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Daphne A. Brooks, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince" (Duke UP, 2026)
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A
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, and today I am here with Daphne A. Brooks to talk about her edited collection Black Star Rising and the Purple Rain, the sonic afterlives of David Bowie and Prince. Daphne, thanks for being here with me today on New Books Network.
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B
Thanks for having me, Rebecca.
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C
Could you start out by Talking about how this collection came to be. Thinking about Prince and David Bowie and why you wanted to sort of get this collection together.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it came together in a moment of grief 10 years ago, as many people recall. Though it's kind of startling to think that it's been a decade. David Bowie died two years after his birthday, two years after the release of his final album, the masterpiece album Black Star. Very few people knew that he was ill at the time of his passing. And when he passed, I started thinking as a faculty member here at Yale and as the co founder and the director of the Yale Black Sound and the Archive Working Group, that we should gather together some fellow travelers who have been influenced by Bowie not only as scholars of pop music criticism and public facing rock music criticism, but also scholars of critical gender studies, critical sexuality studies, visual art studies, critical race theory. I could go on and on. I just thought that we had kind of a whole generation of folks who had been influenced by Bowie as thinkers and creatives and that we'd maybe want to gather somewhere. And so we actually started thinking about pulling together, folks for just kind of a series of readings and in memoriam writings that we would produce for each other in a kind of intimate setting that would take place later that year. This is 2016. And then the idea started to grow to maybe have some kind of a tribute concert. And I kid you not, some of this comes from my past experiences and work curating public facing music events during my time at Princeton, where I taught in the faculty for 13 years. And there was a James Brown conference that I organized. And when I came to Yale, I organized an event with Jack White to celebrate the release of the Paramount Records collections in conjunction with his record label. That was in 2014. So I'd done a lot of this kind of work with popular music artists. And so we started to think, well, let's try and invite somebody. And we thought of just doing a Hail Mary and trying to invite Prince and lo and behold, and to our great devastation, Prince dies in April of 2016 as well. And then the heaviness of the dual passings led us to think on an even grander scale about really paying tribute to both of these artists and pulling together an international array of scholars and music journalists, but also curators of exhibits and popular musicians and world famous creatives to come to Yale in January 2017 on what was roughly the first anniversary of Bowie's passing, and to present work that spoke to this kind of long, as we called it, a long year of grief. And transition in popular music culture, having lost these two icons. And so the volume, which took another nine years to complete, came out of that conference and includes not only the majority of the guests who spoke and performed at the conference, but also other creatives and critics who joined the party. And I would say this, I use the word party in the sense of New Orleans jazz funeral, celebratory kind of affirmation of the gifts that they've given to us and continue to give to us as artists who transformed the landscape of popular music culture in the second half of the 20th century, the latter decades of the 20th century, as well as the 21st century.
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C
So can you talk a little bit about how these two fit together really well, right. Like these two artists, like, why this collection? Why you feel and see this collection working really well covering both of these artists?
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B
Well, one of the things that I felt very committed to doing as the editor, was to be able to think outside of the box of reproducing, merely reproducing the nevertheless important work that's been done across the decades to acknowledge how transgressive Bowie and Prince each were in terms of performing expansive gender formations and sexual identity formations, the kind of, you know, queerness of their repertoires. All of that is central to this project. But the majority of our thinkers who were involved in this effort were also really serious about paying attention to the ways in which black radical music traditions, which in a way, is redundant, since I would argue that, you know, the history of black music is a radical phenomenon given the subjugation of black peoples across the centuries in the Americas, but that that black radical music tradition informed both Prince's and Bowie's philosophies, of how they approached their expressive kind of performance and sonic repertoires, as well as their politics. And so you'll find in this volume a variety of different perspectives on the centrality of blackness to Bowie and Prince, and also the ways in which black feminisms are an important kind of methodological line of inquiry for understanding some of the more under theorized and yet completely powerful and influential ways in which they not only shape their Personas, but, you know, thought about popular music aesthetics again in the. In the late 20th century, the early 21st century, in the wake of multiple transformative freedom struggles, from the civil rights movement to black power to the LGBTQIA movements, of course, the feminist movements, that they were these two kinds of artists who absorbed all of that upheaval which was a part of their coming into consciousness, and that if we pay more attention to those multiple Freedom struggles. We can kind of hear on different frequencies what was so powerful and revolutionary, or I should maybe say transformative and radical about each of them.
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C
So before we get into kind of talking about what you're trying to do in each of the. And what the sort of thinkers, as you say, are trying to do in each of the parts, this is not just a collection of essays, which I think is really important for people to know. Right. So can you talk a little bit about the different ways in which people have contributed to this, besides just the more, I guess, quote unquote, traditional essay form that we often see in an edited volume?
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B
Absolutely. I mean, we took great care to kind of think creatively about the different ways that people could write, could engage the Bowie and Prince archives in this project. And so there are standard bearing, kind of, you know, scholarly and also public facing rock music criticism chapters in this volume. There are also interviews with absolutely legendary artists. Everyone from the Late great documentarian D.A. pennebaker, who passed away a few years after the conference, but who honored us with being present at the conference and gave to us the pathbreaking concert film of Ziggy Stardust. So, you know, Penne Baker, Da Penny Baker worked closely with Bowie during this pivotal moment in his career. And so the scholar Matthew Fred Jacobson was able to conduct an interview with DA Pennebaker after the conference that picked up on the conversation that he had participated in. During our events on campus, we have interviews with Sheila E. Who famously collaborated with Prince and is one of our greatest pop, funk, jazz, soul percussionists of all time. She was at the conference. The great Latina feminist sound study scholar Alexandra Vasquez, interviewed her at the conference and that interview is included in the volume. The last saxophonist to work with David Bowie on his Blackstar album, Donnie McCaslin, also present at the conference. And the black feminist rocksteady scholar Maureen mann interviewed Donnie McCaslin. So those interviews are included in the volume. Also, the curators of the David Bowie is exhibit, which was first presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and has traveled all over the world. Vicki Brooks and Jeff Marsh interview with them. So we have interviews, we have chapter essays. We also have this thing called critical Karaoke, which is very specific to in terms of form and in terms of name. It's very specific to a conference that so many of us have cherished and have done some of our most exciting work at this annual gathering that's called the Popcon. It first started in the early 2000s at the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle. I have participated in this conference since its inception, and it's a conference that in many ways reflects the structure of the volume, meaning that it's not only open to academics, but to rock music critics and journalists and to musicians as well. At that conference, the only recently departed fabulous poet and scholar Josh Clover had in 2004, curated a session called Critical Karaoke, which I participated in. And that session, actually, it changed the course of the conference in many ways because it was a very particular writing assignment that Josh had tasked those of us who participated in this session with being able to carry out. He asked us to pick a song, any song that at some point in our lives, was important to us, and to write about it at the intersections of both memoir and rock music criticism. He had two requirements. We had to be able to present what we wrote with the song playing alongside us, and that the piece that we wrote could be no longer than the song itself. Hence, Critical Karaoke. We had at the time what was one of the largest critical karaoke sessions during our Prince and Bowie conference, with more than half of a dozen, want to say, maybe like, 10 different scholars and critics who were presenting their work on favorite Bowie and Prince songs. And what we decided to do for the volume is to intersperse those critical karaoke pieces throughout the volume so that you got a sense of kind of the intimacies of what Bowie and Princess, you know, have meant to a generation of thinkers and creatives and so that we could live inside of their music even as we're doing this kind of more expansive analytical work with some of the other chapters. So the volume is structured throughout with these kinds of critical karaoke, you know, meditations that are bridges from one section to the next.
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C
I love that idea of them being meditations. Right. So this is divided into kind of six parts. So I thought we could just kind of talk about. You could share what is going on with each part, you know, what you're trying to cover. So the first one is a punch, a higher floor, David Bowie, Prince, the Utopian and the spiritual. So can you talk a little bit about what's going on in that first sort of part? Part of this?
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B
Yeah, it's a heavy way to start. But, you know, the conference and the volume, you know, are inspired by some real heaviness. And so, you know, one of the most important thinkers who was at the conference and somebody who's been important to me throughout my entire career as a critic and a black studies scholar, and he was a dear friend, the late, great music critic Greg Tate, he presented at the conference, as I think I just said, and we wanted to include his presentation, which he had been revising into a chapter for the volume. So in this section, we're thinking about grief, we're thinking about spirituality, we're thinking about what it means to kind of work as music writers with this kind of heavy sense of responsibility and a kind of mindfulness around the ethics of stewardship when it comes to paying tribute to, you know, our beloved musicians, artists who meant so much to us. And music writing, at least for me, has a long history of being tied to grief. One of my, you know, first books, it was in the 33⅓ series on the late musician Jeff Buckley's soul album Grace. And Jeff Buckley drowned the day that I filed my dissertation. So music writing and grief is something that I'm very familiar with, and we wanted to kind of hold a space for that, but to also think about the ways that the music that these artists left behind is also a salve for. For a response to the conditions of grief, and that there's something about the utopic possibilities that Bowie and Prince were always extending to us through their music that is a kind of duality with the process of grieving that we're all working through in this project. I just wanna make sure and give everybody their flowers, right? And so in addition to Greg Tate's essay, we have the music scholar Tiffany Nyman, who's writing about David Bowie's Lazarus, which is one of the signature tracks from Black Star, but also the title of a play which was actually playing off Broadway, that Bowie was deeply involved in developing in relation to the Lazarus track and to one of his most iconic film roles in the man who Fell to Earth. We have the queer theorist Kara Keeling writing about Prince and Purple Rain and the utopic possibilities of that very complicated film. We have the American studies scholar Eric Lott writing about kind of the question of dying and Bowie's life repertoire. We have the black studies and religious studies scholar Ashon Crawley, thinking about a kind of complex, affective repertoire that's bound up in Prince's music and especially in the song Adore Spring.
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A
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C
So, yeah, so do you wanna talk a little bit about what is in that, the sort of pieces in the second part and looking at sort of cities and borders?
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B
Sure. The second section of the volume in Cities and Borders is trying to think about place and how important place is to each of these artists, not only in the sounds that they were innovating across their long respective careers, but also the way certain places are associated with. With those sounds in a variety of different ways. And so, of course, Minneapolis is important. In this section we have one of the beloved Minneapolis music critics, Michelangelo Amatos, writing about kind of the early landscape of Prince's club world and how important that was to him and kind of thinking about this, know, multicultural, you know, vernacular space for musicing. We have the scholars Emma Ballas and Kristen Slomer, who are very much a part of the kind of public humanist contemporary efforts to keep Prince's legacies alive in Minneapolis. So they're writing about kind of, you know, all of these different ways that Prince's afterlife matters to the city. The kind of people's museum of Prints, which one of them has been at the center of curating. We've got the performance studies scholar, Shane Vogel, who's thinking about queer nightlife politics in relation to David Bowie in New York City downtown. We have the American studies and Asian American studies sound studies scholar Vaughn Mei Trung writing about what kind of immigrant, her immigrant experience of growing up in America with her parents from Vietnam, moving across the country and listening to Prince in the car. And we've got the phenomenal American studies sound study scholar, Josh Kuhn, Latinx sound study scholar writing about border politics and thinking about prints across the border and listening to prints through a kind of, you know, Latinx lens of, you know, cultural meaning. And so again, we're trying to, you know, sort of trace the movement and the impact of these artists, not just in the US and the uk, but beyond. And so this section is paying homage to that.
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C
So from there you kind of move to this idea. Part three, the Black Album, Bowie, Prince and the Art of Sonic Experimentalism. And so you kind of really move to them, kind of pushing the boundaries of music. Right. And so, Kia, can you talk about what's in that.
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B
Yeah, I mean, this section is lovely. All the sections are so lovely. This one is just so adventurous in the ways that the music scholar, the musicologist Michael Veal, is writing about the texture of guitar in relation to Bowie's Berlin albums and thinking about, just sonically, the different ways that guitar matters to Bowie's kind of pivotal transitions at that point in his career. We've got the. The performance studies and the popular music study scholar and R and B study scholar Jason King, just living inside of Prince's Erotic City and thinking about kind of black critical geographies that emerges out of that song. We also have that interview with Donnie McCaslin and Maureen Mann in this section. You know, I think that there are things about that interview which are really important to understanding who David Bowie was at the end of his career. And in New York City got the black sound studies scholar Alexander Wahalier, who's writing about kind of Prince and David Bowie in a transatlantic context and thinking about R and B as a transatlantic phenomenon in the 1980s in particular, and what kind of an impact R and B had on Bowie's career. And of course, the ways that Prince is so pivotal to crucial transitions in 1980s R&B. I'm thinking about that globally. There's a wonderful conversation between the podcasters Oliver Wong and Morgan Rhodes interviewing the journalist Lynell George about David Bowie's Young Americans. That again, is kind of helping us to think about what America meant to David Bowie not only sonically, but culturally in the mid-1970s. So that's, I think, a really important kind of transition in the volume. And again, trying to recontextualize the significance of these artists and think about them through a variety of different social, cultural, political and geographical lenses.
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C
So another really important thing with both of these artists is their position in the world of sort of fashion and just the visual artistry of both of them. And so part four really covers that. Right. Oh, you pretty things. Spectacular Bowie Spectacular prints, Visual and performance politics. Yeah. So can you talk about what's going on there? Because it is really fundamental to both of them.
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B
Really fundamental to both of them. And the David Bowie Is exhibition, which was history making and also box office breaking at the V and A museum in London that Vicki Brooks and Geoffrey Marsh curated, gives you this up close material experience with Bowie's archive, which he so carefully designed and looked after and mounted a team to be stewards of this material long after he anticipated his passing. So that exhibit is so groundbreaking that it was exciting to be able to Talk to Vicki and Jeff, especially since the David Bowie Archive in London is now open and was inspired by this exhibit. We also have the incredible critical theorist Jonathan Flatley, who's writing this beautiful piece that was inspired by his own work on Andy Warhol called Like Andy Warhol. So he's got a piece in the volume called Like David Bowie. He's thinking about intimacies and affective relations to cultural objects. He's thinking about the ways that, you know, Bowie was creating his own kind of practices of liking. You can see in the ways that he was performing visually, these kinds of tributes to Marlene Dietrich and a variety of different cinematic icons, and expanding the lexicon of what we could think, how we could imagine rock musicians utilizing the cinematic in their own repertoires and visual art in their own repertoires. Of course, David Bowie also played the role of Andy Warhol in the film Basquiat. So Flatley's work is really giving us, you know, this really important lexicon to think about Bowie through a very wide kind of visual, visual art grammar. This is also a section that includes Tavia Nyong' o thinking about Prince and Black Social Dreaming, and a kind of visual aesthetics of Prince as it was black and queer as it was tied to spectacle. And by way of tying his work to spectacle, Prince was also challenging us to hear him sonically in new and exciting, really demanding and fascinating ways. This is the section that includes Matthew Fry Jacobson's interview with DA Pennebaker. The Spectacular Bowie Spectacular Prince Visual and Performance Politics section also includes an interview that one of our leading and greatest black feminist film critics, Jackie Stewart, Jacqueline Steward, was able to lead with Prince's costume designer, Marie France. And that's just a really exciting piece that allows us to hear up close and personal the kinds of strategic choices that his collaborators were making in terms of his look, thinking a lot about the closeness of the relationship between sound and sartorial politics. So I'm very excited about that piece as well. And there are also some great critical karaokes in each of these sections as well.
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C
And you sort of Your kind of Part five, before we get to your sort of final outro, is Rebirth of the Flesh Adventures Intersectionality with Bowie and Prince. And again, these are two artists that are very much known for thinking beyond sort of traditional masculinity and gender roles and gender norms throughout their careers. So can you talk a little bit about that section?
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B
Absolutely. Well, we're lucky that we have one of our greatest queer theorists of all time, Jack Halberstam, writing a piece called Trans Bowie, Trans Prince, which is so exciting to include here the black feminist sound and performance studies scholar Francesca Royster writing about Prince and his intimacies with black women creatives, specifically Michelle and Dega Ocello and Janelle Monae, but other figures as well. And really thinking through the kind of the figure of the maternal as it impacted Prince's musicing, but also thinking about kind of lateral relations of, you know, sibling collaborations and tensions with other women artists. It's worth noting that we know quite a bit about at this point, both artists and their complexities with regards to gender politics. They were what we would now call allies in many different ways, who really lifted up the brilliance, the artistic genius of a whole range of women artists, and especially black women artists, the both of them. And they also have histories which we're uncovering that were complicated with regards to gender exploitation. The documentarian Ezra Edelman, many people know, has an unreleased documentary about Prince that was supposed to be available on Netflix. I'm sorry, it was supposed to be. We have the documentarian Ezra Edelman, who is supposed to have been able to release a multi part project about Prince that included some very charged material about his relationship to various women in his lives. And that is now a project that we are not going to be able to see. And so this section is really trying to think alongside the ambiguities of these artists, but to also be able to live inside of the material that they gave to us and to find, you know, the different ways that we can sort of understand sort of black feminist theoretical statements that emerge out of the music itself, as opposed to the men who made the music. This is also a section that includes the legendary pop music critic Ann Powers writing about strangeness in Bowie and Prince, also wrestling with those contradictions. Alex Vasquez's interview with Sheila E. Is a really beautiful way of thinking about the intimacies between those two artists, creative and otherwise. And my own chapter is doing a kind of work to think about the question of Black feminisms being at the center of their repertoires. And if we think about their work through black feminisms, what else can we hear in the music?
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C
And then there is this sort of final section, part six, which is kind of, where are we now? And so can you talk a little bit about that sort of ending essay and what was going, you know, what's going on right there at the end?
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B
This is actually technically the second and last section of the volume, which also includes a couple of additional critical karaoke meditations. And then the pioneering rock music critic, one of the greatest rock music critics of all time, Grail Marcus, who was also at the conference, has a piece about Prince and Bowie that is, I would say, really trying to sit with their legacies through very specific engagements with songs and to just kind of give a sort of. Sorry, let me say this again and to just be able to give us a kind of parting gesture in terms of thinking about what it means to listen closely to their music and to hold it closely as a part of your own sort of creative and intellectual practices. So it's a beautiful piece. I'm so glad that it's part of the denim wa to the volume. There's one final parting gesture as well in the volume, and that's the sound and vision playlist from three really incredible artists. The musician Lorraine, the Grammy winning artist Kimbra and Michelle and De Gayo Cello, offering their own annotated lists of Boeing Prince songs that mean so much to them.
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C
And I will say that just we won't go through every single one of the sort of critical karaokes, but you are getting a wide variety in there of like deep cuts as well as more recogniz recognizable and popular tracks. So that too sort of covers a wide range with both of them and both the artists.
- [36:01]
B
There are so many critical karaokes in this volume. Every single one of the critical karaokes in this volume is deeply personal and I would say quite beautiful in terms of vulnerability, but also has an analytic rigor that is dazzling and riveting. You can hear the songs as they're being translated into very personal biographical statements that also are allowing us to learn something new sonically and culturally and historically about these Bowie and Prince tracks that people really wanted to highlight and share with readers why they carry those songs with them in their creative and their intellectual lives.
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C
So this collection comes out on April 14th. So final question, anything people need to know, sort of self promotion, anything you're working on or with this collection. What's going on? What do you want to promote?
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B
Well, you know, this volume is. It's a labor of love and it's a collective labor of love. So I think I would just emphasize that, you know, of the over 40 contributors in this book, I hope that everyone will pay attention to the work of each and every single creative and scholar whose voice lent itself to this just really luminous chorus. So this is a group effort. I am the editor. I lived with this volume for nearly a decade. But the thing that I would promote is the idea of the work of the ensemble.
- [37:47]
C
Fabulous, Daphne. Again, thank you for talking with me about this. Daphne A. Brooks, who is the editor of the new collection on Princess David Bowie, Black Star Rising and the Purple Rain. Thank you so much for being on New Books Network.
- [38:03]
B
Absolutely. Rebecca, thank you. Foreign.
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A
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