear that haunts him at night. A jolting clap seems to snap the song awake, like the agitated layer of conscious that stops Jens from falling asleep. "It's fffucking ridiculous," he repeats, in an understated, downhearted outro that recalls the gentle catharsis of "Pocketful of Money."

June 28: Postcard #25 ended with a vague allusion to a friend receiving good news, but offered few specifics. #26 makes clear that it was good news by a matter of degrees, not strides. "The worst has already happened," Lekman sings, and that knowledge brings fresh resonance to simple experiences cast in a melancholy golden shimmer: cycling down the coast, leaping in the frigid sea, blowing kisses at strangers.

May 31: "If you ever need a stranger to play at your wedding..." Lekman once offered, and honored. Going by Postcard #22, he could add commencement speeches to his ceremonial repertoire. "Summer ahoy!/ Tomorrow you'll wake up unemployed," he tells a friend on their graduation. That's the good news, though, and a freedom as sumptuous as his soft disco: "The market wants you to work yourself into the grave/ But be a punk, at least in spirit/ Reject the stick and the carrot/ And never let yourself be enslaved/ And keep dancing."

March 7: Lekman is a wordy guy, but he knows when to let an emotion just hang there, unexplained. The beat skitters across his piano's metallic chime as he pays tribute to his grandpa, who died a year prior. Lekman recalls asking him a question about his hobby that went unanswered ("maybe it was his hearing") before they shook hands, as they had since he was a little kid. He heads home through the snow, and realizes, "I had more than a question." A sample of John Klemmer playing sax pierces the glow. "I really wanted to get to know him."

July 27: Heavy organs douse Lekman's tale of a delayed flight, and his impromptu trip to Bremen Cathedral. The German liturgy escapes him, but the experience isn't wasted. "Just to sit there and hear the church organ echo through a summer morning/ To feel tiny for a little while/ To look up to the ceiling like you'd look at a starry sky," he sings. "To ask that old question: Where did we come from and where are we going?/ The sadness of everything/ The joy of everything."

June 14: On this sweet early summer's night, there's no need to take tram #7 to heaven; as Lekman forges north through the city, Gothenburg's streets are unfolding with their own strange magic. Improbably, he overhears Dave Grohl breaking his leg onstage at the Ullevi Stadium; he helps a pizza delivery guy who's crashed his bike, sees Jupiter glinting in the sky, and witnesses a fox drop a rose on a grave. "Not such a strange vision," he says over the dreamy, rolling music box motif. "Tonight is magical realism/ So we mention the mystic like we mention the mundane."

June 7: The long path to accepting the turmoil in your head, in just over two minutes. Over acoustic guitar with a little Spanish inflection, Lekman considers childhood and adolescent spells at the therapist, and how he feared that there was something wrong with him. Now, age 34, he accepts, "There's nothing wrong with me/ I'm just a human being/ With a lot of feelings/ With a lot of questions." It shares a philosophy with 2012's I Know What Love Isn't: "You don't get over a broken heart/ You just learn to carry it gracefully."

September 13: Lekman interpolates the luminous strum of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" for a similarly simple devotional—though this one's to London, which he appreciates anew, arm-in-arm with his new beau (while firing deserved shots at the cruel "anti-homeless spikes" that proliferate in London's sheltered doorways and passages). In Postcard #26, simple experiences were a reassuring salve after being broken, but here, he delights in the flower market, airy libraries, and hotdog-thieving foxes on their own terms.

August 1: Lekman doesn't do social media, and maintains a web presence straight out of 1999. But he's clearly keeping up on the sly, as Postcard #31 perfectly knits together two all-time great memes: the determined dismalness of @sosadtoday, and its unwitting mascot. "Just let me be for a while and I'll be fine again/ I'm Billy Corgan at Disneyland," Lekman tells his friends, his refusal to be delighted by ducklings and baby owls contrasted by the ebullient island shimmy of Ed Watson's "Boogie Woman." Pushed to breaking point, he invokes Corgan's response to criticism of him looking miserable on the Thunder Mountain Railroad: "Oh, what the fuck do you want from me?"

February 21: Hooked around a Ravel sample and a Steven Wright gag, "Postcard 8" finds Lekman trying to tramp his troubles out: "Restructure, re-route/ Take a left at the raincloud." It's a lonely, noir-tinged journey, but his finger-clicks and layered vocals summon the spirit of a soulful male voice group.

Still Pretty Magical

September 25: Samples are sidelined in favor of an original slow jam, all glimmering keys and snapping drum machines, co-written with Lekman's pianist, Jonas Abrahamsson. It's a lovelorn missive from a late night train, but one that's taking Lekman home to his lady, rather than the Blue Nile's dismal conclusion.

December 27: An icy lullaby where Lekman's good fortune slowly comes into view. On a trek into town to post his application "for a grant to support me 'til my next album's done," he contemplates why he left and returned to Gothenburg. En route, he meets a homeless man who sleeps by the train tracks, and, imagining Lekman's letter to be a note to the North Pole, the man asks him to tell Santa that all he wants is "a proper address."

March 22: Even adrift in the South China Sea, life's hierarchies are unavoidable. Through his snorkel mask, Lekman catches sight of a cleaner fish, "checking tails and fins for parasites like a shoe-shiner on Wall Street." After all, "We all do what we can do get by/ Find a niche that will keep us alive." He digs into his own trusty toolbox here: the kaleidoscopic violin sample that swirls throughout recall Kortedala's sweet baroque stylings.

April 18: Lekman and a downhearted friend amble around Gothenburg from dusk until dawn, eating Burger King fries amid an explosion of cherry blossom that still clung to the trees just hours earlier. The flowers may not last, but his experience of the night will: "One single spring night can change you more than all the world's literature/ But a spring night cannot be reproduced that way," he croons.

August 18: The continuation of #31's summer slump: With the Nutmegs' buoyant "wah wah"s as his life-raft, Lekman attempts to "write [himself] out of the dark," to move on from the bottom of the abyss and his feelings of worthlessness.

January 15: Lekman has been rhyming long polysyllabic English words with each other for a good 15 years now, but the effect never loses its charm. Here, they seem to bloom atop his skippy acoustic strum. "Why are we here/ In the extreme northern hemisphere?" he asks of two Australian friends on a stargazing trip. "What are we going above the polar circle?/ Why is the night so dark and eternal?"

September 10: Lekman has sampled dozens of slow jams in the past, but rarely does he sing like the ’90s adult contemporary crooners that populate his record collection. Here, though, he drops into a low-slung mode to recount a trip to a cemetery with his friend's kid, whose observation chimes with the dejected mode Lekman has been in for the past few Postcards: "I heard him say, 'We're just tourists on vacation from not existing/ We're just tourists on vacation from being nothing.'"

December 16: As documented in Postcard #24 and countless other songs, Lekman's life as he sings it often seems touched by a strange magic; here, he admits to relying on mystical signs as guarantees of good fortune. "Sometimes I get scared that you're no longer in love," he sings, "And I go through these rituals to please the gods above." If you've ever had to promise yourself that the sky is definitely blue in order to catch a breath, or walk down the subway steps in a certain fashion to prevent otherwise certain danger, here's the OCD anthem for you. 

January 1: No doubt there's a German word for the act of making New Year's resolutions you know you'll only break. Lekman, however, has a revolution for your failed resolutions, one that's as self-referential as it is a kindly proffered reset button. "This song is a time machine," he sings over resonant piano that glints like a pair of emerald slippers. "A chance to start over before it's even begun."

Entering Superfans Only Territory

May 24: "Kicks don't give me kicks no more," Lekman sings over crude hand percussion and distant birdsong, as he commemorates, rather than laments, the passing of youth. After all, there's still so much more to come: "To sow some seeds for an apple tree/ To make an apple pie/ That I'll enjoy 10 years' forth."

December 1: Postcard #1 was a time machine, a reset button for failed new year's resolutions. Postcard #45 is a portal to five years in the future: As the sampled "Vila Do Sossego" by Zé Ramalho swoons and stutters, Lekman asks his 39-year-old self a series of questions—"Are you still in love?/ Do you still carry a sadness somewhere deep within?"—and leaves the rest of the song blank so he can fill it in. Given Lekman's love of inter-song jokes and picaresque self-mythologizing, there's no way his Soundcloud (or whatever it is then) won't offer up the answers on December 1, 2020.

December 9: Postcard #46 is sung from the perspective of a robotic vacuum cleaner who "didn't ask to be the Christmas gift of the year, and asks, "please let me cry a little robot tear" as trumpets squawk in ascendence. It's not some cute marketing ploy; instead, in Lekman's appropriately absurdist yarn, the appliance is so aggrieved by Europe's treatment of asylum seekers that it's gone on strike. "Please, you can't afford refugees/ But you afford crap like me?/ Yeah, I suck/ You suck/ But I don't suck as much as you suck."

October 27: Postcard #43 is a test-run for the Ghostwriting project. The result sounds like French street corner chanson in more ways than one: there's his brisk acoustic guitar, and his friend's existential realization that her growing similarity to her mother is a sign of impending death.

March 28: Relations on a tropical island grow icy as all the coconuts, baby turtles, and beers in paradise can't thaw Lekman's friend's bad mood. So he leaves her to it, and writes this lilting Calypso number instead.

May 3: It's no "A Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill," but Postcard #18 finds Jens and pals celebrating Walpurgisnacht in Finland, where the pagan holiday is as big a deal as Christmas or Easter. It's a trundling, plinking ramble that takes in drunken croquet games, dancing in the park, and a strange woman who insists that Return of the Living Dead 3 is a very romantic film.

June 21: A warped, metallic glow encases this vignette of an evening in limbo, spent picking ticks off a cat ("dangling like blueberries, juicy and fat") as a friend waits for an important phone call. The news is good, but that's all we discover. The lack of conclusion or detail is a reminder that these songs are being written in real time, and although Lekman often seems to live a lyrical life where stories wrap up neatly, those are selective occasions. You can imagine him here, sketching out the song while his friend takes the call.

December 29: Kisses, too, are a time machine; over a game of chess on a park bench, Lekman encourages his heartbroken friend Oscar to sustain himself by the memory of someone's lips. It's a classic mid-tempo Jens number, and a sweet moment of platonic intimacy between two male friends: "If there's anything we know, it's each other's weaknesses," Lekman sings of Oscar. "Then he looks serious/ As he checkmates my sorry ass."

December 15: At the end of a bad year, a road trip and gas station coffee with a friend is its own kind of salve. "Hey, it's good to be alive," Lekman sings with resigned jollity, over brisk acoustic guitar and sweet piano. "Hey, feels pretty nice to be alive."

December 19: At first it seems as if the echo pedal-laden vocal might tip into Arthur Russell territory, but Lekman keeps it simple on this a capella memory of a dream, where chimps who take risks live longer, happier lives. "I thought to myself, I need to be more like that monkey."

Rarities For the Box Set

September 15: Lekman's girlfriend cranks FS Blumm's "Flocke" from 33 to 78rpm, turning its summer hum into teeming maximalism, and the bed from which he probes someone about their own introspection.

August 25: In this short, sweet a capella message, Lekman encourages listeners to donate to his friend Carey Lander's fundraising appeal for Sarcoma UK, the charity funding research into the rare form of cancer that the Camera Obscura keyboardist succumbed to in October.

September 8: Bright, stuttering samples underpin a field recording of a rally to welcome refugees, the day before a similar gathering in Gothenburg: "Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here." It's simple, but resonant: racism has risen starkly in Sweden in the past few years, and two months after Lekman released this song, the country ended its open-doors policy to those seeking asylum, reverting to the EU minimum quota.

May 17: Lekman's embarrassment for an unpopular busker becomes a humbling moment as he contemplates what he would do if "nobody listened any more." He also makes good on the promise of Postcard #5: It was recorded a capella in a bathroom on his tour of under-the-radar Swedish towns.

August 13: An ebullient mixtape in miniature, weaving together Guerre and Scissor Lock, the Go-Betweens' "Streets of Your Town", Moe Koffman, the Rubettes, and the Nutmegs.

April 5: Human hubris battles the desire for self-destruction on this rambling full band effort, where Lekman uses a strange sci-fi story he's made up as a litmus test to figure out where his friends see themselves in the world.

May 10: A brisk, lo-fi acoustic number (recorded on Lekman's phone) that skewers idealized young love and artists that use their friends as characters in their work, while doing exactly that.

July 7: Two-and-a-half minutes of wordless sampledelic joy: the Whispers' "Lady" chopped up into glitchy euphoria. It's a bit adrift by itself; better to imagine it as the breeding ground for Kortedala-style dazzle, or a period in one of Lekman's peerless mixtapes.

March 15: A low-key one where Lekman likens Sunday night dread to "being strangled by a small but determined child" over lovely cascades of chiming piano.

October 12: Spacey instrumental that builds from tentative bleeps to tremulous piano.

April 10: Wistful, wordless keys + fingerclicking interlude hooked around the vocal tick from Biz Markie's "A One, Two."

July 10: A fairly abrasive instrumental experiment with a video game beat, a pretty piano motif, blaring whale song and a few "whoa-oh"s.

The End

December 31: "All these memories and melodies, you can keep them," Lekman sings on New Year's Eve. "I'm giving them to you for a reason/ So you can store them for me and remind me/ What life was filled with—both sadness and beauty." The dreamy, titular female vocals from Derek Martin's "You Better Go" loop throughout the final Postcard, as our musical diarist wishes a "Happy New Year/ From Jens Lekman." The signoff is a sweet affectation he nicked off Leonard Cohen; after this generous year of unfiltered, intimate missives, it's the perfect goodbye.

A scientific tool for those lacking a voice, a means of encrypting voices during World War II, and a way to drop the funk, the vocoder has had many exhale its praises, from General Dwight D. Eisenhower to Chromeo. The strange history of this piece of equipments usage for both international espionage and making suckers dance was lovingly detailed by author Dave Tompkins in his 2010 book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach. Developed by Bell Labs in 1928 and patented by engineer Homer Dudley in the late '30s, the device was "the first electrical synthesizer which attempted to produce connected speech…[it] contains 10 contiguous band-pass filters which span the speech frequency range," wrote James L. Flanagan in 1965.

Introduced at the 1939 New York World's Fair, the American government invested in the device as a speech-encoding technology during the height of World War II. Well after the war, Robert Moog and Wendy Carlos built another vocoder, now coupled to the Moog modular synthesizer, introducing a new robotic voice into the musical world. Its wartime function was drastically altered as Carlos used it to warble the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

From there, the vocoder began its creep into pop music, often via Kraftwerk's post-human take on R&B. The vocoder caught the ear of Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaataa, Roger Troutman, Michael Jonzun, and more, making this futuristic sound the embodiment of funk. The vocoder is where the first instrument—the human voice—might meet the last, the inhuman voice. Adapted by everyone from Dr. Dre to Daft Punk, presaging Auto-Crooners like T-Pain, Akon, and Future, the frog gurgles, HAL lullabies, Flubber hiccups, and ethereal human-after-all sighs of the vocoder continue to give voice to that divide between man and machine. These 16 songs feature vocals from the vocoder, as well as its sister piece of equipment, the talk box. 

"Glossopharyngeal Speech/ Frogsound" (from Speech After Removal Of The Larynx), 1964

Maybe it’s not the first recorded instance of the synthesized voice, but this Smithsonian Folkways album showed how the alien timbres of our own vocodered voices did have precedent in the natural world.

Boney M: "Nightflight to Venus", 1978

Europop masters Boney M opened their ambitious space-themed 1978 opus Nightflight to Venus with thundering drums, Sun Ra-worthy space chants, and a robotic rocket operator chatting about the Venusian vistas just over the horizon. This is what would happen if "Battlestar Galactica" was turned into a tour bus.

Jonzun Crew: "Pack Jam (Look Out for the OVC)", 1982

Name-dropping the OVC (Outer Visual Communicator), a trippy device well known to Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Michael, Soni and Larry "Maurice Starr" Johnson similarly explored the cosmos as the spacy electrofunk group, the Jonzun Crew. Their distaste for a popular arcade game led to the creation of "Pack Jam," its queasy vocodered growls turning into a breakin’ classic.

Roger: "So Ruff So Tuff", 1981

A protégé of George Clinton and Bootsy Collins, Ohioan Roger Troutman banded his brothers together as Zapp. And when he purred through the vocoder about mass measurements, he had an instant hit with "More Bounce to the Ounce." It set the template of the Zapp sound, which carried over to his solo albums as well, as on this sweet, tough, trilling thrill.

Hashim: "Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)", 1983

Bronx-born producer Jerry Calliste Jr.’s first release as Hashim broke down the barriers between the underground sounds of hip-hop, electro, and dance music.

OutKast: "Synthesizer", 1998

OutKast called on the funk godfather George Clinton on this Aquemini deep cut. Paranoid, defiant, honeyed yet harried, futuristic and funky, Big Boi spits barbecue and mildew, André raps about nose jobs and making seven babies, while Clinton croons of Valley girls, virginity, and life’s "half illusions" against a mean vocoder.

Boards of Canada: "In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country", 2000

Trust Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison of Boards of Canada to find beauty in the purrs and hisses of this device, rendered as ephemeral and opaque as highland fog. Listen for a reference to former Branch Davidian member Amo Roden (also a track title) and David Koresh’s infamous religious compound.

Holger Czukay: "Ode to Perfume", 1981

While his fellow German progressives Kraftwerk were famous for their embrace of the cold coo of the vocoder on albums like Trans Europe Express and The Man Machine, Can's Holger Czukay swooned over the device's atomizing properties. On this contemplative track from a post-Can album, he twirls his voice into mist.

Cities of Foam: "Last Man Standing", 2005

This UK duo made but one full-length album, working with a jazz vocalist, saxophonist, trombonist, and vibraphonist. But on this sunny, infectious track, the gentle kiss of the vocoder gives the chunky breaks a weightless air befitting their name.

Will Powers: "Adventures in Success", 1983

Will Powers was the curious one-off from famed rock photographer Lynn Goldsmith. Using a vocoder, she neutered her gender into the androgynous voice of Will on this leftfield self-help boogie track, making its positive affirmation into a hook: "Make it habit/ Make it happen."

"Q": "The Voice of 'Q'", 1982

A project of Bruce Weeden and Michael Forte, this is a hybrid of space-disco and leftfield electro, funky and cuddly at once. Since it emanates from the same year as E.T., one wonders if the duo envisioned some sort of Saturday morning cartoon for this, as one can hear a child pleading with the vocoder-voiced alien cipher: "Come back, Q."

Ginuwine: "Pony", 1996

Its lecherous hook might now be drowned out by squeals thanks to its tantalizing placement in the film Magic Mike. But 20 years ago, "Pony" and its croaked come-on from Timbaland re-introduced the vocoder to a new generation of R&B fans (and made them get low to the sound of Frogger squatting and hopping).

The "P" Crew: "Nasty Rock", 1983

While Garrett’s Crew ignited the b-boys in North Carolina with "Nasty Rock" (complete with southern drawl through vocoder), it was when Patrick Adams recorded his version with the "P" Crew that it became a staple for NYC breakdancers.

Stevie Wonder: "Race Babbling", 1979

Tucked amid the dense foliage of The Secret Life of Plants, his charming but befuddling double album about plant telepathy, Wonder delivers a leftfield dance floor track with "Race Babbling." With his and Jose James’s voices slurred by the vocoder, they embody the plants themselves, warning humans "You need us to live/ But we don’t need you."

Herbie Hancock: "Tell Everybody", 1979

An early adapter of new-fangled analog synths like the Poly-Moog and Arp 2600 on his early '70s albums, it's no surprise that Herbie Hancock was also an early vocoder enthusiast. He embraced both that and the thumping sounds of disco-funk on this maligned yet catchy album, even garnering play at the Paradise Garage.

Rockets: "Future Woman", 1976

Decades before Daft Punk donned robot helmets, this studio group (produced by disco godfather Tom Moulton) were coated in silver paint and twitched like French man-machines. Early albums featured stiff stabs at "Apache," "Ave Maria," and Canned Heat. But this stomping space disco cut features furious vocoded harmonica blasts and a coda that blazes like that nightflight to Venus burning up upon re-entry.

Correction (01/2016, 2:50 p.m., EST): Earlier, this piece conflated the effects of the vocoder and the talk box, a different piece of equipment that produces a similar effect. It has been corrected to reflect that the songs feature both devices. 

Photo by Kathryn Yu

Last year, writer Dan Brooks coined the phrase “egg manning,” which he described as “the practice of finding a terrible argument from an unknown Twitter user in order to disagree with it.” The awareness of this tactic should be enough to render 90% of internet think pieces immediately irrelevant, but here’s the thing: There are people out there who are mad about LCD Soundsystem reuniting, I swear. Not mad enough to occupy the headquarters of a federal wildlife reserve, but mad enough to say they’re done with the band forever.

James Murphy was surprised by this reaction. He’d expected the cynical response—look at these fuckin’ guys—but hadn’t anticipated the more present, wounded response from fans aghast at the seemingly casual decision to cash in on retirement by playing Coachella, that bastion of rich kids and their #vscocam filters. "if you cared a lot about our band, and you put a lot of yourself into that moment (or anything about us you chose), and you feel betrayed now, then i completely understand that,” he wrote. “it’s your right to define what you love about a band, and it’s your right to decry their actions and words as you see fit, because it’s you, frankly, who have done much of the work to sustain that relationship, not the band.”

There’s no reason to doubt the depth of Murphy’s sincerity, but I was taken aback by how hard he fell on his sword, apologizing for the cardinal sin of wanting to make music with his friends, and get paid an absurdly large amount to do so. Maybe it’s sort of gauche to have made such a big deal out of breaking up—there was the Madison Square Garden blowout, and subsequent documentaries and box sets diagramming that blowoff—only to reunite within the same presidency, but whatever. Most reunions are done with tangible pleasures in mind, like making music with your friends, and getting paid an absurdly large amount to do so.

Holding a grudge against the inevitable reality of broken-up bands getting back together is a losing battle. It never bothered me to begin with: I came of age in the early aughts right as all the alt bands of yesteryear—Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., Mission of Burma, and so forth—were reforming, surely disappointing the aged heads whose memories dated back to when Black Francis had hair. But I wanted to see these reformed bands, and I did, no matter that they weren’t possibly as good as they were "back in the day." Who cares about history when the present is right in front of you?

There are presumably thousands of LCD fans who never saw the band when they were together. This is what happens when a band like LCD is so valorized for their artistic achievement: The next generations want to check it out. Sure, it’s great if you were there… but it’s fine for everyone who wasn’t to want to catch up. (Besides, it’s fitting that James Murphy wouldn’t do the “cool” thing by remaining a warm memory accessible only to a few—despite being the living personification of Brooklyn hip, he disavowed that hipness whenever given the opportunity and made it clear he was just a music geek.)

As for the cynical response Murphy was expecting: It’s easy to clown on LCD for all their outward pretensions, and the waves of adulation they received during their brief career. They attracted lots of accolades from music critics for their brand of “I’m the saddest dad at the rave” rock, partly because music critics are a bunch of sad dads (sad moms, too, but it’s fun to rhyme). This website alone ran a very in-depth feature on their music about the length of Ulysses. The perception they were making music for aging hipsters refusing to let go has only been accentuated by Murphy's post-band career, in which he's scored multiple Noah Baumbach movies and opened up a trendy Brooklyn wine bar. 

But let’s not get it twisted: LCD Soundsystem were very, very good, and worthy of most of that praise. No other 21st century band did a better job at synthesizing decades of music history into a sound that wasn’t crass, overt, or obscure. Murphy was both knowingly ironic and unapologetically sentimental, a cyborg built from the best bits of Stephen Malkmus and Billy Corgan. LCD made music to be gloomy to in your bedroom, and music that launched you onto the dance floor like some post-molly monster, motivating smart asses to loosen up and feel less self-conscious about recognizing the emotions dislodged by the passing of time.

Though LCD predated the EDM surge, and aren’t as associated with the movement as other indie-adjacent dance act like Justice, they’re not too far off. You can trace a throughline from, say, “All My Friends” to modern EDM standards like “Clarity,” blissful emotion imbued in a rippling dance groove. That’s why they’re going to go over strong at Coachella, despite the hesitation of critics who think indie legacy = baaaad in 2016. Imagine the drugged-out teens, ready to cry it out in the arms of their besties, a new collection of euphoric LCD Soundsystem experiences manifested for people to tell their friends and kids about. From there, they’ll tour again, and release a new record before the end of the year. There are no reasons to think it won’t go well.

As Murphy noted, fans disappointed by the violation of their sanctified feelings need not participate. There’s a lot of music out there; there’s a lot of lifeout there, and it is stunningly simple to avoid paying attention to a moderately popular band from an indie label. It’s not like they’ll pop up at the Super Bowl to play with Coldplay. But I would bet several paychecks those reservations will vanish once the new record drops, or when those hesitant fans are Four Loko drunk at a festival when the opening piano riff to “All My Friends” kicks up. Pardon the convenient kicker, but: That’s how it starts.

Image via BBC

Pierre Boulez, who died this week at age 90, didn’t start out trying to make friends. In 1952, the young French classical musician claimed that any composer who didn’t see the value of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method—also known as "serial" or "atonal" writing—was "USELESS." (The use of all-caps fit in with Pierre’s early, rage-stroke polemical style.) When asked, in 1967, about the "problem" of putting on experimental works in mainstream opera houses, the modernist composer and conductor gave what he must have known was an anarchic reply: "The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses up. But don't you think that would also be the most elegant?"

Plenty of artistic radicals have used this same bad-boy strategy to get some attention for their ideas. What’s unusual about the case of Boulez is how well it worked; nearly half a decade after that latter remark, he was the music director of the New York Philharmonic and chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Boulez was the rare avant-extremist who won real aesthetic power. And not in the pages of history, either—but in his own lifetime.

He encountered opposition: both from traditional-minded symphony subscribers (who didn’t want to hear any "noisy" modern music), as well as from enemy camps of contemporary composers (who thought European atonality an artistic dead end). But by the time of his death, Boulez had long since changed the way the world listened to symphonic and electronic music.

As a conductor, he revolutionized our understanding of composers like Stravinsky, Debussy, and his own teacher, Messiaen. (He conducted Frank Zappa’s classical music, too.) Words like "lucidity" and "clarity" are often used to describe Boulez’s precision in leading orchestras, but these cliches can seem too dry and dutiful-sounding to honor his achievement. At his best, he makes the music leap out at you, no matter its conceptual complexity. You don’t have to come in "knowing anything" about classical music to be jolted into a new state by a Boulez performance. You just need to be present.

Boulez was the rare avant-extremist who won real aesthetic power. And not in the pages of history, either—but in his own lifetime.

Even so, the great advocacy project of Boulez’s life is not over simply because he is gone, or because he is individually celebrated. Classical music establishments remain in danger of playing to their existing audiences too predictably, thereby missing the opportunity to present risk-taking new works (and simultaneously failing to entice new generations of audiences). "What we are trying to escape from is the sterile standardization that imposes on the present … norms suited to the past," Boulez wrote in 1972, at the beginning of his controversial tenure in New York. "We want the creative spirit to be re-established at every level of musical life."

Some of Boulez’s most vibrant interventions into the musical life of our time remain his extravagantly (even obsessively) complex compositions, many of which he continued to revise over the course of his final decades. Running from a minute and change to over an hour in length, many of the works in this compact oeuvre contain dizzying richness, thanks to their fast-moving streams of rhythmic, timbral, and harmonic information (which can also help sharpen a listener’s overall sense of sonic perception). The decadent, dreamy quality of Boulez’s solo piano writing, riotous large-orchestra visions, and pathbreaking electro-acoustic experiments is best explored through extended, focused listening. (This high-value, streamable set—complete with instructive liner notes in its paidversions—awaits those ready for the deep plunge.) But the highlights that follow give a strong sense of Boulez’s aggressive, lifelong pursuit of original sound expression.

This short excerpt from "Anthèmes 2" (for violin and electronics) should appeal to anyone who enjoys the instrumental processing found in contemporary electronic music, not least Oneohtrix Point Never’s Garden of Delete.

This 2009 performance shows Boulez leading the Berlin Philharmonic in a selection from one of his forever in-process works, the Notations for orchestra. (They are based his first mature compositions, the Notations for piano.) Such fast-moving orchestration, particularly on this scale, invites stupefied, mouth-ajar awe.

The kickoff of the piano sonata that was, initially, judged so dense as to be "unplayable." This crushing hailstorm of individual themes that bump into one another (and then explode) was a gauntlet thrown by the 23-year-old Boulez at music’s past, present, and future. In addition to helping make Boulez’s own early reputation, it has also proved a useful summit for generations of ambitious virtuoso pianists (like Maurizio Pollini, who plays on this recording).

He wasn’t all crunch and chaos, though. He could also create gorgeous brooding! This excerpt from the early-career milestone "Le marteau sans maître" includes the vocal setting of a poem by René Char that translates as "Hangmen of solitude."

Another long-in-process piece, this final, composer-conducted version of "…explosante-fixe…" is a 36-minute delirium dream for chamber orchestra and three flutes—one of them electronically outfitted. As with "Anthèmes 2," Boulez’s electro-acoustic composing here is made possible by a computer-assisted setup that can be "triggered" by specific moments in the live performance—a capability that was the end-product of decades of research, initiated at Boulez’s direction, by the French government-funded IRCAM facility.

After saturating mainstream American culture, yoga’s now starting to pool into smaller communities, many of them drawn along lines of musical tastes as well as geography. In Williamsburg you can do Drake yoga; in Bushwick you can do hipster New Age yoga, and in Seattle the incredibly paradoxical-seeming noise yoga.

Heavy metal yoga sounds just as ridiculous on the surface, but its existence shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s paid attention to the sliver of the underground metal scene that’s replaced the genre’s historical combination of fretboard speed-runs and shlocky Satanism with trance-inducing drones and a mishmash of occult interests. At a slant, this sect of the genre can read like a dark side cousin to the New Age movement. Yoga fits into the mix nicely.

Kimee Massie is one of a handful of yoga instructors folding metal into their practice. For the past few years she’s been holding classes soundtracked by selections from bands like Sunn O))), Earth, and Wolves in the Throne Room. Now she’s released BLACK YO)))GA: Asanas Ritual, Vol. 1 an hourlong video of "vinyasa style yoga set to drone, noise, stoner metal, ambient, industrial, space doom, and other traditional meditation music" that as far as I know is the first "real" metal yoga video to come to market.

Before you ask: yes, it’s pretty funny to watch if you want it to be. There is something inherently amusing about watching a bunch of pale-ass white people with dreadlocks and tattoos and all-black outfits very seriously practicing yoga, and an instructor who introduces the practice in a hooded cloak, occasionally invoking the kind of chipper "do what feels good" white-yoga mantras that seem like a better fit for the "Yoga With Adrienne" videos on YouTube that I do a few times a week. There are also times where the video’s dark aesthetics get in the way of actually doing yoga, to comic effect, like when the soundtrack—provided by a supergroup called the BLACK YO)))GA Meditation Ensemble, featuring Massie’s husband, who also plays in the band Storm King—overwhelms the instruction, or when the shadowy visuals make it hard to see what’s going on.

Metalheads tend to be good at appreciating the ridiculousness of the thing they’re passionate for, while being intensely, earnestly into it. That’s what’s allowed them to take a campy devil-worshipper shtick, steer it into hardcore, church-burning Objectivist-inspired Satanism, and then build a metaphysical praxis from bits of other belief systems. It clearly still means something real to the people who practice it. Metal might turn out to be the first pop genre to launch something like an actual religion. One that now includes yoga, apparently.

As far as BLACK YO)))GA’s utility as an actual yoga workout, rather than as an indicator of a postmodern spiritual movement, it’s pretty good, and more challenging than I expected. Two days later my abdominal muscles are still sore from an extended chair pose sequence that was in its own way as satisfyingly brutal as any metal show.

Photo by Jimmy King

I fell for pop in the early 1980s, in Britain, and David Bowie was the air it breathed and the earth it walked on. He wasn't the first star to make me love pop, but the first star to make me love pop was most certainly made in his image. And so was the second. And the third. And the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh. The covers of the style and pop magazines at the time—The Face and Smash Hits—were a parade of his imitators, some magnificent, some comical. Adam Ant, Toyah, Visage, Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran. This was British pop, a costume shop riot with Bowie its idol and excuse.

And even then when I got around to him, he still came as a surprise. Getting into Bowie as a teenager was the first time I became aware of rock as something with a history and a pantheon. I could turn away from the moment—in which the toybox stars of my childhood had in any case become arseholes or junkies—and dig.

What you found wasn't one Bowie, but layers of him, a jigsaw everyone could put together differently. Fit it together in the right way, and the jigsaw's solution was a mirror—a way to understand yourself through this extraordinary man. For many, the mirror arranged itself in a way that let them realize who they were and who they wanted. The boxes of gender, style, self-expression or sexuality you were put into were just a push away from tearing open.

I can't claim anything like that. For me, the Bowie mirror rearranged itself in the image of a teenager—bright, awkward, terrified of the future and fascinated by it. I was too scared of the record to say so, but my secret favorite Bowie album was Diamond Dogs. The fucked up end of his glam rock imperial phase, a sci-fi dystopia born out of Orwell and coke and the adrenalin and insanity of a two-year hot streak with no pop equal.

Diamond Dogs was like the things I loved already—the JG Ballard books, the 2000AD comics—but it was louder and demanded more response. It's a confrontational record, for all its decadence. It has moments of grand absurdity, like the sleaze rock title track and its opening monologue, and moments of awful tenderness. My most private Bowie memory, as a memorial offering: reading about some climate nightmare, shortly after my son was born, and hearing the man in my head, from "We Are The Dead": "People will hold us to blame, it hit me today…" and crying, which was the last time I cried about David Bowie until today.

Bowie made me feel what science fiction made me feel—the vertigo of imagination—and made me start to understand that I could acknowledge my dread and sadness about the future as well as my hope. And so the short version of my Bowie story is the same as most other people's: I found him when I needed to find him.

The word the press latched onto, to describe the ongoing jigsaw of Bowie's career, was "chameleon." It's not a very good word: Chameleons change continually so they won't be noticed, which was not an option David Bowie ever entertained. He regenerated periodically, trying on new faces, reacting against his former selves. If his work was any guide, success made him move harder and faster in new directions, jumping into "plastic soul" at the peak of his glam fame, rejecting art-pop godhood in the ’80s to turn suited and slick, and then jumping again into the cacophony of Tin Machine.

Not all Bowie's regenerations were successful, but there was always another to come. Everywhere you look today, there are memories, and they are all different—of the music, mostly, but of the films too, the images, the curation, the patronage, the lives Bowie touched directly, the ones he changed and never met. If his great legacy to the kids of the '70s was to let them become who they were inside, what is his legacy to the adults of the '10s? To show them how to keep doing that, I think: to recognize when to try something new, and do it well and without fear. Two voices speak to us, both wise: One says "change" and the other says "work." Bowie, more than anyone, found a way to heed both.

There are a million reasons to memorialize the passing of David Bowie, but none more so, at least for me, than because of his legacy as the patron saint of strange gay boys everywhere. Because he ultimately married and had children with women, Bowie wasn’t exactly "gay" himself—though he did stoke the flames of queer rumors in interviews from the 1970s long before it was fashionable to do so, telling Playboy in 1976 that he was bisexual, while in the same breath admitting that his sexual fluidity was something of a publicity stunt. "I just got my leg over a lot," he told British talk show host Jonathan Ross with a laugh and a smile in 2002 when asked about his youthful relationships with men. "I was incredibly promiscuous and let’s leave it that." But his heyday said enough: The pink and yellow outfits, the fluffy orange mullet, the dramatic makeup, the way he’d seductively gaze into the camera lens. His body was so thin and lithe that he bore the elegance of a female swan. He never even needed to actually be gay—to have sex with men—to be gay. He was one of us whether he ever really was one of us. Bowie’s gender and sexuality were probably more outerspace alien than anything found within the narrow confines that we’ve created here on Earth—and we loved him.

For so many gay men, the first pangs of childhood shame have actually nothing to do with an attraction to other boys and everything to do with the emergence of certain traits often described as "feminine." Not all gay men are "girly," that’s true. But I was. I remember drawing on my hand with pastel bubbly pens before a particularly joyless middle school Latin teacher pulling me aside to tell me that that’s something that only girls do, and ordering me to wash it off. I scrubbed my skin so furiously with hot water that it hurt.

For so many, it’s only much later in life that you discover that feeling girly—indeed feeling all shades of the gender rainbow—can be wonderful, no matter who you choose to sleep with or how you were born. If you’re like me, the eventual embrace of the traits that you were once told to hate was helped along, in no small way, by David Bowie. When I discovered Bowie a little later in high school, he was the first person I can recall doing the opposite of what that teacher did: he made being a girly boy seem not just brave, but pretty cool, too. As a college kid, I used to (intentionally?) mishear the lyrics of one of Bowie’s most famous songs, "Life on Mars," as "Look at those gay men go" when, as I’d discover later, the actual lyrics referred to "cavemen." No matter: I heard what I heard when I needed to hear it, and I had enough evidence in his outfits and music videos and appearances that Bowie did, in fact, believe that swishy gay men were worth looking at. You couldn’t enjoy any aspect of his career without confronting his own femininity there staring you in the face with a smirk, shiny bracelet, and a cigarette on the front of Young Americans and shimmering beneath his white wig in Labyrinth.

If gayness were a church, I’d say we make Bowie one of its anointed saints. I cannot quantify precisely the effect he has had on the increasing visibility of gay and trans peoples throughout the world, but there are few figures, at least in the influential world of pop culture, that I’d give more credit to for expanding the boundaries of what we think of as beautiful. Through my sadness, I keep remembering that he does not have to be alive for some fresh new 16-year-old boy—or girl, or girl wanting to be a boy, or boy wanting to be a girl, or some person who in fact has no gender at all—to discover Bowie, and help whomever needs it to reimagine that not so long after that part of queer life that seems like hell, it will feel like heaven.

Alex Karpovsky is best known for playing Ray Ploshansky, the curmudgeonly Café Grumpy manager turned city council member on HBO’s "Girls." He also showed up in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and will appear in their forthcoming Hail, Caesar!. But before that, Karpovsky was a prolific director on the ultra indie scene, creating and acting in films including Red Flag and The Whole Story.

After the premiere of "Girls" in 2012, Karpovsky hadn’t been behind the camera again until 2015, when he co-directed three music videos. Teaming with designer and musician Teddy Blanks under the name Spielbergs, the duo have been behind the goofily dark videos for "Palace" by Tanlines, "Back of the Car" by RAC, and "Talk to Me" by Kopecky. In the coming year, along with more video work, Spielbergs have a short film in an episode of "The New Yorker Presents," a new show streaming on Amazon, and are currently writing longer ideas for film and television.

In this interview, the two tell the story of how they started working together, describe their writerly process, and explain how they borrowed from James Turrell before Drake and Director X. Then they reveal five music videos that have been key in developing their approach and aesthetic.

Pitchfork: Did you meet from your work on "Girls" or did your relationship predate that?

Alex Karpovsky: We met while working on Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture. I acted in the film, and Teddy wrote the score and designed the opening titles. But our first real collaboration was on my feature Red Flag, which Teddy also scored. During that process we became close friends, but it was another few years before we worked on anything else together.

Pitchfork: What lead to you becoming a directing team?

Teddy Blanks: Tanlines brought us together. CHIPS, the design studio that I co-founded, was working on album artwork and various promotional materials for Highlights, the band’s most recent record. Eric Emm, their singer, had been repeatedly told that he bears a striking resemblance to Ray from "Girls." When the band realized that I was friends with Alex, they asked me if I thought he would be interested in working with them on a music video that explores a doppelgänger or "parallel lives" theme.

AK: The four of us had dinner and really hit it off. The next day, Teddy and I were brainstorming ideas and realized that it would be much more fun to write and direct the video together. We had a great time making it and were happy with how it came out, so we naturally wanted to make more. And we did. 

Pitchfork: Alex, since you’ve taken a break from directing these past few years, what motivated you to start making music videos?

AK: Making a film is a herculean endeavor that takes a lot of time. Things often move at a glacial pace as you try to assemble a team and financial backing. Making music videos, along with other short-form content, allows me to stay creatively stimulated during the waiting periods. A few short weeks after you pitch a music video you can be on set shooting away. That’s exciting. Videos are also a more immediate way to experiment with style, test out the latest gadgets, and meet new collaborators. Increasingly, short-form stuff is not just a gap-filler, but something that informs and expands my approach to features.

Pitchfork: Teddy, had you done any directing before these videos?

TB: Through my work at CHIPS, I’ve designed and animated a bunch of opening title sequences for movies and TV (Love & Mercy, Still Alice, HBO’s "Togetherness"), but these videos are my first foray into directing.

Pitchfork: What's your process for coming up with concepts for videos?

TB: The Spielbergs process pretty much looks like the most stereotypical version of a screenwriting team that you could imagine. Usually one of us is pacing around bouncing a tennis ball on the floor while the other one is typing.

AK: For these videos, we would listen to the song together a bunch of times, and at some point, a seed of an idea would occur to one of us. Then it would become a game to see how far we could push that idea into the kind of surreal comedy that we both respond to.

Pitchfork: How would you describe your aesthetic in these videos?

AK: None of these videos are at all performance-based. Each tells a short story, and is pretty jam-packed with plot. So if there is any overall aesthetic, it comes from a desire to get either as much narrative information or as much comedy out of every moment that we possibly can. Because of this, the videos end up looking pretty stylized; the shots are carefully composed and the camera movements are smooth. We’ve been lucky to work with really talented cinematographers right out of the gate.

TB: As far as the actual "look" of the videos goes, we approached each one differently. Going into the Kopecky video, our initial idea was: There’s a cult, and the cult lives inside of a James Turrell exhibit. We got in touch with Jason Peters, an artist who works with light, and found an incredible abandoned church to shoot in. The whole thing took on a life of its own. We wanted the RAC video to look super warm and sun-drenched, almost like a beautiful, serene fashion video. That way, once things get really absurd, it’s that much funnier. The more composed the images seem, the more surprising it is when things get wacky.

Pitchfork: As well as Alex's appearance in two of the three videos, each one features a known actor (Michael Ian Black, Sasheer Zamata, Natasha Lyonne). How and why did you select these performers?

AK: Michael, Sasheer, and Natasha are all incredible comedic actors with a lot of range. They can all turn in subtle and grounded performances, but that’s not really what we wanted them for. Since there’s hardly any dialogue in our mini-movies, we needed actors who could convey a lot just through their movements and facial expressions; it’s almost like silent film acting. 

TB: As far as Alex is concerned, his irrepressible narcissism forces him to insist upon being cast in every video we do, which has become a constant source of tension that threatens to end our collaboration at any moment.

Five Videos That Have Inspired Spielbergs

Beck: "'Sexx' Laws" (directed by Beck)

Any video in which a refrigerator fornicates with a stovetop oven until they both catch on fire is bound to be right in our wheelhouse. Plus, there’s a lithe and youthful Beck employing the best dance moves of his career.

Talking Heads: "Nothing But Flowers" (directed by Tibor Kalman)

Teddy’s background is in graphic design, so we’re always trying to find ways to incorporate type in the outskirts of our videos. "Nothing But Flowers" is a good example of an early, innovative use of typography in music videos. It was directed by Tibor Kalman, who designed many of Talking Heads’ album covers.

Beach House: "Wishes" (directed by Eric Wareheim)

"Wishes" exists in our ideal tonal universe. It’s totally absurd, almost surreal, while also being somehow strangely beautiful.

Foster the People: "Houdini" (directed by DANIELS)

We are huge admirers of the DANIELS, and not only because they are also a duo. In "Houdini," the band members die in a freak on-set accident 10 seconds into the video. It’s up to the entire promotional team behind the act to make it seem like their dead bodies are still performing in the video, and then later, live onstage, Weekend at Bernie’s style! It’s a funny idea for a video, but the DANIELS make it great because they consistently raise the stakes, and because they are magical wizards with visual effects.

New Edition: "Cool It Now" (director unknown)

We often revisit this video together during breaks from writing. Everything about it is '80s perfect: the colorful sweatshirts, the strange cutaways to sunset canoodling, the elaborate hand gestures. We particularly respond to the exaggerated displays of emotion—exactly the kind of performance we’re trying to get out of people in our videos.

No musician understood the power of the image—still, moving, mime, puppets, you name it—better than David Bowie. He was making music videos before MTV would eventually consecrate the form; it can be argued that his emphasis on character, costume, narrative, and personal reinvention helped set the stage for the arrival of music videos as such a crucial artistic medium in the 1980s.

He had a symbiotic relationship with MTV; in the early and mid '80s, the network helped catapult him to new levels of worldwide fame. But that didn't stop him from criticizing the company: Bowie famously chided the VJ Mark Goodman for the network's reluctance to air videos by black artists. And he used his videos not only as the opportunity to develop his radically gender-fluid character, but also, occasionally, to extend more pointed critiques of racial and class injustice.

Mainly, though, he gave us striking and indelible images that are impossible to forget, like his lithe frame silhouetted in the mist, or a rain of white rice tumbling down in slow motion, or a mushroom cloud rising over the Australian outback.

And then, at the end of his life, Bowie returned to the form to create some of the most triumphant work of his entire career, turning his own imminent death into three very different, and profoundly moving, video treatments. He kept us watching, rapt, until the end.

"Space Oddity" (1972)

Bowie is relaxed and resplendent under his orange paintbrush mullet, bathed in reddish light as he strums an acoustic guitar. Directed by Mick Rock, the video is unapologetically bare bones, but oscilloscope pulses, pans across studio mixers, and some judicious shaking of the camera do a surprisingly compelling job of translating the song's zero-G atmosphere.

"Life on Mars?" (1973)

In contrast to the song's vivid descriptions of the dramatic scenes playing out in a darkened cinema, there's nothing to see here but Bowie himself. But his expression and body language are as rich as any wide-screen epic: those blue-shadowed eyes, bobbing in the washed-out frame; the gravity-defying fluff of his hairdo; the perfect curl of his lips in profile. In some shots, his skin tone is so blown out that he seems to merge with the white background, like some pink-lipped Cheshire Cat. Despite the song's cryptic imagery, there's no mistaking the message of the video: Here is a man who understands the power of spectacle.

"Heroes" (1977) 

Of all the images that presented Bowie as a man from outer space, the opening shot here, with the singer wreathed in luminous fog, his head tipped slightly to one side, is one of the most elegant. (It seems unlikely that director Stanley Dorfman would have seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was released in December the same year, which makes the similarity with key shots from that film all the more remarkable.) As the camera slowly zooms in on his elven features, he really does look like a creature from another world. A portrait at once intimate and strange.

"Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy" (1977)

An unlikely inter-generational summit meeting between Bing Crosby, 73, and Bowie, just 30 years old. Crosby hides a not-unkindly barb or two beneath his avuncular façade; Bowie, tongue firmly in cheek, plays an overconfident young hotshot. It wasn't all an act; behind the scenes, Bowie protested the producers' choice of "Little Drummer Boy." As a solution, the show's musical director and arranger co-wrote "Peace on Earth" with Bowie, giving the world one hell of a Christmas present.

"D.J." (1979)

No fancy concept, no special effects—well, save one minor explosion less than 30 seconds in—just Bowie wreaking havoc in a radio station's DJ booth, getting kissed by passersby on the street, and looking absolutely ravishing in a pink belted jumpsuit and gasmask. (This song paved the way for LCD Soundsystem's very existence, by the way.)

"Ashes to Ashes" (1980)

Early video effects, creepy costumes, Martian landscapes, padded walls, a bulldozer, and Bowie in a creepy Pierrot costume—he and director David Mallet ushered in the new decade in fine, outré fashion.

"Fashion" (1980)

Suiting the song's eerie fusion of disco and new wave, the clip offers the uncomfortable spectacle of Bowie and his band playing for an indifferent nightclub audience—Bowie dancing like a gerbil and making truly awful cocaine faces—interspersed with images of wildly costumed fashionistas waiting in soup lines. It's every bit as abrasive as the song's guitars and deadpan lyrics. And at 1:35, his dancers convulse wildly, a move that he'll reprise, to terrifying effect, in "Blackstar."

"Under Pressure" (1981)

More soup lines, this time from the Depression era, turn up in this montaged clip accompanying Bowie's defiantly euphoric collaboration with Queen. Juxtaposing clips of German expressionist films like Nosferatu with footage of city crowds, imploding buildings, violent demonstrations, and outdoor rock festivals, it plays out a little bit like a cut-and-paste answer to Koyaanisqatsi.

"Let's Dance" (1983)

Bowie's first real smash of the MTV era, the video for "Let's Dance" flipped the song's red shoes, with their hints of Cinderella and The Wizard of Oz, into an unlikely dramatization of the struggles of Australia's Aboriginal people.

"China Girl" (1983)

It's easy to mistake the song's critique of Orientalism as Orientalism itself, and the same goes for the video—that thing Bowie does with the corners of his eyes can be difficult to watch, even understanding that he was playing a character. (Even more difficult to watch: the fake execution of his female lead.) But you've got to respect his unwillingness to be too didactic—and his determination to make the viewer squirm. Among the unforgettable images the video gave us: Bowie standing in the middle of the street, tossing a bowl of rice over his head.

David Bowie & Mick Jagger: "Dancing in the Street" (1985)

Watching these two go head to head is hilarious, and instructive: Where Jagger is antic and unstoppable, Bowie, in comparison, is a model of restraint, even in his billowing white duster and printed jumpsuit—and even though he's acting out in ways he never would in one of his own videos. They shot the video on the same day they recorded the song, a benefit for Live Aid—both recording and video were wrapped up in just 13 hours—and the spontaneity of the affair is palpable.

"Day-In Day-Out" (1987)

Proof that even Bowie wasn't immue to the heavy-handedness of the late '80s, although the video is somewhat redeemed by Bowie's gilding moves on roller skates.

"Never Let Me Down" (1987)

Jean Baptiste Mondino directed this sepia-tinged tribute to the dance marathons of the first half of the 20th century; the drowsy, elegant images suit the song's understated, nostalgic qualities.

Tin Machine: "Under the God" (1989)

Say what you will about Bowie's rock group Tin Machine; here, at least, is a chance to watch Bowie flanked by cage dancers and stage dives. Oh, and bearded, although fortunately that phase didn't last too long.

"I'm Afraid of Americans" (1997)

The song has endured better than you might expect, given its glitchy breakbeats—post-Prodigy, post-Judgment Night, a true artifact of the late '90s—and the video remains even more relevant: Riffing on Taxi Driver, it stars Trent Reznor as the embodiment of America's seething, deep-seated violent tendencies. (Bowie, always ahead of the curve, also anticipates Drake's "Hotline Bling" turtleneck by nearly two decades.)

"The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" (2013)

David Bowie and Tilda Swinton, together at last (plus assorted incubi/succubi). Enough said.

"Blackstar" (2015)

What seemed cryptic just two months ago suddenly becomes crystal clear. Amid fallen spacesuits, bejeweled skulls, strange rituals, convulsive dancers, a girl with a tail, and a total eclipse, Bowie—bandaged and with buttons for eyes—faces down the infinite. It is almost unthinkable: Just months before his own death, he was art-directing his ascension.

"Lazarus" (2016)

Bowie's final video is, frankly, hard to watch. Not because he looks ill, which he was—he comes across as vital as he'd ever been. (My God, just look at him in that woolen jumpsuit, busting out Bob Fosse moves—he looks incredible.) It's what lurks beneath the surface of this otherwise unflinching look into the void. It looks, as he scribbles away with an old-fashioned ink pen, a little bit like terror: He bites his nails, grimaces comically. But it also looks like eagerness—the readiness to just get it all over with, to finally be free. Everybody knows him now, it's true, but as he pulls back into his closet, it's impossible not to feel like he's still one step ahead of all of us.

Carlos Dengler was a founding member of Interpol, playing in the band until 2010. He is currently pursuing a career as an actor and working on a memoir.

Dengler is also one of many artists whose lives were changed by David Bowie. Following Bowie's death earlier this week, Dengler reflects on the ways in which the Thin White Duke impacted him, from his first encounter with the "Boys Keep Swinging" music video as a young boy up through his decision to leave Interpol and beyond.

When I was a 10-year-old boy, surviving the cultural wilderness of inland Queens in the '80s, I happened to alight on a public access channel one night broadcasting a music video wherein a thin white duke swaggered, hand on hip, facing the camera. Then, through a haughty, haunting series of drag vignettes, he violently removed his wig with one hand as the other smeared his lipstick across one cheek of his gaunt, chiseled, frozen mien. It was the music video for the song "Boys Keep Swinging."

My childhood TV set was my oracle; when I turned its plastic dial between 13 positions I was like an urchin at a nickelodeon playing with the genie, dropping coins, demanding needed answers to puzzling traumas. The dispatches I received—episodes of "Three’s Company," "What’s Happening," "Inspector Gadget," "Star Trek"—were communiques from safer, sunnier worlds than my own and the answers were beautiful. But no world nor alien that Scotty ever beamed into my childhood living room was more strangely, glacially beautiful than the figure on that public access channel that evening smearing his makeup.

This galactic crooner offered me a vision of abject androgyny and robotic distance that resonated with the loneliness of being a gentle misfit in a dangerous neighborhood full of macho Latino gangs whose members donned goose feather puffy jackets and listened to Run-D.M.C. Here was an option the cable-TV-less outpost of Queens in the '80s simply hadn’t gotten around to until that moment, that evening, when I was permitted to gaze into the land of cosmetic freedom, where not only could a man wear lipstick, but he could smudge it, too, seemingly in protest.

Unlike other, more angry heavy-metal examples, this was a vision of masculine glamour with a bizarre fourth dimension, tailored from worlds I would discover later on in undergrad, the worlds of Dadaism, French Symbolism, German Expressionism, et al. The dispatch had hit its mark; a brutally other, intergalactic denizen had written the constitution to my future goth and post-goth experiments.

Some 20 years later in late 2005, after conducting those experiments globally with varying levels of success, the final stage of my post-adolescence arrived.

I was gazing into my reflection in a mirror inside a locked bathroom backstage at the sold-out Hammerstein Ballroom, five minutes before the lights would go out and 3500 rabid Interpol fans would ostensibly lose their shit. Despite the collective opinion of 3500 ticket holders to the contrary, I regarded the drug-addled, snot-nosed visage staring back at me from the mirror with no shortage of contempt. I’d done it again, only this would be the last time: I’d toyed with a fragile nervous system, dousing it with chemicals and warm bodies well past the hour when most mortals had already made it to the office somehow. Now, at the moment of glory, for the grand homecoming of four heroes who’d recently signed their names on some pages of rock’n’roll’s storybook, I wasn’t able to stand without supporting myself on the bathroom sink with my arms, let alone make it up the stairs. I was ruined, and I was going to cancel the show and disappear into a lifeless twilight of shame and anonymity, with a scarlet letter forever reminding me of my failure.

Then I heard voices from outside the bathroom. Bright, jovial cheers and upturned tones, as though a rainbow had pierced through a muddy cloud casting a years-long shadow over a village and the townspeople now rejoiced. Only I was in no mood to rejoice. My emotional suicide was on schedule, and I had no room for anything but a dirge.

Little did I know another dispatch was headed towards me, and this time the messenger came in person. I thrust open the door and there was the thin white duke from the public access channel in Queens who’d now, 20 years later, grown a bushy beard and learned my name and heartily shook my hand. I don’t remember much about the details of our conversation backstage with him, only that at this moment he was no longer my cherished gorgeous alien, but an unannounced gracious pope on a secret mission to visit lonely Jesuit missionaries, in order to bestow a blessing on this little corner of the great New World of alt-rock ambition.

Boy, did I kiss that papal ring.

Later he would watch our set, sitting in the balcony, no doubt flanked on either side by bodyguards. The pope would never know that his blessing had inadvertently reversed the course of an emotional suicide and given a self-hating bass player spiritual CPR. Call it adrenaline if you like, I call it divine intervention, or, in this case, benevolent alien intervention. It would be one of the best shows I ever played with the band.

I’d be looking in the mirror again, four years later in late 2009, without the drugs and sex, but with the same contempt and fear. I’d be looking at a terrified post-adolescent trapped inside a Darth Vader suit that was called Carlos D. Each year he'd ossify more and more behind his constrictive Carlos armor, and now he was suffocating inside. He was panicking and he wanted out of the suit.

It didn’t help that differences had ensued. The decadence of the '00s was at an end. It was a time of conservation, of the profit principle, of high anxiety, of major label betrayals, of group therapy and raised voices, of cold, stony pursed lips on poker faces disguising a contagious terror that trickled down from managers and executives quivering in their boots. Free downloads threatened to take away yachts. The end of art was nigh, I could feel it.

I looked again in the mirror, looking straight at Darth Vader. I waited for jovial voices outside. Nothing: this time there wouldn’t be a papal reprieve. I was on my own.

I thought of that thin white duke, of the beautiful rooster from Mars who was once a lonely astronaut and who at age 30, at the height of his beauty and vitality, became a man who fell to Earth, specifically to Berlin, to collaborate with audio sculptors, and later on to collaborate with an eminent minimalist composer.

I thought of the gracious host who’d invited us backstage at his concert at Madison Square Garden during his final tour; Paul Banks and I shook his hand as we left. We were too awestruck to decipher his plummy, rushed English undertones in real time, instead gazing straight at him in an awkward silence. Losing not a beat with this lapse in our social graces, with his own utmost grace, he said "Goodnight, gentlemen" and turned right around to continue holding court backstage. Here was not the man who fell to Earth, but the man who’d conquered fame.

And of course I thought of the bearded pope who’d rescued the spirit of a confused 31-year-old teenager before an important concert.

I thought of how lovely was the sight of a man who fell to Earth freed from the acrid stench of his own recycled air inside his constrictive astronaut suit, an alien who became human enough to save my ass one lonely, cold evening without even knowing he was doing it.

Staring down a future floating in a fear-driven galaxy of legacy act business models based on ads, metrics, and Facebook likes, and locked in a life-support suit that was my own walking, talking prison, I knew there was no way out for me except by hitting the eject button on my space pod and venturing out into deep space alone with nothing but a dream and some hope. I took a page out of the the duke’s book of reinvention and fell down to Earth my own way.

I would never be able to transmute the DNA of persona the way the duke could. The way he seemingly effortlessly glided from galaxy to galaxy was forever beyond me and my little space pod. God had given him warp drive and a state-of-the-art navigation console to send him along from star system to star system. But I’m not doing so bad. I’ve gotten an MFA in Acting from NYU, a three-year actor’s boot camp not for the faint of heart. I’m finally pursuing my dream to be a decent stage actor. And I’m writing a memoir. Thankfully the Darth Vader suit I created to stay alive in the music industry, Carlos D’s suite of clothes and effects, is hanging in the closet, my private museum of my past in music, as I’m sure the duke had, and those of many like others he inspired.

Today my space pod lands on a new planet with a new tribe. I can see from my windshield the shape of a thin white duke on the ground. He’s giving me the thumbs up for landing. He’s saying "Good on ya mate! Follow your dreams. Just make sure you’re doing what you love and you’ll be all right. Be it all. Don’t dream it, be it. Be an alien, be an astronaut, be a gracious host, be a bearded pope, be a thin white duke. Be a writer, be an actor, or just be a conservatory student. You don’t have to be successful, but you should die trying to be all you can be. Nothing’s impossible. Be free, mate. Travel."

And in remembrance of how we met, he’s smearing his lipstick.

Rest in peace, and thank you, beautiful, ever inspiring, David Bowie.

Photo by Jimmy King

As I was born in the 1980s, I didn't experience David Bowie's interest in the communist East firsthand. Instead, I learned to love him via his thrilling, polished pop of the mid-90s. But later, when I discovered Bowie's Berlin Trilogy as a Western pop culture-obsessed teenager in then-capitalist Poland, it became apparent that these records were a result of a careful immersion in the otherness of the Soviet Bloc. They're in equal measure about our history as his heart. That the allegedly bleak and sinister communist East was a fascinating place culturally, and that historically charged Eastern Europe must have possessed some truly sophisticated allure, given that it appealed so strongly to a disillusioned generation from the consumerist West. This sophisticated, gloomy music, considered Bowie's masterpiece, speaks of an "alternative" Eastern Bloc: one that existed more in dreams and yearning than in the everyday reality.

As far as Western popular music goes, a strong argument could be made that Bowie discovered the Soviet Bloc. His relocation to Berlin in 1976 (and the subsequent recording of his landmark trilogy) enabled a whole generation of musicians, from opposing geographical and political backgrounds, to communicate with each other. In the murk of the Cold War's divided capital— dangerous, concrete-laden, grey, sleazy, sexy—Bowie recognized the potential for a fruitful cultural and historical cross-fertilization.

Bowie's European fixations stemmed from his prolific dabbling—his interest in everything from the occult, to mime, the space program, William Burroughs' dystopian visions of aliens conquering human civilisation, Warhol's pop artifice and simulacrum. Raised in a London suburb as a child of the hippie generation, as well as the post-war British welfare state, he could have gone in any political direction. His late ’60s/early ’70s albums reveal this dualism: Alongside a typical flower child interest in shady mysticism is an unusual political alertness. He loved Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," Gurdijeff, Kahil Gilbran, Aleister Crowley, and Kenneth Anger, while songs like "All the Young Dudes" and "Star" had jarring references to the Labour movement.

Bowie's later sincere interest in Cold War history is in stark contrast with his early, somewhat troubling, ventures into the world of right-wing ideology. The Man Who Sold the World (1970) and Hunky Dory (1973) both contained Nietzsche-inspired themes, where a modern man is to be replaced by a "Homo Superior," Bowie's bizarre take on the concept of the Ubermensch—later developed into the Ziggy Stardust-era's Starman, which suggested that the Ubermensch would be an alien who would appear from the sky and impose his rule. The lightning face paint from the cover of Aladdin Sane resembles a glamorised version of the British Union of Fascists' logo. This bizarre flirtation with a political taboo came probably from Bowie's yearning for rockstar fame and success, and his instinctive understanding of a pop idol as a political, perhaps even fascist-style, leader. Fueled by his cocaine habit, Bowie made deeply unsettling comments about fascism in various interviews, not least an infamous, addled Playboy feature: "Britain is ready for a fascist leader… I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism… I believe very strongly in fascism, people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership… Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars…You've got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up."

Bowie's fixation with totalitarianism also found its muse closer to home when fascism once again reared its head in 1970s Britain. Diamond Dogs (1974) was the result of a failed attempt to stage a musical based on Orwell's 1984. Denied the rights by Orwell's widow Sonia, Bowie transformed his idea into a less specific, post-apocalyptic, glam-driven vision of urban decay. It also fed on his short-lived hope to create a musical of the Soviet underground comic "Oktobriana," about a Communist superheroine—a kind of totalitarian Wonder Woman—which was published in the West.

While the Beatles had sung about the USSR, Bowie decided to actually go there. In early 1973, after a tour in Japan, he bought a camera and boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway, traveling over 9,000km from Khabarovsk, just 30km from the Chinese border, to Moscow, where he strolled around, looking at the hard-working communist men and women, and taking plenty of pictures, while looking flamboyant as usual. He then took a train to Paris, which stopped for technical reasons in the capital of socialist Poland—specifically, at Warsaw's northern station, Warszawa Gdańska. This short stop has been much mythologized by Polish fans. Allegedly, during these 40 minutes, Bowie looked around the station's socialist concrete architecture, went up for a walk to the district of Żoliborz, and strolled around Paris Commune Square. There, in a socialist cultural club called Empik, he purchased some records—among them, possibly, an LP by the folk band Silesia, whose song "Helokanie" bears a close resemblance to Bowie's "Warszawa."

With Bowie increasingly worn out due to his cocaine habit, his Station to Station era (and attendant Teutonic, 1930s-indebted Thin White Duke look) coincided with a psychotic period. This culminated in his infamous, alleged Nazi salute at London's Victoria Station in 1976, which he would deny for years afterwards. The faux-pas was a tipping point: He endeavored to kick drugs and attempt to rejuvenate himself by relocating to West Berlin. While Bowie's time in the German capital didn't prove to be especially healthy, it lent him a seriousness and gravitas his work had previously lacked. There, driven by his interest in Expressionism, the 1920s avant-garde, and Germanic rock, he transformed himself into a dandy, a student of history, and a real artist.

Cycling from his home in Schöneberg to Hansa Tonstudio, famously just next to the Wall, Bowie recorded his three Berlin masterpieces. In 1977, he channeled the city into Low, an exquisite, otherworldly and minimalist record, in which the most extraordinary feature is space. The second side is filled with abstract, sweeping, electronic landscapes, whose coldness evokes both the infinite depth of cosmic space, as well as the cold spaces of communist boulevards in Moscow, Warsaw, and Berlin. Side B opens with the towering "Warszawa," Bowie's most obvious homage to the doubtless grim-seeming city he caught a glimpse of back in 1973 (and possibly again, in 1976, on a trip with Iggy Pop). It's the most eccentric take on traditional Eastern European music imaginable, with Bowie singing invented words in a high pitch, over Eno's swirling electronics.

Also in 1977, "Heroes" was similarly entrenched in European imagery. Not only its famous cover, with Bowie emulating a painting by the Expressionist Erich Heckel, but its references to specific places in Berlin, to Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider in "V2-Schneider," and "Sense of Doubt," with rain and cars running in the background evoking film noir and Cold War espionage. With its Japanese koto, "Moss Garden" signaled Bowie's interest in the farther East. "Heroes"' greatest emblem, of course is its title-track, perhaps Bowie's most beloved hit, which is both a love story of Berlin Wall-separated lovers, and an anthem to pop music's redeeming protean powers.

The influence of Bowie's Berlin period spread swiftly. The Human League dreamed about the dignity of hard labour and Yuri Gagarin's space flights; New Romantic Visage projected a moon over Moscow; Eurythmics recorded the conceptual soundtrack to Michael Radford's adaptation of Orwell's "1984"; Ultravox fantasised about concrete, spies, and Cold War Vienna; Depeche Mode dabbled in musique concrète and socialist realist imagery of glamorized workers. The relentlessly modernist, cold, electronic sound of Bowie's Berlin albums allowed them to dream beyond the Wall.

Germany, with its brilliant electronic music (stimulated by other centers of electronic music, such as that in Warsaw), was a laboratory, and a window from which Bowie could comfortably observe the history behind the barbed wire without getting bruised by it. Kraftwerk had provided a sound and alluring trips on the Trans-Europe Express, but it was Bowie who united elements of music and history that had seemed separated by the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall. As a model postmodernist, someone who built his life and art out of the artificial, the fabricated, who traversed pop art, comic books, and Brecht, Bowie needed the necessary frisson of the real, which he found in Berlin, Warsaw, and Moscow. There, you had little art or style to be consumed, but the burden of history, which could be tracked on the cities' gigantic open spaces: all consuming emptiness and morbid austerity.

In the 1981 film, Christiane F, an adaptation of the sensationalist autobiography of a teenage heroin addict and Bowie obsessive from West Berlin, Bowie becomes a soundtrack to infinitely sad, murky landscapes filled with failed housing projects and a failed family unit. While related to a specific experience, he unified the fears and sense of decline felt by young people on both sides of Europe. He was the wall against which Christiane F and her young friends—sex workers and heavy drug users—projected dreams that never came true. Whichever side of the curtain they were on, all young people were disadvantaged by Cold War politics and the decaying economy. The Iron Curtain turned out to have big enough holes through which young people could finds ways to each other—poked and widened by Bowie's curious spur.

Photos courtesy of Carlos Alomar

The story of David Bowie and Carlos Alomar begins in New York. By 1974, the Puerto Rico-born Alomar had become a guitarist in the house band at Harlem's Apollo Theater, playing with James Brown and eventually working as a session musician at RCA. To call Bowie and Alomar musical soulmates seems too fitting. Beginning with Bowie's 1975 "plastic soul" masterpiece Young Americans, Alomar was his rhythm guitarist—he co-wrote "Fame"—and would become his musical director. Their collaborations spanned over 30 years, with Alomar playing on Station to Station and the Berlin trilogy among many other records. We spoke to Alomar this week about their friendship and his hopes of organizing a tribute to Bowie's groundbreaking electronic music.

Pitchfork: What was your favorite album to work on with David?

Carlos Alomar: I have to go back to the very beginning, and that would be Young Americans. In the lead up to Young Americans, David Bowie leaves Spiders from Mars and comes to America and I meet him during production of the Lulu tracks that he was doing at RCA, where I was the house guitarist. I meet him and we hang out, we really hit it off as people.

Then he tells me he wants to do an album. Well, I was already working with the Main Ingredient, so I couldn’t do it. A little while later he calls me back: “I’m doing Diamond Dogs”—but I still can’t do it. Then he calls me back: “I’m going to Philadelphia, I need to do this record [Young Americans], come on.” And I said, “Well, financially I can’t do it”—but he said “no problem.”

So here I am. When I tried to ask people about him, nobody knew anything, but I figured “this sounds interesting, he is really a nice guy.” For Young Americans he wants the real soul singers, he wants the real deal. I married the real deal, Robin Clark. She’s already got all her credits. And my best friend was Luther Vandross, the greatest singer I know. Diane Sumler, Anthony Hinton, Emir Kassan, I got all my friends. And he’s like “bring them along.”

When you're doing an album and your best friend is there, and your wife is there, and all your buddies are there, and boom, first day, we knock out two songs—that's so cool. Although I had a blast doing Brian Eno and the trilogy [1977's Low and Heroes, and 1979's Lodger], which really affected my life, I think the best was Young Americans. I really appreciate the fact that there was always a little something funky about David Bowie, and that little something funky is Carlos Alomar. So that's the album that made David understand “Carlos is cool, Carlos can deliver it,” and we had so much fun. Young Americans will forever live as the springboard to everything else.

Pitchfork: You've said that during those sessions, one night David went out to dinner and you stayed behind, and when he came back you'd pretty much finished “Fame.” What was it like to receive that kind of trust from him?

CA: It is trust, but it is also courage—that you can leave an individual to his own devices and say “explore and experiment” and think, “It's okay, I'll see what it sounds like when I come back.” I mean who the hell does that? It is evident all the way through David's career, this issue of exploring the possibility of mixing genres. There’s a perfectly fine rock'n'roll song—well, no, let's throw a wrench, let's throw some discordant guitar and [wrench noises] just mess with that damn song! And everybody loves it, so you keep moving. David Bowie's music is a moving target. Just when you think you got the bullseye, it shifts. And to his credit, on to death, it's still shifting. David Bowie is a moving target, even after he's gone.

Pitchfork: What else did you learn about music from working on that album?

CA: In hindsight, we could say a lot of things. For instance, James Brown stole “Fame” from David Bowie—but did he really steal it from David Bowie? Or did he steal it from Carlos Alomar? [laughs] Because there ain't a funky bone in David Bowie's body that would ever create a song like “Fame.” I have a lot to be proud of on that record and it was all allowed by David. To think I'd bring my best friend—who had never been on a record, never been in a studio, Luther Vandross—and that David would say, “Hey Luther, go in there and see what it sounds like. I know you were just playing around in the lounge, but I like what you were doing, go see what it sounds like on the record.” And when he sings “Young Americans” and you hear Robin and them all singing, "young American young American he wants the young American alllllright"—that man just discovered Luther Vandross! Just like that.

You ask me—which is the album that has the peaks? The album that was done in less than a month and a half? Which album has the components of a jazz David Sanborn wailing well before all the saxophone players were wailing like that? That's Young Americans. That damn album was never supposed to be done by a blue-eyed soul singer from Britain. It's crazy! And that's the way you launch your career in America? Well, welcome to America, David Bowie.

Pitchfork: There's a sense of curiosity that you and David shared. Was there a moment where you felt like you'd witnessed the fullest expression of his curiosity?

CA: Being called in to do the trilogy with Brian Eno was—not only for me, but for all the fans, all the record companies, all the audiophiles, all the musicians—that was a leap of faith. To think that you would say "an album has an A-side and a B-side—and what do you care what I do on my B-side?" If that's the case, there's this new thing called electronic music, watch this. And in one fell swoop, you introduce electronic and ambient music to a general public that is clueless to the advent of a new pop form. It was the advent of a new future for music. And so we have to consider that exploration and experimentation really was the core to the future, and David introduced it to all of us in a palatable form. 

He created this atmosphere for me where I walked into the studio thinking the old way, and walked out with a set of tools that I didn't even know what to do with. This goes to the core of things I did with Bowie that changed me forever. When he introduced me to Brian Eno, he introduced me to the concept that you don't have to be a proficient musician. Technology can make it so that if I press this one key or strum this one note, the machines can do everything, if I know how to program them. That is totally—2050-million, that is so far advanced and yet look at where it is right now. One keyboard can be a full orchestra.

My heart is frozen. I don't know how to deal with his death right now. It doesn't make any sense. So I'm suspended. In my world, the only way I can release is to do music.

I need to do a concert to celebrate David Bowie's electronic music. And in so doing, I'm not taking a step back, I'm taking a step forward and presenting it in its entirety so people can understand this type of visionary. It doesn't happen often. It's genius and it needs to be proclaimed as such. I ultimately want to do a simple thing. There was a trio that we worked with called the DAM Trio, and DAM means Dennis Davis, Carlos Alomar, and George Murray. We did all those Bowie albums as the rhythm section. Man, if I can get that DAM trio back together again—"get the band back together" [laughs]—and put on a concert of David Bowie's electronic music, that's the way I want to remember David, moving forward into the future of music. Musicians have to do what they do and express it musically. All the blah blah blah will get lost in the dialogue.

Pitchfork: I think people would love that.

CA: I gotta figure out a way to make it free—oh my god, that's the tribute to David. I'll pay the fans one dollar each if they come to the concert [laughs] that's what it should be. I think that's the way to go—dive into the music and don't think, stay frozen, why don't we all stay frozen in time for awhile?

I just need a quiet moment with the fans. They don't need superstars, they don't need no guest singers. Let's just bring the fans and students of music together. All of us will close our eyes and when we close our eyes we're all back there, and that's all anybody wants. I think David would have liked that. Once I go into bandleader mode, that's where I'll get closer to David.

I was listening to the electronic stuff, I think it was "Warszawa," and quite honestly, it was the only stuff that touched my heart. It's the only stuff that is ambient enough to let me also be in the music. It allowed my thoughts to be in the music, it didn't stop me from thinking. I wasn't hearing David's voice, I wasn't hearing some great lead guitar coming at me, I wasn't thinking about "who was that?" And if I'm going to do a tribute, I just want fans to be alone in their own thoughts. That's a tribute to the personal relationship that fans have with an artist. Fans don't need all the crap that corporate America wants to feed them for $12, they just need to be together. 

Pitchfork: That makes a lot of sense to me—it sounds peaceful and emotional.

CA: Exactly! Even talking to you, it is generational. If the young people that just discovered Bowie lament his loss so much... the older crowds that knew him as a sophisticated Duke, they understand the chess piece moves. We all know a different Bowie, and isn't that cool?

Pitchfork: Let’s hear side B of Low.

CA: Look—I feel low, goddamnit. I feel low as hell, and I don't wanna hear no uptempo shit, I just wanna be alone in a room. When I got Low, I turned off all the lights in my apartment and I turned up the systems and man, I was in space. It was awesome. And you can't do that when you're tapping your feet and wanting to shake your butt. When I started thinking about special moments, it wasn't about hunting for the number one single, it wasn't about appeasing the record companies. It was about the exploration and experimentation that moved the bar. And that trilogy was the bomb. Some people don't understand, but the fans will get it.

Pitchfork: I think people are wondering right now what they can do to honor Bowie.

CA: You should be courageous. When we look at the human experience and the human revolution and what's necessary for us to progress, we have a mentor. We have someone. We have a prophet, we have somebody that showed us the way. We had a person that traveled a lonely road all by himself—and of course he dragged us kicking and screaming along the way. Nonetheless, if we're all courageous and we understand that life is a moving target, then we'll never be satisfied with accomplishments. Accomplishments have nothing to do with anything. It's not the destination, it's the journey. It's what allows us to think like Bowie: "I'm a pioneer. Well, what the hell am I pioneering? I already got a number one hit, why am I still there? Everybody's copying what I just did—how the hell am I supposed to compete with myself? I need to jump the tracks and take the next train, going in the opposite direction." So that's what I would say to everybody. Take a page from his book, have courage, pave your own path.

Pitchfork: Are there any other especially vivid memories you've grasped to? 

CA: There are too many. His life was the most fabulous moment. The fact that David Bowie and Carlos Alomar met—I was 23, he was 29. We were young—people just don't get it.

Pitchfork: When you first met, you took him to Harlem. What was his response?

CA: [laughs] He was scared and excited. First of all, you don't come out of a limousine with orange hair and a fedora hat and walk past a whole line of African-American people waiting to get into the Apollo and just walk straight through. You gotta have a lot of cajoles to walk into Richard Pryor's dressing room and say, "Hi, I'm David Bowie" knowing that he has all the right to say "Who the fuck is David Bowie and what the fuck are you doing in my dressing room?" This is Richard Pryor [laughs]. He'll curse you out! Richard Pryor of course is a comedian, and, like many comedians, is light-hearted on-stage and a dark lord off-stage. So you know what... welcome to America. I loved it, and I thought he did. In a strange way I was trying to just: "Here’s some after-hours joints, here’s some Latin places, here’s some black places." Nothing fazed him, so I was like: "You know what, you're cool, dude. I like you. We can hang."

In the excellent Oscar-nominated film The Big Short, Christian Bale plays real-life person Dr. Michael Burry, a hedge fund manager who loves metal. He blows off steam playing drums. Ergo: Christian Bale needed to learn how to play drums. Enter Scott Wittenburg, drum teacher at the Musician’s Institute, member of Zen Robbi, and all-around impressive human who can play a solo while eating a burrito. We figured that must have been a weird couple of drum lessons, so we called up Wittenberg to ask how he taught Bale how to pound the skins like a pro.

Pitchfork: My big question for you is, how the hell did this happen? How did you end up teaching Christian Bale how to play drums to Pantera for a movie about finance? It's such a bizarre thing.

Scott Wittenberg: Well, I've been teaching the heavy metal class at the Musician's Institute in Hollywood, California for about 10 years. And Paramount Pictures called the school, asking if my boss had any guys he could refer. He gave a few names out, and I guess based off my metal background and teaching the metal class I was the guy. 

Pitchfork: Is teaching someone how to act like they're playing the drums different then teaching someone to actually play the drums?

SW:  That's a good question. I started by giving him the basics. Like, really basic: This is a ride cymbal, a crash cymbal, a snare drum, a bass drum, toms, etc. We did six or seven lessons, each one between a hour and a half and three hours. And from there, after a few listens of basic how-to-hold-the-sticks kind of stuff, we just turned the song on. Basically it turned into a copycat game, the repeat-after-me thing, where I would play and he would try to mimic my motions as best as he could. We would talk about trying to get some height on the sticks and trying to get his hands high, looking like he's having fun. This wasn't, you know, Whiplash 2. He just had to look like a guy who was a metalhead who was blowing off some steam.

Pitchfork: Even in just your teaching of normal metal drums, how much is actually about looking the part?

SW: Well, I do think it's very important. Metal music, probably more than most styles, is more a showmanship thing.  When I go see a metal band, I like to see the drummer rocking out, his hair down and the cymbals swinging. I think it's also important to tap into inner animal, to get the point across the right way.

Pitchfork: Michael Burry, the character Christian Bale is playing, is a dork. Definitely not cool. How much did you consider what that character was like, how he might play drums?

SW: I didn't really have too much to do with that. Christian came in and explained the character to me, but when we first started the lessons he hadn't even met Michael yet. Maybe halfway through the lessons he went up to San Jose and hung out with him for a weekend. Christian seemed to have a pretty good grasp on how he wanted to do the whole thing. He's what they call a method actor, so he makes sure he's immersed in the role. And I have to say this for him: Of all the students I've taught, he was certainly not the best drummer, but one of my best students. I gave him "homework" and he would come back doing it like he had been doing it for a long time. It was obvious he had put his hours in.

Pitchfork: As a teacher that must be encouraging—Christian Bale or otherwise.

SW: Yeah. It was great. And we were both having fun with the whole thing. It wasn't like I was teaching him to speak with an accent. We were just doing metal drums and he was definitely into it.

Pitchfork: It's clear he may not have been the best drummer but he was a great student, and you can see that passion on the screen. 

SW: He's a pretty intense guy. He wasn't there to mess around. He came in ready to rock for sure. He pulled up in the parking lot with the windows down blaring—I think it was Earth, Wind & Fire, old funk bands from the '70s, which I thought was awesome. He's into music. He listens to a lot of music, but maybe not the metal thing, but he listens to the loud stuff. Maybe he listens to metal now, I don't know. I kind of had to hip him to the whole Dimebag Darrell thing. He seemed pretty into it as he went.

Pitchfork: You've seen the movie now, I assume?

SW: I have. It was cool. I enjoyed it a lot. I'd see it again.

Pitchfork: Was it funny to watch him play? Could you see your own handiwork? Did it feel like, "That looks like me, someone mimicking me?"

SW: Kind of! What he looked like in the movie is exactly what he looked like in real life. He has a little bit of a stiff-arm thing; he doesn't look like he's been practicing his paradiddles for 20 years. He doesn't have this fluid motion going on. I have a few drummer friends of mine who would wisecrack at me and say he needs to work on the whip. But he did good.

 There was one funny moment where I told him the right way to hit a cymbal. There is a right and a wrong way to hit a cymbal, and the analogy he made is it's like pulling a punch. It's pretty cool, I'm teaching how to hit a cymbal and Batman is telling me how to pull a punch.

Pitchfork: Have you talked to your students about it?

SW: I wasn't really supposed to talk about it for a long time, but people found out. All I had to do was tell my mom and the world knows. She's a big Christian Bale fan so she was pretty pumped on the whole thing.