Rebel Rebel

Author: Chris O'Leary
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1780997132
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
David Bowie: every single song. Everything you want to know, everything you didn't know. David Bowie remains mysterious and unknowable, despite 45 years of recording and performing. His legacy is roughly 600 songs, which range from psychedelia to glam rock to Philadelphia soul, from avant-garde instrumentals to global pop anthems. Rebel Rebel catalogs Bowie's songs from 1964 to 1976, examines them in the order of their composition and recording, and digs into what makes them work. Rebel Rebel is an in-depth look at Bowie's early singles and album tracks, unreleased demos, session outtakes and cover songs. The book traces Bowie's literary, film and musical influences and the evolution of his songwriting. It also shows how Bowie exploited studio innovations, and the roles of his producers and supporting musicians, especially major collaborators like Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Mick Ronson. This book places Bowie's music in the context of its era. Readers will discover the links between Kubrick's 2001 and "Space Oddity"; how A Clockwork Orange inspired "Suffragette City". The pages are a trip through Bowie's various lives as a young man in Swinging London, a Tibetan Buddhist, a disillusioned hippie, a rock god, and a Hollywood recluse. With a cast of thousands, including John Lennon, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Cher.

Forever Stardust

Author: Will Brooker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786731533
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Most of the many books about David Bowie track his artistic 'changes' chronologically throughout his career. This book, uniquely, examines Bowie's 'sameness': his recurring themes, images, motifs and concepts as an artist, across all his creative work, from lyrics and music through to costumes, storyboards, films, plays and painting.To be published on Bowie's 70th birthday, Forever Stardust looks at Bowie's work not as a linear evolution through calendar time, to his tragic death in January 2016, but as a matrix, a dialogue, a network of ideas that echo back and forth across the five decades of his career, interacting with each other and with the surrounding culture. It explores Bowie's creative output as a whole, tracing the repetitions and obsessions that structure his work, discovering what they tell us about Bowie in all his forms, from Ziggy Stardust to David Jones.David Bowie challenged cultural expectations from the early 1970s until his final masterpiece, Blackstar. Forever Stardust offers a new understanding of this remarkable & significant artist.

One-Track Mind

Author: Asif Siddiqi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000640167
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
The song remains the most basic unit of modern pop music. Shaped into being by historical forces—cultural, aesthetic, and technical—the song provides both performer and audience with a world marked off by a short, discrete, and temporally demarcated experience. One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song brings together 16 writers to weigh in on 16 iconic tracks from the history of modern popular music. Arranged chronologically in order of release of the tracks, and spanning nearly five decades, these essays zigzag across the cultural landscape to present one possible history of pop music. There are detours through psychedelic rock, Afro-pop, Latin pop, glam rock, heavy metal, punk, postpunk, adult contemporary rock, techno, hip-hop, and electro-pop here. More than just deep histories of individual songs, these essays all expand far beyond the track itself to offer exciting and often counterintuitive histories of transformative moments in popular culture. Collectively, they show the undiminished power of the individual pop song, both as distillations of important flashpoints and, in their afterlives, as ghostly echoes that persist undiminished but transform for succeeding generations. Capitalism and its principal good, capital, help us frame these stories, a fact that should surprise no one given the inextricable relationship between art and capitalism established in the twentieth century. At the root, readers will find here a history of pop with unexpected plot twists, colorful protagonists, and fitting denouements.

David Bowie's Diamond Dogs

Author: Glenn Hendler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501336606
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 163

Book Description
After his breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust and before his U.S. pop hits "Fame" and "Golden Years" David Bowie produced a dark and difficult concept album set in a post-apocalyptic "Hunger City" populated by post-human "mutants." Diamond Dogs includes the great glam anthem "Rebel Rebel" and utterly unique songs that combine lush romantic piano and nearly operatic singing with scratching, grungy guitars, creepy, insidious noises, and dark, pessimistic lyrics that reflect the album's origins in a projected Broadway musical version of Orwell's 1984 and Bowie's formative encounter with William S. Burroughs. In this book Glenn Hendler shows that each song on Diamond Dogs shifts the ground under you as you listen, not just by changing in musical style, but by being sung by a different "I" who directly addresses a different "you." Diamond Dogs is the product of a performer at the peak of his powers but uncomfortable with the rock star role he had constructed. All of the album's influences looked to Bowie like ways of escaping not just the Ziggy role, but also the constraints of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. These are just some of the reasons many Bowie fans rate Diamond Dogs his richest and most important album of the 1970s.

BOWIE

Author: Michael Allred
Publisher: Insight Comics
ISBN: 1683834488
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
Inspired by the legendary David Bowie, BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns, & Moonage Daydreams is the original graphic memoir of the great Ziggy Stardust! This graphic novel chronicles the rise of Bowie's career from obscurity to fame; and paralleled by the rise and fall of his alter ego as well as the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust. As the Spiders from Mars slowly implode, Bowie wrestles with his Ziggy persona. The outcome of this internal conflict will change not only David Bowie, but also, the world. MASSIVELY SUCCESSFUL GRAPHIC NOVEL OF 2020: A New York Times Best Seller CELEBRITY COLLABORATION: Foreword by Neil Gaiman SUPERSTAR ARTIST: Illustrated by Michael Allred CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED! "The Allreds’ art and love for Bowie’s work makes this one stand apart." – Entertainment Weekly STAR-STUDDED: Read of Bowie’s encounters with Elton John, Mark Bolan, The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, and more

David Bowie and Film

Author: Stephen Glynn
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303113401X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
This book constitutes the first monograph dedicated to an academic analysis of David Bowie’s appearances in film. Through close textual analysis together with production and reception histories, Bowie’s ‘silver screen’ career is explored in full. The book covers performance documentaries such as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, star vehicles ranging from the eulogised The Man Who Fell to Earth to the excoriated Just a Gigolo, plus roles from the horror chic of The Hunger and cult fantasy of Labyrinth to the valiant high-brow Baal and vainglorious high-budget Absolute Beginners, ending with Bowie as Bowie in Bandslam and others as ‘Bowie’ in Velvet Goldmine and Stardust. Alongside showing his willingness to experiment (and at times fail) across a variety of genres, this study investigates Bowie’s performative style that, while struggling to accommodate the requirements of cinematic realism, fits more harmoniously with alternative production codes and aesthetics. More broadly, by exploring the commercial, socio-cultural and ideological significance of Bowie on film, the book demonstrates how notions of gender, sexuality and identity formation, plus commodity and cultural capital, function and fluctuate in contemporary society.

Silhouettes And Shadows

Author: Adam Steiner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493065653
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
An avant-garde pop album rich with tension and fear, 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) marked a pivotal point in David Bowie’s career. Standing at the bleeding edge of the new decade between the experimental Berlin Trilogy (Low, Heroes, and Lodger) and 1983’s wildly successful Let’s Dance, it was here Bowie sought to bury the ghosts of his past and the golden decade of the 1970s to become a global superstar reaching millions of new fans. Featuring fresh insights and exclusive interviews with close collaborators, Adam Steiner’s Silhouettes and Shadows uncovers the studio stories, meanings behind, and secret history of Scary Monsters. Steiner gives a nuanced, memorable portrait of Bowie at a personal and professional crossroads, drawing on his own struggle with addiction, growing paranoia, and political turmoil. Despite the album’s confrontational themes, it included the hit singles “Fashion” and “Ashes to Ashes,” with Bowie riding a new wave of inspiration, from the post-punk of Joy Division, The Specials’ two-tone revolution, and the stadium synth-pop of Gary Numan. Most importantly, it marked a final goodbye to Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, and The Thin White Duke, characters and personas that had defined his career: in this rare moment, David Bowie, the costumed clown of romance, suffering, and song, let his mask slip to reveal David Jones, the man within.

The Velvet Underground

Author: Sean Albiez
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501338439
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
Though The Velvet Underground were critically and commercially unsuccessful in their time, in ensuing decades they have become a constant touchstone in art rock, punk, post-punk, indie, avant pop and alternative rock. In the 1970s and 80s Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico produced a number of works that traveled a path between art and pop. In 1993 the original band members of Reed, Cale, Morrison and Tucker briefly reunited for live appearances, and afterwards Reed, Cale and briefly Tucker, continued to produce music that travelled the idiosyncratic path begun in New York in the mid-1960s. The influence of the band and band members, mediated and promoted through famous fans such as David Bowie and Brian Eno, seems only to have expanded since the late 1960s. In 1996 the Velvet Underground were in inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, demonstrating how far the band had traveled in 30 years from an avant-garde cult to the mainstream recognition of their key contributions to popular music. In these collected essays, Pattie and Albiez present the first academic book-length collection on The Velvet Underground. The book covers a range of topics including the band's relationship to US literature, to youth and cultural movements of the 1960s and beyond and to European culture - and examines these contexts from the 1960s through to the present day.

Strange Stars

Author: Jason Heller
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612196985
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
A Hugo Award-winning author and music journalist explores the weird and wild story of when rock ’n’ roll met the sci-fi world of the 1970s As the 1960s drew to a close, and mankind trained its telescopes on other worlds, old conventions gave way to a new kind of hedonistic freedom that celebrated sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Derided as nerdy or dismissed as fluff, science fiction rarely gets credit for its catalyzing effect on this revolution. In Strange Stars, Jason Heller recasts sci-fi and pop music as parallel cultural forces that depended on one another to expand the horizons of books, music, and out-of-this-world imagery. In doing so, he presents a whole generation of revered musicians as the sci-fi-obsessed conjurers they really were: from Sun Ra lecturing on the black man in the cosmos, to Pink Floyd jamming live over the broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing; from a wave of Star Wars disco chart toppers and synthesiser-wielding post-punks, to Jimi Hendrix distilling the “purplish haze” he discovered in a pulp novel into psychedelic song. Of course, the whole scene was led by David Bowie, who hid in the balcony of a movie theater to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, and came out a changed man… If today’s culture of Comic Con fanatics, superhero blockbusters, and classic sci-fi reboots has us thinking that the nerds have won at last, Strange Stars brings to life an era of unparalleled and unearthly creativity—in magazines, novels, films, records, and concerts—to point out that the nerds have been winning all along.

We Could Be

Author: Tom Hagler
Publisher: Cassell
ISBN: 178840274X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
*** With consultant editor Tony Visconti. David Bowie's story has never been told quite like this. Tracing the star's encounters with fellow icons throughout his life, We Could Be offers a new history of Bowie, collecting 300 short stories that together paint a portrait of humour, humility, compassion, tragedy and more besides. He embarrasses himself in front of Lennon and Warhol. He saves the life of Nina Simone. He is hated by Bob Dylan. He teaches Michael Jackson the moonwalk. Individually astonishing, together these stories - including details never before revealed - build a new picture of Bowie, one which shows his vulnerability, his sense of humour, his inner diva. Exhaustively researched from thousands of sources by BBC reporter and Bowie obsessive Tom Hagler - with the guidance and memories of Bowie's long-time producer Tony Visconti - We Could Be is fascinating, comic, compelling, and a history of Bowie unlike any that has come before.