When iconic artists go on tour, most fans buy tickets hoping to hear the \u201chits.\u201d And the hits are typically decades old, released when the artists were young. However, many rock legends remain curious, continue to record worthwhile music, and occasionally release masterpieces. The tracks may not appear on a greatest hits anthology but are nonetheless essential chapters in groundbreaking careers. Here are two latter-day masterpieces from a pair of rock history\u2019s most transformative voices.<\/p>\n
David Bowie \u2018Blackstar\u2019 (2016)<\/p>\n
Blackstar, David Bowie<\/a>\u2019s 26th and final studio album, was released on his 69th birthday. Two days later, the singer died. He\u2019d battled liver cancer privately for 18 months, and after his passing, many began to reevaluate the meaning of his final LP. In \u201cLazarus\u201d, he sings, \u201cLook up here, I\u2019m in heaven \/ I\u2019ve got scars that can\u2019t be seen.\u201d It\u2019s hard not to interpret this as anything other than one facing their own mortality. But it\u2019s Bowie, and the brooding track could just as easily be a noir drama.<\/p>\n Bowie\u2019s backing band on the album is led by Donny McCaslin, the saxophonist in Maria Schneider\u2019s big band orchestra. Blackstar isn\u2019t a jazz album, but its musical perspective is. The title track is searching and fidgety, much like the rest of the album. Meanwhile, orchestral strings surround Bowie\u2019s voice on \u201cDollar Days\u201d, a mid-tempo number echoing his more familiar output. Then there\u2019s the sputtering beats and angular guitars of \u201cSue (Or In A Season Of Crime)\u201d, first recorded with Schneider\u2019s orchestra<\/a> and appearing in 2014 on the compilation, Nothing Has Changed.<\/p>\n Yet don\u2019t go looking for an end-of-life hymn. Songs like \u201cTis A Pity She Was A Wh*re\u201d and \u201cI Can\u2019t Give Everything Away\u201d reveal an artist still in motion all the way until the very end.<\/p>\n Bob Dylan \u2018Rough And Rowdy Ways\u2019 (2020)<\/p>\n When Rough And Rowdy Ways arrived, it was Bob Dylan\u2019s first album of new material since Tempest (2012). Between the two LPs, he released three collections of pop standards. A collection of covers after a long career of expanding the American Songbook with his own tunes. On the opening track, \u201cI Contain Multitudes\u201d, Dylan sings, \u201cI\u2019m a man of contradictions \/ I\u2019m a man of many moods.\u201d Which was always apparent, even before he plugged in his electric guitar and alienated folk purists in 1965.<\/p>\n Like much of Dylan\u2019s latter output, the music is old-fashioned with death-on-my-mind lyrics and verses of poetry that often seem intent on throwing the listener off his trail. Again, a familiar theme. The wobbly blues of \u201cFalse Prophet\u201d might be biographical or whole-cloth fiction. \u201cI ain\u2019t no false prophet \/ I just know what I know \/ I go where only the lonely can go,\u201d he howls in a broken voice.<\/p>\n In the sprawling album closer, \u201cMurder Most Foul\u201d, Dylan describes the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. The title, taken from Hamlet, gets repurposed as an account of American distress and a culture happening around, because of, and after Kennedy\u2019s gruesome death. The band, seemingly free of meter or a fixed tempo, supports Dylan in a combined drone. And you get a sense of zooming out, like the awed perspective of the Earthset<\/a> image. To such a scale that all the trauma feels insignificant. Or, depending on the view, extraordinarily significant.<\/p>\n Photo by Gary Miller\/Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When iconic artists go on tour, most fans buy tickets hoping to hear the \u201chits.\u201d And the hits…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216,2156],"class_list":{"0":"post-593783","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-rock-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}