As an artist, David Bowie was widely considered a "chameleon," shedding one persona to create another and thus staying popular, relevant and compelling. In reality, Bowie was able to work with the resources around him to create something new, causing many to see him as a sort of lone artist rather than a collaborator in the creation of his own celebrity. Mid-career, Bowie began presenting himself as a figure in darkness, progressively more hidden. He required an audience for his continued celebrity but worked against that audience in the creation--or rather the destruction--of his star image. This tension is made clear in his 1995 album 1. Outside, which has him performing for an audience while simultaneously shunning them. This book explores Bowie's negotiation of his celebrity during his later career, with particular focus on 1. Outside, an album symptomatic of deep-seated societal and personal anxiety.

As an artist, David Bowie was widely considered a "chameleon," shedding one persona to create another and thus staying popular, relevant and compelling. In reality, Bowie was able to work with the resources around him to create something new, causing many to see him as a sort of lone artist rather than a collaborator in the creation of his own celebrity. Mid-career, Bowie began presenting himself as a figure in darkness, progressively more hidden. He required an audience for his continued celebrity but worked against that audience in the creation--or rather the destruction--of his star image. This tension is made clear in his 1995 album 1. Outside, which has him performing for an audience while simultaneously shunning them. This book explores Bowie's negotiation of his celebrity during his later career, with particular focus on 1. Outside, an album symptomatic of deep-seated societal and personal anxiety.

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.

"From the hoodoo-inspired sounds of Elvis Presley to the Eastern odysseys of George Harrison, from the dark dalliances of Led Zeppelin to the Masonic imagery of today's hip-hop scene, the occult has long breathed life into rock and hip-hop--and, indeed, esoteric and supernatural traditions are a key ingredient behind the emergence and development of rock and roll ... [and in this book] writer and critic Peter Bebergal illuminates this web of influences"--Amazon.com.

Already a bestselling work in Europe, "Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness" vividly portrays the unpredictable life of a loner, patriot, outlaw, and music rebel, making this unique biography a compelling read for multiple generations of graphic novel and music fans.

Over the course of her career, Barbara Stafford has established herself the preeminent scholar of the intersections of the arts and sciences, articulating new theories and methods for understanding the sublime, the mysterious, the inscrutable. Omnivorous in her research, she has published work that embraces neuroscience and philosophy, biology and culture, pinpointing connections among each discipline’s parallel concerns. Ribbon of Darkness is a monument to the scope of her work and the range of her intellect. At times associative, but always incisive, the essays in this new volume take on a distinctly contemporary purpose: to uncover the ethical force and moral aspects of overlapping scientific and creative inquiries. This shared territory, Stafford argues, offers important insights into—and clarifications of—current dilemmas about personhood, the supposedly menial nature of manual skill, the questionable borderlands of gene editing, the potentially refining value of dualism, and the limits of a materialist worldview. Stafford organizes these essays around three concepts that structure the book: inscrutability, ineffability, and intuitability. All three, she explains, allow us to examine how both the arts and the sciences imaginatively infer meaning from the “veiled behavior of matter,” bringing these historically divided subjects into a shared intellectual inquiry and imbuing them with an ethical urgency. A vanguard work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, this book will be sure to guide readers from either realm into unfamiliar yet undeniably fertile territory.

A comprehensive exploration of the final four decades of David Bowie’s musical career—covering every song he wrote, performed, or produced In Ashes to Ashes, the ultimate David Bowie expert offers a song-by-song retrospective of the legendary pop star's musical career from 1976 to 2016. Starting with Low, the first of Bowie's Berlin albums, and finishing with Blackstar—his final masterpiece released just days before his death in 2016—each song is annotated in depth and explored in essays that touch upon the song's creation, production, influences and impact.