“My first reaction was that Prince was the sound of the post-civil rights freedom struggle,†Brooks said. “I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and his music articulated for me a different iteration of what it means to be free. We had the promise of legislative and judicial ‘freedom' that my parents' generation made possible. The sonic side of that was to think about who we were expressively in our quotidian lives.
“And that was true of Bowie too. They had a shared sense of thinking about a more expansive way in which to define oneself as many different things, as heterogeneously alive, as connected across racial lines, and of course pushing the boundary in terms of gender formations.â€
Now, on the 10th anniversary of the year of their deaths, the two pop icons and their legacies are the subject of a new anthology edited by Brooks, “Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince†(Duke University Press).Â
The anthology grew out of a three-day conference Brooks organized at Yale in January 2017 that drew well-known scholars, journalists, and musical artists interested in reflecting on what Prince and Bowie had meant to the shaping of modern popular culture.Â
Most of the anthology's 40 or so contributors participated in or attended that conference. Among them are six other Yale faculty members, all in FAS: Matthew Frye Jacobson, Sterling Professor of American Studies and History and professor of Black studies; Kathryn Lofton, the Lex Hixon Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, and professor of history and divinity; Tavia Nyong'o, the William Lampson Professor of American Studies, Black Studies, Performance Studies, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Alexandra T. Vazquez, professor of theater, dance and performance studies; Michael Veal, the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music and professor of Black studies and of American studies; and Shane Vogel, professor of Black studies and English.Â
Chapters include tributes to specific songs and the memories they invoke, cultural studies, music criticism, and explorations of locations and scenes related to the artists' lives. Sprinkled throughout are also Q&As with collaborators of Bowie and Prince, including singer and musician Sheila E., the late documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, and costume designer Marie France.
In her introduction, Brooks writes that “to think [Bowie and Prince] together and alongside one another, as this volume aims to do, creates the opportunity to grapple with the twinned scale and impact of their legacies. It enables us to pay close attention to the meaningful parallelisms and, in more than a few cases, the deep and vibrating resonances between the respective communities they were each forging through their sounds and rapturous visual spectacles.â€Â
While younger generations may be less familiar with music from Bowie and Prince than Gen X and late Baby Boomers are, their influence continues to resonate in pop culture today, Brooks said. In an undergraduate class she taught last year on the relationship of Beyoncé's repertoire to Black feminist history, culture, and politics, both Bowie and Prince came up in class discussions several times.
“The legacy is very strong in relation to Prince, who was a mentor to her,†Brooks said. “But also to Bowie, in terms of sonic and visual experimentalism.â€
That continuing influence reflects how thoroughly Prince and Bowie dominated “the soundtrack of our lives,†Brooks said, and provided “the fabric of who we came to know ourselves to be.â€Â
