Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. David Bowie and Prince are two iconic figures in music who pushed cultural boundaries while also generating large popular followings. And of course, both of them were consummate musicians. My guest today has edited and contributed to a new book that considers both of them together. Daphne Brooks is a professor of Black Studies and Music at Yale University, and her book is titled, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince”. Professor Brooks, welcome to the program, very interesting book.
Daphne Brooks: Thanks so much for having me, Grant.
GR: We really appreciate you making the time. So let me just ask a very basic question at the beginning, how did you get the idea to put this book together? How'd that happen?
DB: Oh, I mean, it was really a calling. And in many ways, the book kind of sprouted out of this moment of just collective cultural grief. Beginning with David Bowie's passing two days after his birthday on January 10th, 2016, which was, you know, shocked the world, and several months later, with Prince's passing in April. And I'm a professor that does a lot of work in public humanities, a lot of public programming designed to bring together our greater community in New Haven, with the Yale campus. When I first came to Yale, I organized an event with the great Jack White around blues records and the Blues Record Archive, and 800 folks showed up at Battell Chapel for that. So, kind of my organic sort of place to go was to think about putting together a conference. But really just, you know, a gaggle of my closest friends, fellow compatriots in music writing, to just, you know, kind of hold an intellectual and cultural wake for these two figures who shaped our lives. And then the event just kept growing and growing and growing. We ended up holding it in January of 2017, marking the first anniversary of Bowie's death, and it was a three day international conference.
GR: Wow, wow. And, I know you could speak about this for the entire time that we have, but what, I guess, sort of briefly, what do Bowie and Prince share beyond the proximity of their passing that would put them in the same volume? Are there certain things about their impact, the nature of their music and so on that you think make them a pair?
DB: Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm a proud Gen-Xer, although I have questions about my generation now.
GR: (laughter)
DB: That's a separate conversation. But, I did feel drawn to the both of them, not only with regards to the fact that they, now dominated the soundtrack to our lives as we like to say, but because of what each artist represented in terms of, a kind of politics and poetics of freedom with regards to identity formations, world making practices, as we like to say in the academy, but also outside of the academy. So, what they each represented aesthetically was a kind of will to invent these alternatives to normative ways of being, that historically one could argue were oppressive to folks in the margins. So, when we think about, you know, gender liberation, sexual identity liberation, Bowie is a real beacon of light. And with regards to Prince, NPR's Marketplace, I mean, so many different press outlets were contacting so many of us who are music writers in the early hours of Prince's passing. And I got a call from NPR Marketplace asking me if I could be on the air with them. And, at first, I didn't believe them. But the first kind of gut reaction I had to the question about what does Prince mean to you, as I said, well, he is the voice of the post-civil rights freedom struggle. And the person on the phone kind of went, what are you what are you talking about? I was like, well, you know, I'm a post-Civil rights baby. My parents, you know, came of age as Bay area civil rights, local educational pioneers. And for me, you know, they bequeathed to me and my generation the world in terms of what we thought was possible. And Prince culturally represented that in terms of the sonic boundaries that he transgressed. So, the two of them were transgressive figures in terms of the ways in which we, who see ourselves in the margins, who experience ourselves in the margins, you know, they offered us a way of thinking about what was possible.
GR: This follow up question may seem a bit almost crude in a way, but does it have any significance for the book or the way you think about them, that one's black and one's white?
DB: Well, another really important part of the project, and this came up organically in the conference, is that we were really trying to reclaim the roots of Bowie's passion for black culture and black music in particular. You know, if anyone went to the historic David Bowie Is exhibit which originated at the V&A museum in London and became that, sort of the foundation for what is now the David Bowie Archive in London. And the two curators of that exhibit were presenters at our conference, and they're in the volume. But if anyone is familiar with that exhibit, they'll know that the exhibit begins with these kinds of images of David Bowie's fandom and attachment to Little Richard. And you can really hear that, especially on the "Let's Dance" album, but even Young Americans. And he was a long time champion of the ways in which black music held the seeds to modern music making, is one of the arguments that he made across the course of his career. So, we really felt like there was a kind of kindred spirit, you know, way in which to think about Bowie and Prince together, what they embraced about the history of rock and roll, as a black music.
GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Yale University professor Daphne Brooks, and we're discussing her new book titled, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince”. So let me get into your title here about the afterlives. What, after Bowie's passing, what do you think looking back now, what has been his effect on music and culture? What were the permanent, or more lasting contributions that he made?
DB: Yeah. I mean, I think that one of Bowie's central idioms, is the spectacular, and the ways in which his storytelling practices wove together the sonic and the visual, the performative. Again, you know, drawing through lines from early rock and roll pioneers, all the way to his own present day, you know, landscape of glam rock, which he pioneered, and lionized and experimented with aesthetically. So, you know, he's just inescapable in terms of how we think about popular music culture today as being sensorial, as being, having a kind of this, sort of, politics of sublimity. As being someone who is thinking expansively about what it means to be able to remake the world through the sonic. So, I see him as inextricable with regards to popular music culture, and how we consume it today, how we define it.
GR: And how about Prince? What would you add to what you just said about Bowie in terms of thinking about Prince?
DB: Yeah, I mean I think that, you know, Prince, his radicalism had so much to do with rejecting the constrictions of how blackness has been defined historically in this country. The boxes that black musicians have been put into by the recording industry, by fan cultures as well. He very famously, when he was signed as a teenager to Warner Brothers said, you know, I don't want to be perceived as a black artist. And people kind of misinterpreted that statement as a rejection of blackness. But what he was doing was rejecting the category of blackness as it had been just defined by, you know, these corporate logics. So, I think that, you know, Prince is someone who, you know, talks about Bowie being an influence, but the ways in which he kind of seized back the expansiveness of black expressive practices, as being tied to, sort of narrative authority, about claiming one's own terms of what it meant to be black in America makes him an extremely powerful singular artist of his generation.
GR: Yeah, that makes sense. I was wondering, I was thinking back on how musicians and bands sometimes ebb and flow in their popularity and their significance. And I think I remember this right, you would be the expert, but I think there was a time, for example, when I can remember that the Rolling Stones kind of faded and then they came roaring back with “Some Girls”.
DB: Tattoo You, right? Oh right, and "Some Girls", right. "Some Girls" which has a really problematic history. I mean, you know, the black press really, you know, attacked the Stones, critiqued the Stones for "Some Girls," but, yes, that was one of their comebacks.
GR: Yeah, and so did Bowie or Prince ever go through something like that? And did they do something to kind of get back into, get the public's attention again?
DB: Oh, God, yes. I mean, they had they each had such long careers and they each took so many risks. I mean, one of the other parallels is that they had, you know, these kinds of, you know, projects that some would consider artistic failures, like Bowie's “Tin Machine” project, you know, is one infamous one. And even people found his late 90s work, you know, with techno to be, you know, polarizing. I think polarizing is a word that is used a lot with regards to their work after their major breakthroughs. You know, for Bowie had several different breakthroughs, beginning with "Space Oddity" and throughout the course of his career. His biggest comeback, so to speak, was "Let's Dance." And, you know, "Let's Dance" was a collaboration with Nile Rodgers. And in many ways it was, for him, a return to form, having grown up, first playing the saxophone, being able to sort of reclaim this music of the 50s and the early 60s, early rock and roll, and infuse it with this kind of modernist new wave sensibility. So, you know, it's interesting to think about him kind of continuing to revisit these different points in his career and remake them. You know, there's, we could just talk about Bowie, you know, all day, and we can just talk about Prince. But I mean, another moment to think about with Bowie is the fact that he very famously has this drug addiction in the late 70s. He goes to Berlin to clean up, so to speak, and he gives us the Berlin albums, which includes "Heroes". So he's, you know, and then with "Ashes to Ashes”, he's kind of, you know, critiquing Major Tom and critiquing his own addiction arc and clean up. So, you know, the template for, kind of the ebbs and flows of his career are tied to his aesthetic rebirths. And with Prince, it's sort of like, you know, he has this enormous breakthrough with "Purple Rain" in 1984. And then there's a way in which Prince, you know, being so incredibly prolific, you know, he kind of flooded the airwaves with his own experimentalism and it really challenged listeners to follow him on these journeys through all sorts of trials and errors with his own artistry. Some would argue that Musicology, which was a huge stadium tour, some called it a comeback, was a turn away from the kinds of challenging, more challenging music that he'd made earlier in his career. But he did reach a new generation of listeners. So, I think the story that we're telling with each of them and thinking about, you know, who they were as artists is that they never walked away from their music entirely. And it was really about a lifetime of relationships with fans who had to kind of reckon with all of the different sides of Bowie and Prince.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Daphne Brooks. She's a professor at Yale University and the editor of and contributor to a new book titled, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince”. You obviously have a great expertise going into this project, but I'm curious, as you worked on this book, did you learn things that surprised you about these two figures that you didn't know before?
DB: Oh, that's a great question. Well, I do want to emphasize that this is an anthology. There are over 40 contributors, I'm only one of the contributors. And so I learned something from everyone, I mean, there are six different sections of the book, and, you know, it spans topics from spirituality and utopia in the work of Bowie and Prince to thinking about their regionalisms from Bowie's downtown New York and London to, of course, Prince's beloved Minneapolis. There's a section on, you know, Bowie and Prince and the spectacular. There's a section on Bowie and Prince and their sonic experimentalisms. There's a section on Bowie and Prince in thinking about intersectionality, how important black and brown women creatives were to their own aesthetic vision and the collaborations that they, the collaborative journeys that they went on with black and brown women. So, it's a book that really, I think, is trying to honor both their artistry. And also what they, again, what they meant to us in terms of their iconicity, and to a range of different kinds of listeners coming from different places around the world. You know, I guess the biggest thing that I learned about each of them is that, and this is a journey that we all went on as we mourned them, and as we move into deeper and deeper into the 21st century and think about racial and gender liberation politics is that they were, you know, flawed icons. I think that was always there in front of us. You know, there have been a number of stories, especially with regards to gender politics, that have just been complicated to think about. So, we didn't want to do a hero worship kind of project, but say, for instance, Ezra Edelman, who, is also who's a Yale alum, who's an Academy Award winning documentarian, he did the massive, epic documentary about O.J., which she won the Oscar for. He has an unreleased multi-hour Prince documentary that he originally made for Netflix which has not been able to air yet for a variety of different reasons, and The New York Times covered that story. You know, just complicated stories about Prince that are included in that project. And that's a story for Ezra to tell. I haven't been able to see the material, but it is something that we wanted to be really mindful of and that I wanted to be mindful of as editor of this project. That and the many stories of David Bowie and, you know, at the pinnacle of his fame and, you know, quite a bit of coverage, even at the time when this happened of his cocaine addiction and how that was entangled with several, you know, infamous incidents tied to Nazism, Nazi salutes. You know, really, really just complicated anecdotes about each of these individuals. The thing about Bowie that's interesting is that he really did reckon with that kind of period. And by the time he got to Berlin, and many different Bowie scholars who have thought about this deeply, those Berlin albums have a lot to do with a kind of cleaning up, you know, both physically in terms of his substance abuse and thinking about, you know, a romanticism that was tied to ideas about authoritarianism and rock and roll and glam. So, Bowie is somebody who kind of came back to these issues at different points in his life. And Prince is complicated because, you know, even though we have these anecdotes about gender politics and gender abusiveness, he also was someone who very famously, you know, championed gender non-normativity, kind of pushing of the boundaries in terms of gender formations and a complete adoration of especially black women's genius and musicality that was so central to his own repertoire. So, the takeaway was that they each were deeply complicated individuals, and we wanted to be able to think about the art on its own terms, but to not ignore these other stories about who each of these men were.
GR: Yeah. There's a powerful picture in the book of Prince, he's photographed from behind. He's watching, I think it's Patti LaBelle in a tribute to him.
DB: Yes!
GR: Yeah, that speaks to what you're saying. If you've just joined us you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Daphne Brooks. We're discussing her new book, it's titled, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince”. So, one thing that you did have in the book, structurally, that I was curious about was these recurring, shorter pieces that are in between the chapters called ‘Critical Karaoke Interludes’. Tell me what the purpose of those were. They were a lot of fun, but tell me what the purpose of those were.
DB: Yes. Well, the origins of that genre, as we like to think of it, a genre of writing, come from the late poet and scholar Joshua Clover, who died tragically just a year ago, but he's a colleague of mine. And we met at a conference, that's dear to many of us music writers, scholars alike, musicians. The conference originated at what was then called the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle early in the 21st century, started in 2002. The museum opened under the stewardship in the education department of Eric Weisbard and his life partner, Ann Powers, who were each celebrated music critics in their own right. We would gather each year at this conference that still lives on in a different form now, but we'd gather in Seattle each year and, you know, come together on these different panels and roundtables to think about different themes in popular music culture each year. I mean, it really was and continues to be one of the most important intellectual spaces in my own professional life. But the second or third year of the conference, I believe it was a second year, Josh Clover, who was a regular attendee, tapped a cluster of us, including the legendary rock critic Greil Marcus, who's a wonderful colleague and mentor of mine. Ann Powers was on this roundtable. He wrote to us and said, you know, I have this idea, I'd like for us each to choose a song, any song, that at some point in our lives we absolutely felt, you know, deeply connected to, had a passion for love it, hate it, whatever you feel, I'd love for you to write about this song in a style that's a combination of memoir, but also music criticism. And there are only two catches, when you read your piece you're going to be reading it to the music, and it cannot be any longer than the track itself, so I'm calling it ‘critical karaoke’. And, you know, it's my favorite writing exercise, I use it in the classroom, I use it in my own writing. When we did it at the Bowie and Prince conference, it was the largest critical karaoke that we'd ever organized. There were about a dozen of us at the time who chose Bowie and Prince songs, and it was just round robin. People are reading, Matthew Fred Jacobson, historian here at Yale, did a reading of, and it's in the volume, of Prince's legendary performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, the George Harrison tribute…
GR: I was going to ask you about that, you anticipated that.
DB: Yeah, and I mentioned his critical karaoke at the conference because people actually got up and started cheering like they were at the Prince performance, right? So there is an energy to critical karaoke that's incredibly powerful. And, you know, I wanted to be sure to include that in the volume to give people these snapshots of our critics’ intimacies with the music itself in really concentrated spurts. So you'll find these critical karaoke’s in pairs and sometimes in trios interspersed throughout the volume.
GR: Well, it's no surprise to me, then, that I found a lot of that writing, very lyrical, and I can see why that would come out of that. We've only got about two minutes left. This occurred to me, from what I learned about the artists in reading your book, it's the big question about work ethic versus natural talent and the equation that equals greatness. And, you know, Prince, for example, obviously had this huge amount of natural musical talent playing all these different instruments, but it sounds like also he had a really killer work ethic.
DB: Yes.
GR: And so, I'm just wondering if you had briefly, any thoughts about how those two could go together in the equation for greatness?
DB: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I've talked a lot about world making, and I think both of these artists were so immersive with regards to their craft. I mean, it just, it was, it constituted their entire life worlds. And so, the way in which they accrued a kind of prodigiousness in terms of their instrumentality, their song making practices, their performative aesthetics, which were virtuosic, had a lot to do with, you know, this just kind of complete, you know, porousness between the art and their lives, you know, and there are sacrifices that are made, you know, along the way in being that kind of an artist. But I do think that there is a relationship, you know, between that kind of deep connective tissue of, you know, artistry and life worlds and the ways in which the two flow into each other reciprocally.
GR: So, I'm going to do a version of the critical karaoke for you at the very end. We only have a few seconds, I can't resist this, but let's just say, I'm not going to ask you to, but let's just say you have to pick one song from each artist to take with you in your life, what are the two songs?
DB: No! It's the Stephen Colbert desert island slash question.
GR: Yeah, yeah.
DB: Oh my God. I mean, for Bowie, it has to be, "Heroes".
GR: Okay.
DB: And for Prince, probably one of his early tracks, which is "Free".
GR: All right, great, we'll have to leave it there. That was Daphne Brooks. And again, her new book is titled, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince”. It's a fascinating read and you can digest it in smaller bites if you like. Take it to the beach, you'll be the coolest person out there. Professor Brooks, thanks so much for talking with me, really interesting book.
DB: Thanks so much, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
