Who Has Had The Most “Returns To Form”?
Applied to pop, this question – discussed at some length in the pub last night – proves surprisingly complex. “Dylan” was everybody’s obvious answer* but the more we thought about it the less sure we were about this. So I throw it open to the Freaky Trigger readership and wish them joy with it.
*why yes, it WAS an all-male party, why do you ask?
Actual or proclaimed returns to form? If the latter, then unquestionably REM
maybe Sinatra? possibly Neil Young
Depends upon the definition of the term – oddly (or perhaps not) this topic came up in discussion about a year ago when I was in the pub as well, and I argued that the Bee Gees had more commercial returns to form than most artists, but whether they had critical favour on their side in each instance is something I’d question (although unlike most people who read “Freaky Trigger”, I do actually really like “You Win Again”).
The Fall always seem to have a “return to form” with every damn album according to at least one or two critics, and there are always disagreements about how many times Bowie has or hasn’t been off the boil… (I’d argue “Outside” was a return to form in his case, but it’s bloody hard getting anyone outside his fanbase to agree).
Shurely the real question here is: who has made the most STUNNING returns to form?
@4 – Johnny Cash?
Take That would be my choice.
Cheating, but Woody Allen. He makes a movie a year almost like clock-work and his fallow periods are full of stuff that’s unwatchable and makes one swear off him forever…. But every six years or so he becomes worth watching again (at least for a year or two). More fastidious established writer-directors would just not make a new film until they had a new genuinely good idea.
P!nk? Van Morrison?
I’d probably go with the Fall. But that’s proclaimed returns to form. I don’t think any of these acts ever really did return to form. (But then, I also didn’t follow them closely enough to really know.)
I do think Bowie on Station To Station and the Bee Gees starting with “Nights On Broadway” actually had changed form and gotten good again after what they’d been doing well earlier ran dry. Maybe the same is true with Max Martin on “Since U Been Gone.”
It’s not Dylan – I thought the critical consensus was that Dylan had one really long crap period followed by one relatively late period of being pretty good again, but with no serious suggestion that’s it’s as good as the good stuff. Same goes for Prince.
Seemingly every REM album is a proclaimed return to form by someone, even the really bad ones, to the extent it’s become a cliche and no one ever believes it. It’s that combination of hope, vague desperation and prolonged disappointment over several years – I suspect that the Arctic Monkeys are heading for mid-career like that for people who like that sort of thing. Jay-Z’s probably well into this kind of pattern as well.
I suspect Neil Young is the best answer to this question in that he genuinely does have periods of being dull as ditchwater or batshit terrible and will then suddenly release an album that’s as good as his best ones. But then the people proclaiming this probably hate Trans and are therefore NOT TO BE TRUSTED.
Certainly Woody Allen is frequently proclaimed to be back, although I suspect he hasn’t made a film that’s genuinely worthwhile since Sweet And Lowdown some 12 years ago. Can’t swear to that, because I haven’t seen all the films in between, but those I have seen have been mostly atrocious (hence my avoiding the others).
@Mark M, 10. You may be right, but I guess I regard Match Point (2005) as a significant uptick compared to the positively angering/unwatchables that came just before it, and I gather (it’s not out down under yet) Midnight in Paris (2011) is a lot more fun than anything else Allen has done recently.
Looking back over Allen’s filmography now, though, I do see that some of my memories are a little distorted: I *detested* Shadows and Fog (1992) at the time and it’s coded in my memory as being part of a huge slump for Allen. But Husbands and Wives (which I loved) was the same year, and Manhattan Murder Mystery (pretty good) was the next year so I’ve evidently misremembered. Similarly I tend to think of the mid/late ’90s for Allen as being a wasteland (‘The Deconstructing Harry Years’) before Sweet and Lowdown, but that leaves out Everyone Says I Love You which I remember thinking was pretty decent and occasionally great (the Goldie Hawn bits). There’s something about Allen’s bad films that makes the experience of seeing them loom inordinately large in memory!
Dottie West
Merle Haggard
LL Cool J
The Hold Steady
(Actually, the Hold Steady is something of a prediction. And I’m only including them ’cause Lifter Puller quoted LL.)
Adele
Cher Lloyd
OK, now I’m just making noise. But New Morning was definitely proclaimed a return to form in its day, and so was Planet Waves (though the proclamations were softer), then Blood On The Tracks was, with clamor, then even Slow Train Coming received some return celebration; after that there’s a decade where people forgot to decide Dylan was returning to form, then there was Time Out Of Mind, which was proclaimed the best since [choose a favorite previous return to form], which one P&Jer even said beat everything since Highway 61 Revisited.
(But I have a friend who fell for Dylan in 1987, “widely regarded as his worst year,” she says cheerfully. Her favorite all-time is Street Legal; she doesn’t care as much about the stuff prior to Planet Waves. I’m sure she’d have an altogether different account of his comings and goings.)
Yes, we said Dylan because he’s been making records for 50 years and making the occasional record generally received as bad for 40, so he has the scope for plenty of RTFs. But he’s never fallen into the “perpetual RTF” zone which REM or latterday Bowie have.
(Did any of the “Judas!” crowd feel anything he did was a return to form, I wonder?)
You forgot Oh Mercy, definitely proclaimed as a Return To Form in some quarters.
One person unmentioned here but mentioned in the pub is Elvis Costello – I don’t think his new records get paid much attention to now, but for a while he was a repeat Returner To Form, helped by having a variety of different forms he might conceivably return to.
Well, I’d say that Dylan ’71 through ’76 may be the gold standard in unrelenting returns to form that people can’t prevent themselves from intensely believing in or disbelieving, but yes, after that people didn’t care as much. So – to go meta here – I doubt that his later periods of returning to form ever returned to the form of that period of his returning to form. But I’m not sure anyone else’s did either, though I was too young to pay attention to Billie Holiday’s returns to form. Also never paid much attention to Radiohead after “Creep,” but perhaps they belong in this discussion. And we should certainly stay attuned to Lil Wayne.
I wonder if an average Idol/X-Factor season allows performers to act out the “return to form” form in miniature.
(So actually it isn’t only Dylan’s making records for fifty years that’s crucial, though that’s a help, but that people cared so much about Dylan 1965. And it’s not the occasional record received as bad but the perception that his talent rapidly walked off a cliff, with some people making various ongoing attempts at revisionism afterwards. Of course, other artists mentioned and unmentioned fit that walking-off-a-cliff category too, but not all of them got revisionists. Did Ray Davies? Jefferson Starship? Did anyone speak up for Elvis’s ’70s?)
Frankie Valli.
One of the things that Dylan, REM and Woody Allen* (and Neil Young) have in common is that they’ve kept cranking out material on a regular basis long, long after the period when they were widely perceived to have mattered. So that unlike, say, Scott Walker, the bulk of the work of these four belongs to what be categorised as their ‘late period’ (in that sense they’re a bit like Monet or indeed Picasso).
*If we’re talking prolific movie directors, then Robert Altman had his share of “ooh, he’s back… oh, hang on…” periods.
Woody Allen was the obvious film analog in the pub, though more about proclaimed return to form rather than actual. Prolific is important, and even directors who have gone significantly off the boil (say Scorsese, Coppola, Ridley Scott), are given enough kudos for their early work that a bad film is seen as an aberation rather than the norm. I think someone like Stephen Frears has less of a auteur tag, so his good ones could be tagged returns to form, but then an awful lot of his good films seem to end up being credited to anyone but him.
As with the Elvis Costello comparison, often starting off with patchy form is the way to go. I can see someone trying to RETURN TO FORM Tim Burton without really noting there wasn’t much form to start off with.
Robert Altman’s a very good call.
Great challenge – one in which I failed completely, although after looking at the comments I concur – the Bee Gees is a good call. (I’m with 23 Daves on ‘You Win Again’)
The longevity required to generate a number of ‘returns to form’ narrows it down and prompts the opposite question also: which artists have been given the most long-term leeway – based on great earlier works – without any noticeable ‘return to form’?
Bowie.
In answer to Jonny B’s question that is.
The secondary question is whether when people say ‘return to form’, they mean ‘going back to what we know they can actually do’. That’s certainly the case (regularly) with Elvis Costello – ‘at least if he’s back with the Attractions he’s not making another chamber music album’. Or indeed Lou Reed’s New York (an album title, indeed, that pledged a reversion to home territory in both the geographical and stylistic uses of the term).
Of course, this can be a false promise – there’s many a truly rotten album in the vague approximation of an earlier beloved style, and I’ll argue long and hard that The Aviator is a far, far better movie than The Departed.
Not with me you wouldn’t. Or at least we’d agree so we would probably move on to lacing daisies in each others hair.
In literature it seems a given that after a while people go off the boil a touch (or mine the same seam constantly). But even there people like Stephen King can get the return to form tag just for writing something that has a vague smell of horror, or sci fi. I always got the sense that John Updike books were often labelled as returns to form, which they often weren’t.
The other one mentioned on Friday not mentioned yet here is Morrissey and Bruce Springsteen. Which makes me think that artists, to be regular return to formers, probably need a large proportion of their fanbase to be obsessives willing to see the best in everything. And music reviewers to boot.
sheep from goats time: nick cave
Madonna. Kylie.
Rolling Stones? Beggar’s Banquet, Some Girls, Steel Wheels, A Bigger Bang at least – maybe every album since Steel Wheels.
Elton John maybe, as he’s cranked out enough records, often harking back to the ‘classic’ sound (re 20). A Single Man, Too Low For Zero, Reg Strikes Back, Made In England, Songs From The West Coast, The Captain and the Kid…
wld buy another Costello/Brodsky album ahead of any Imposters record
Nick Cave is curious bcz his only real “return to form” comes after one of his most critically acclaimed periods! Moatman’s Balls/No More Shall We Fart are horribly snoozesome up-his-arse tediumfests, that were wildly praised for the sensitive piano songwriting balladry. BOREdry, morelike*.
This, and his general longevity and lack of interest in stagnating, means that the Abattoir Blues/Lyre Of Orpheus double came out as a “return to form” in terms of using the Bad Seeds as a band, having interesting arrangements and whatnot, but his new audience didn’t give a rats and so it kind of disappeared.
The longevity and shifting audiences also interestingly mean that the Grinderman/Lazarus/Grinderman period hasn’t been met by a superannuated early-mid ’80s audience rapturously welcoming his RETURN TO angry, noisy music FORM, but more being bemused by this strange new direction.
*The Good Son? The bad album. The Ship Song? etc etc…
@9 Yes Prince has got a charge sheet as long as your arm in this area, to the extent that reviews of his albums (when they have been reviewed at all) over the past two decades almost always felt the need to acknowledge it, by saying something like “this is not the return to form we’ve all been waiting for….”
Prince is an interesting one, though, because the current critical consensus seems to be that he really has returned to form, but only in live performance. There have been a number of reviews along the lines of “I have’t heard anything since Batman, and I wouldn’t listen to the last five albums if you paid me to. But he does put on a fantastic show.”
has rod stewart ever had a return to form? he was suddenly all over the place as a lad icon [shudder] in the mid nineties and is kind of a national treasure these days but i’m prety sure no one was ever talking up his latest album much.
#28 – RE Nick Cave – I liked ‘No More’ and the like, then went on to utterly love ‘Abattoir Blues’. Probably helped that I hadn’t really heard his early stuff, which I’ve now gone back to.
#21/22 – Pete – along with The Who IMHO.
Cliff Richard?!
If we stick to recorded material, I’d probably rule out Prince, not because he hasn’t had better and worse periods followed by better periods(which he clearly has), but because of his general, almost unabated tendency, for much of his career, to exercise far too little quality control or editing, and to release excessive quantities of material, meaning that, even when he was absolutely on top form, it was still necessary to do a fair bit of sorting wheat from chaff.
Not enough counting on this comments thread: viz if acclaimed artist x makes two lousy records then three good ones is that ONE or THREE returns to form. Surely the “most” returns to forms = the most up-and-diwn like a yo-yo?
Also koganbot is right when he points out — without saying it out loud — that there’s something very questionable about the kind of artist we are on the whole holding this accolade back for…
joan jett <—
Paul Weller:
1978 – All Mod Cons
1993 – WildWood
2008 – 22 Dreams
Very good/exceptional albums after bouts of mediocrity.
“something very questionable about the kind of artist” — er yes what i in fact mean is “something very questionable about the very narrow range of KINDS of artist”
(and by questionable i probably actually just mean INTERESTING and worth exploring)
The choice of Weller is backed up by stringent internet research into Britain’s leading exponent of returns to form:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Aqthemusic.com+%22return+to+form%22
^^^actual internet science at last (.feat.THE FUTUREHEADS)
Re 34 – And how to assess the re-evaluations that happened between releases is also very important. “Black Tie White Noise” was hailed as RTF for Bowie at the time, and then quickly became rather less hailed.
Which meant that “Outside” could also be an RTF. And so on, but were those both right? Both wrong? One of them only?
Beastie Boys
@35. Hang on, The Jam’s first single was in 1977 – a year’s a bit quick to find form, lose it then regain it, doncha think?
@37. Checking that link, Q cites Massive Attack’s recent work as a possible RTF, but fans don’t see it that way (anymore than Portishead’s fans do with their stuff). 100th Window felt a bit odds-and-ends-ish (hence unlikely to garner any new fans) but was otherwise a fine record (assuming one liked MA in the first place). MA’s principal issue is their slowness not their wild inconsistency which I take it is what normally prompts RTF observations.
Thinking some more about RTF ideas…. I think it’s basically a sporting (maybe even a race-horsing) idea that only fully makes sense when there’s a pretty singular dimension along which output gets measured (ideally something as simple as ‘time around a track’). In performance arts where aging is a real factor – so that even if you in some sense have a RTF then you won’t be doing anything like what you did earlier – then the number of dimensions along which one’s measuring form to enable comparisons explodes. I find film directors easier to think about in RTF terms than film actors for this reason (i.e., because it’s easier to think of them as always doing the same thing). Musicians tend to be an interestingly muddled middle case – they’re more like directors than actors at least in some ways, but not in all. It feels to me that as though we do salute Neil Young or Marianne Faithful or the Stones or whomever for figuring out some way to gracefully grow old in a very public, youth-worshipping medium in roughly the same way we do for Michael Caine or Mirren or Angelica Huston or Hackman without burdening them with any simple notion of form they may once have had and now must try to return to, etc..
@36 Good point. Dylan rules the RTF league because he invented the type of artist who is allowed an RTF: serious, album-based, self-expressive, capable of progress and growth.
Elvis had an RTF, but only after Dylan made it possible.
It’s all totally rockist, of course.
Exceptions? Bobby Womack with ‘The Poet’ and ‘Poet 2′, maybe, which was a Soul RTF. But he fit all the criteria for seriousness, album-centrednes (album-centricity?), etc.
As robotsdancingalone suggests, Kylie is a good one. The RTF panel apparently makes an exception for her because of sentimental affection for ‘Neighbours’, or something.
Re 41: “I find film directors easier to think about in RTF terms than film actors for this reason (i.e., because it’s easier to think of them as always doing the same thing).”
That’s a brilliantly concise one-line way of saying what I was trying to say in this now horribly dated piece.
so why don’t we want to apply form to singles and singles bands like the jam (who made just one good-ish LP ever, so never even reached “album form”)? there was — especially with louis armstrong — something of a watch on, from the 30s, to see if/when he’d produce work again that matched the hot fives and the hot sevens (which periodically he did): rockwrite is bad at seeing and knowing that many of its shapes and habits preceded it in jazzwrite, but some of them surely did
i think it’s less about “seriousness” per se, than about the achievement of some quality assumed not to usually inhere in the (popular?) art-form the artists under regard are working in (sustained aesthetic value?) Doesn’t RTF also imply the stamp of approval of “return to relative popularity”? i feel there’s an implied paradox involved; it’s a validation of the overall project rock critics are involved in, because it affirms that value and accessibility and public recognition of both can all (sometimes) combine
what about novelists? painters? poets? (i don’t mean, do they or don’t they have peaks and troughs — ans = yes obv — but do we respond in the same way?)
In actual salaried music crit speak RTF usually means “give us an interview.”
haha a desire which certainly reflects perceived return to popularity
except there are perhaps also artists whose face on the cover might depress readership? bobby brown on the MM? (cilla black on the NME was notoriously the best-selling issue of the decade, by an enormous margin)
@45 Or “I’ve been taken to Antigua to hear it”?
“The Brothers Karamazov” was decidedly a RTF (and widely recognized as such) after the thin and excessively lengthy gruel of “The Adolescent” (a.k.a. “A Raw Youth” a.k.a. “An Accidental Family” a.k.a. doubtlessly other translations or interepretations of the title none of which have stuck so minor is the book in comparison with the author’s other major works)
Re: The Jam @ #41: Second album (This is the modern world) got panned as a lazy retread of the first and the band were reduced to supporting Blue Oyster Cult on tour in America. All Mod Cons was hailed not so much as a return to form, but of the flowering of Weller’s youthful talent.
Most proclaimed RTFs: Oasis. But only by Noel Gallagher. Every album was preceded by an interview promising the best album since Morning Glory (later this was backdated even further to Definitely Maybe once everyone decided that was the only half decent Oasis album) and everyone wondered how long before they dropped this embarassing charade and got on with cranking out the old hits for the fans.
No more RTFs for them: http://remhq.com/news_story.php?id=1446
This is enthralling, and I can’t keep up.
Right at the beginning, Tom says “Applied to pop, this question … proves surprisingly complex”, and yeah, it does. At #44, there sure is “an implied paradox” in pop.
Essentially, I think this is because in Pop we try to embrace two marginally separate meanings of “form” simultaneously. One meaning expected high quality (in sportspeak “in form”) and one meaning a series by which we’d evaluate what to expect (in sportspeak “form guide”).
In other fields, the “form” sometimes includes all the peaks and troughs, sometimes not – but it’s easily understood, often implicit; in pop, it tends to mean something vaguely like (paraphrasing much of what’s upstream) ‘doing more of the type of work that this artist has already done well, critically and commercially’* .
The paradox (for me) is manifold and it’s a itch I want to scratch. Really, I can’t though. This is longer than an average post as it is.
I summarise, thus, apologetically aware of a similarity to others, esp #44: Every few years an artist of long-standing will be permitted by the media to have new material taken extra seriously*, and it will be propelled to unusually high sales through media interest. Far from returning to form, this defies form – bluntly, it reverses decline. Except, of course, for the fact that permission to defy form is the new form. So when the sales decline again following an album lauded as a RTF, that’s the real return to form. But no-one ever says so. That would be too rude.
And yes it is (almost?) always blokes, and always albums:
Costello, Neil Young, Bowie, Elton John, Neil Diamond, Dylan, McCartney, Duran Duran, Ozzy Osbourne…
* see #45. It means interviews.
huh Duran Duran, that implies their having a form to begin with!
RTF to me has always sounded like the sort of thing one says about a racehorse, which may say something about The Industry.
Racehorses but also criminals! “This scrote has form as long as your arm, let’s feel his collar” etc.
In fact come to think of it “Let’s feel his collar” means “We need to interview him”
From a literature point of view, the return to form I am most looking forward to is William Boyd, whose output has been on the whole really rather great, and then turned out the astonishingly poor “state of London” novel Ordinary Thunderstorms. So one of the tensions within return to form is in creating the great feeling of discovering someone great only for them to go off the boil. Does the talent run out, does the material/novelty run out or does just time pass.
Can you return to form when you have jumped the shark?
@41 and @43 – is this why people are so annoyed by Stephen Soderbergh on the one hand and David Gordon Green on the other (the latter pulling the great trick of indie auteur darling moving to grossout comedies!)
Re 56: I think people are baffled as much as annoyed by Soderbergh overall, although there is a feeling that the Ocean films are tremendously lazy (I find if you wait until they turn up on TV and catch them half by accident, they’re reasonably enjoyable). But he gets as much stick for some of his more off-beam projects… I’m not sure, though, whether there’s a clear sense of what the director-aware audience would want from him – apart maybe something a bit more like Out Of Sight.
With DGG, it’s much clearer (and more like an indie band stumbling into the mainstream). He turned up with such a distinctive look/vibe – Malick goes to modern America’s forgotten rusty places that it did seem a bit jarring when he joined the Apatow conveyor belt (although he did try a serious film with proper-ish movie stars in between, just nobody saw it). I sort of enjoyed Pineapple Express, but it’s not a great film, and Your Highness in its way is as much a product of personal vision as George Washington – it just also happens to be dismally unfunny. I think the problem is that not so much that he’s making gross-out comedies, it’s that unlike, say, Greg Mottola, who also went from micro-budget indie director to Apatow employee (over a longer time span), he’s not very good at mainstream movies.
Hang on, The Jam’s first single was in 1977 – a year’s a bit quick to find form, lose it then regain it, doncha think?
Not necessarily. If the moment matters in a particular way, and the performer matters, then a year can be an eon.
Wasn’t paying attention to the Jam, but it truly did matter to me that the third and fourth X-Ray Spex singles, and the album, live up to the first two. And they didn’t.
Wasn’t aware of making the point that Lord Dubdob says I was. And (@42), I don’t think that being album-based or perceived as serious in a standard way is what makes Dylan eligible. Without “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Like A Rolling Stone,” he isn’t part of this discussion (even if I may or may not have been even more moved by “Visions Of Johanna” and “Sooner Or Later”). Dylan’s eligibility comes from his seeming to have reinvented the world, reinvented what matters, what it looks like and what it sounds like. The need for a Return To Form is a need for him to confirm the reinvention, or to reinvent anew. Dylan exacerbated this by periodically turning his back on his achievements and his audience. In the ’70s, not only did we get Dylan’s supposed Returns To Form, we got new Dylans as well (Springsteen and G. Parker and Elvis Costello merely being the most prominent; anyone else remember Elliott Murphy?) (btw, for those who believe in transmigration of souls, I’d say that Dylan’s most emphatic return to form was The Marshall Mathers LP). So something needs to be perceived as at stake beyond “artistic regeneration” and “impressive mastery” and ilk.
Of the performers I’ve mentioned, the one I’d link Dylan to, in regard to how people needed him to return to form, are Cher Lloyd and Elvis. Elvis’s most famous Return To Form was his 1968 NBC-TV special, which is now known, tellingly, as the Comeback Special (and which I paid absolutely no attention to when it happened, don’t recall even knowing it had happened, which tells you how ignorable Elvis was to teens in ’68; more ignorable then than now). Cher Lloyd came on as a gawky teen with attitude and style and almost no chops, and she gave two surprising (and I’d say her Shakespear’s Sister cover was stunning) performances – the urchin finding transcendence – seems clueless as to what to do next, and is finding all sorts of ways to fall on her face. So a Return To Form is both desired and plausible, given how implausible she was in the first place.
As for actual returns to form, for which I consider artistic regeneration and impressive mastery quite sufficient, the Bee Gees and Neil Young are credible choices; but since I never paid persistent ongoing attention to their work, further detail would be welcome. Van Morrison might qualify as well, but I paid him even less attention. Miles Davis? Brian Wilson? Randy Newman? Willie Nelson? For all I know, Reba McEntire may be hitting her peak (which is to say I only know a smattering of her previous output; I’m surprised to like her recent album as much as I do, given that at one point I compared her voice to a frightwig).
@58 “the one I’d link Dylan to” = the ones I’d link Dylan to
Also, “always seem[ing] to have a return to form with every damn album according to at least one or two critics” and “seemingly every REM album is a proclaimed return to form by someone, even the really bad ones, to the extent it’s become a cliché and no one ever believes it” are not remotely equivalent to “gets five-star reviews in Rolling Stone and Spin and wins Pazz & Jop in a runaway.” So, reversing what I said upthread about the Fall, the reason Dylan seems the obvious choice, at least in proclaimed returns to form, is that he’s probably the right choice in proclaimed returns to form.
I don’t have a horse in this race. I doubt that I’ve heard more than three songs from Time Out Of Mind, though I heard the two subsequent albs and threw a few P&J points at one of them. I also have never heard a full R.E.M. album (though did squeeze “Losing My Religion” onto my 1991 singles ballot), don’t even remember what the last Bowie album I heard in full was (Lodger? Scary Monsters?), and haven’t at all kept up with the discussion about R.E.M. and Bowie. But a seeming precondition for our perpetually being able to find someone to declare an R.E.M. or Bowie return to form is that it be surrounded by widespread disbelief and indifference. I realize that there is an alternative: what made Dylan’s ’70s return-to-form threepeat of New Morning, Planet Waves (with Before The Flood being the return’s supposed confirmation), and Blood On The Tracks (ditto for Desire) extraordinary is that it necessitated that, each of the latter two times, some of the proclaimers discount (or admit that in their heart they’d never believed) the previous return(s) to form that they’d endorsed. So there’s the incredible need for the return, and then the dawning realization that, no, this wasn’t quite the buzz we wanted. Which isn’t to say that everyone was on board for the return. I remember a review of New Morning that lamented that Dylan wasn’t an amoeba hence, unlike a band, he couldn’t break up. And the only Dylan album to actually win Pazz & Jop in the ’70s was The Basement Tapes, recorded circa 1967. But the return-to-form albums came with an accompanying discourse of “We’ve got Dylan back” (though Planet Waves came after a long layoff from recording and touring, so that was part of the return too).
Whereas the accolades for Time Out Of Mind were from people who hadn’t expected or needed a great Dylan album.
Those are the only Dylan returns to form that really register, the three in the ’70s and Time Out Of Mind, with Love And Theft confirming and building on the latter. I still think those returns beat any other artist’s in the category Proclaimed Returns To Form – though from what TriffidFarm @39 says about Black Tie White Noise, it’s possible that Bowie had a ’90s string to match Dylan’s ’70s. I wasn’t paying attention if he did, but that hardly means he didn’t. But that’s what it would take for Bowie and R.E.M. to really be in the running. Of course, artists with a specialized market or with fanbases that are socially or geographically distant from me might also be in the running, but obviously I don’t know who they are.
(Cher Lloyd’s week three was a return to form after a weak week two, if I remember correctly. Her new single, unfortunately, is another belly flop.)
Beastie Boys
not sure that anyone has ever accused them of making a return to form, ever
Koganbot @ 59: I don’t think anyone’s ever claimed a return to form for Brian Wilson: 9 groundbreaking and increasingly complex albums in four years, before the age of 25 is hard form to return to. More that people are happy to hear him sing just about competently over an (admittedly spot-on) session band hits since he’s been through some awful shit.
Ps Dylan is cheating these days by playing the old songs really badly (except Simple Twist of Fate) and the new ones really well. Obviously in a deliberate attempt to queer the pitch.
He’s also cheating by creating really good bands. I’d say bass and drums on Love And Theft and Modern Times decisively beat the bass and drums on “Like A Rolling Stone.” So if I were judging solely on bass and drum…
(When Sony was promoting its Soundtrack For A Century series it had a promo CD that made the mistake of putting “Like A Rolling Stone” right before Sly’s “I Want To Take You Higher,” making “Like A Rolling Stone” sound dead in the water – which it isn’t, and for rocking harder emotionally (and intellectually too, for that matter) I’ll take it over anything in Sly’s oeuvre. But sometimes the body wants more than emotion and insight.)
But a point I don’t want to get lost is that there isn’t a difference in kind between wanting a Dylan or Young to return to form and wanting a John Shanks or a Timbaland or a Frank Farian or a Lukasz Gottwald to return to form, or a Kelly or a Britney or an Ashlee.
@44 some quality assumed not to usually inhere in the (popular?) art-form the artists under regard are working in
But certainly Louis and Elvis and Dylan etc. created our idea of what is possible in the art forms, and once those possibilities are there, they can’t be withdrawn – at the most will only fade or go into remission. Don’t know enough about Korean music, but I’d wager that acts like Seo Taiji in the ’90s and 2NE1 right now are living in a space of possibility partly created by Dylan and Michael Jackson, and that here in the U.S. the commentariat underestimated the extent to which groups like *NSync and the Backstreet Boys were living in such a space (and ’90s Michael Jackson was living in a space partly created by New Edition, like the Backstreet Boys and *NSync were)(btw, to complicate the story further, Teddy Riley is now producing records in Korea).
And people underestimate the extent to which Dylan was like a Fabian or an Anka even while cutting the ground out from under the Fabians and Ankas.
A bit late for this, I know, but are we agreed that the *genuine* return to form, as opposed to the phony one proclaimed by deluded or venal critics, is a vanishingly rare event?
Most careers seem to follow a pretty regular arc, in which the musicians work to master their craft and reach some form of artistic peak, after which their lives are dedicated to tending a dwindling flame until it gutters out altogether. (if they are lucky, the peak of creative achievement coincides with their period of critical acclaim and commercial success, and it’s an imperial phase.) In some mournful cases – Arctic Monkeys, Pavement, Pink Floyd – a band will emerge fully-formed with their first album, and the whole of the rest of their careers will be about managing decline.
So while the single-level RTF may be pretty common – Girls Aloud coming back off a duff run with ‘Biology’, for example – the album-level ones almost never happen. Elvis ’68, certainly,’LA Woman’, the Bee Gees going disco (although that was not so much a return to form as a re- flowering of genius in another idiom), maybe ‘Rust Never Sleeps’. But not many others. What am I missing?
@ed, 69. Pink Floyd emerged fully-formed, and it’s managed decline thereafter? I don’t see/hear that at all. I’d say that they had a paradigmatic career arc: a couple of albums figuring out what they want to do and can do, followed by an imperial period from Meddle to Wish you were Here, followed by decline/feuding/bitterness/recrimination/partial successes at best thereafter.
@70 You’re right, actually. Pink Floyd is a bad example for the point I was trying to make. As you say, there was a huge amount of experimentation up to about DSOTM or WYWH, and it was only then that they really found a niche and decided to stick with it. I still think the first album is their *best* album, but that’s a different point.
Another late thought: isn’t it the case that almost all the people who have genuine RsTF are the ones who move between a variety of styles and genres? Dylan, Prince, Bowie, Young: it’s certainly true for all of them. Sometimes a change of style revives flagging inspiration; sometimes it is experimentation that caused the dip in form, and artists renew themselves by returning to what they do best. Either way, it seems easier to manage an RTF that way than by just plugging away at the same patch of ground.
Sparks anyone?
At least two, maybe as many as four, “RTF”s although one (No1 In Heaven) seems to have been a false start.
There is a tendency, probably in my example and certainly in many of those above, of conflating a “return to form” with a simple “change of direction.” While not mutually exclusive, these are not the same thing.
Did anyone mention Paul McCartney? (solo, obv).
I think there is more of a case to be made for the argument that Macca has had more returns FROM form (or at any rate, to varying degrees of crapness) than almost anyone else.
Although I suppose that is the inescapable flip side of this sort of claim…
I would cheekily argue that “form” is the one element of music-making that PM has possibly always been weakest at; he retained a genuinely original ear for startling moments in songs — textual mainly — long after he stopped bothering to think of ways to string them together (as anything except a string); and long after he worked with people who advised him to omit the dull or sententious passages from the exact same strings.
#73. Strictly in answer the question: Yeah, I mentioned McCartney, at #51.
textual s/b textural obv (in this ever-changing world in which we live in)
Ah, i was scratchin my head at the thought that PMac had original texts in his songs, whereas most seem to regard most of his lyrics post Let-it-be as ‘will-this-do?-yeah-course”..
As you were..
@72 “Return to form /= change of direction”.
Yes, but the two often seem to go together, don’t they? Bowie reanimates himself by trying something new. Prince gets fired up again by bringing back the funk.
No-one’s mentioned the opposite. What about artists who nail it so right on their first go that they spend the rest of their careers playing catch up?
Wu Tang Clan
Jesus and Mary Chain
and, on some days, I’d say, The Who
Tommy, you can add Oasis to that list.
I thought about Oasis, but, while I much prefer Definitely Maybe (and it seems to be the only Oasis album with any critical reputation left) it was Morning Glory that really delivered the tunes the milkman could whistle, which was what Noel G always said he was about. Of course once milkmen start whistling your tunes, critical backlash is never far behind. Critics hate milkmen. Next time you take coffee with a critic, take a look in his cup. Black as the Ace of Spades I’ll bet.
Obviously, everything Oasis have done since 1998 is toss.
This article on influential artist(e)s with small bodies of work seems marginally relevant:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/short-paths-to-the-canon-22-influential-artists-wi,63030/
@80 are you saying that the Wu shot their bolt with 36 chambers? I wouldn’t agree with that at all.
For one thing, their imperial phase was surely 95/96 with tical/ironman/liquid swords/cuban lynx, which is the single greatest run of albums ever put out by anybody (who else? dylan’s 64-66 explosion, I might give you) and was followed only a few months later by QUADRUPLE ALBUM Wu Tang Forever which, okay, isn’t exactly totally without filler but is largely pretty great and has got stuff like ‘a better tomorrow’, triumph’ and ‘impossible’, which no one has ever caught up with. For another (and here’s where I might lose people) i’ve never quite got 36 Chambers and think that 2000’s The W is probably the best Wu-group album overall – Careful! Hollow Bones! I Can’t go to Sleep! Gravel Pit! (though I concede that pretty much nobody else thinks this).
While I’m asserting and not proving, I’ll also mention that I saw the Wu live a couple of months ago for the first time and they were spectacularly good – not only much better than I expected, but better in a totally different way. I was thinking i’d get something all crabbed and murky and introverted like the records but it was instead a brilliantly good natured showbiz celebration – though I’m not sure I’m ready to proclaim a return to form just yet (and er, yes, *of course* some of them didn’t turn up – rza, ghostface and inspectah deck, i think).