A longstanding, successful and frequently controversial career spanning more than four decades establishes David Bowie as charged with contemporary cultural relevance. That David Bowie has influenced many lives is undeniable to his fans. He requisitions and challenges his audiences, through frequently indirect lyrics and images, to critically question sanity, identity and essentially what it means to be 'us' and why we are here. Enchanting David Bowie explores David Bowie as an anti-temporal figure and argues that we need to understand him across the many media platforms and art spaces he intersects with including theatre, film, television, the web, exhibition, installation, music, lyrics, video, and fashion. This exciting collection is organized according to the key themes of space, time, body, and memory - themes that literally and metaphorically address the key questions and intensities of his output.

David Bowie: Critical Perspectives examines in detail the many layers of one of the most intriguing and influential icons in popular culture. This interdisciplinary book brings together established and emerging scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds, including musicology, sociology, art history, literary theory, philosophy, politics, film studies and media studies. Bowie’s complexity as a singer, songwriter, producer, performer, actor and artist demands that any critical engagement with his overall work must be interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in its scope. The chapters are organised around the key themes of ‘textualities’, ‘psychologies’, ‘orientalisms’, ‘art and agency’ and ‘performing and influencing’ in Bowie’s work. This comprehensive book contributes a great deal to the study of popular music, performance, gender, religion, popular media and celebrity.

Addressing the interart, intertextual, and intermedial dimensions of David Bowie’s sonic and visual legacy, this book considers more than five decades of a career invested with a star’s luminosity that shines well beyond the remit of pop music. The book approaches the idea of the star David Bowie as a medium in transit, undergoing constant movement and change. Within the context of celebrity studies, the concept of stardom provides an appropriate frame for an examination of Bowie’s transmedial activity, especially given his ongoing iconic signification within the celestial realm. While Bowie has traversed many mediums, he has also been described as a medium, which is consistent with the way he has described himself. With contributions from a wide range of disciplinary areas and countries, each chapter brings a fresh perspective on the concept of stardom and the conceptual significance of the terms ‘mediation’ and ‘navigation’ as they relate to Bowie and his career. Containing a multitude of different approaches to the stardom and mediation of David Bowie, this book will be of interest to those studying celebrity, audio and visual legacy, and the relationships between different forms of media. It was originally published as a special issue of Celebrity Studies.

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.

This book explores the relevance of David Bowie’s life and music for contemporary legal and cultural theory. Focusing on the artist and artworks of David Bowie, this book brings to life, in essay form, particular theoretical ideas, creative methodologies and ethical debates that have contemporary relevance within the fields of law, social theory, ethics and art. What unites the essays presented here is that they all point to a beyond law: to the fact that law is not enough, or to be more precise, too much, too much to bear. For those who, like Bowie, see art, creativity and love as what ought to be the central organising principles of life, law will not do. In the face of its certainties, its rigidities, and its conceits, these essays, through Bowie, call forth the monster who laughs at the law, celebrate inauthenticity as a deeper truth, explore the ethical limits of art, cut up the laws of writing and embrace that which is most antithetical to law, love. This original engagement with the limits of law will appeal to those working in legal theory, ethics and law and popular culture, as well as in art and cultural studies.

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.

The first in-depth study of David Bowie's music videos across a sustained period takes on interweaving storyworlds of an iconic career. Remarkable for their capacity to conjure elaborate imagery, Bowie's videos provide fascinating exemplars of the artistry and remediation of music video. When their construction is examined across several years, they appear as time-travelling vessels, transporting kooky characters and strange story-world components across time and space. By charting Bowie's creative and collaborative process across five distinct phases, David Bowie and the Art of Music Video shows how he played a vital role in establishing music video as an artform. Filling a gap in the existing literature, this book shines a light on the significant contributions of directors such as Mick Rock, Stanley Dorfman and David Mallet, each of whom taught Bowie much about how to use the form. By examining Bowie's collaborative process, his use of surrealist strategies and his integration of avant-garde art with popular music and media, the book provides a history of music video in relation to the broader fields of audiovisual media, visual music and art.

The central image of David Bowie's “Life on Mars?” could have been ripped from his own experience: a child sits “hooked to the silver screen,” reliving fantastical scenes played out on film. Throughout his life, Bowie was similarly transfixed by the power of film. From his first film role in The Image to his final music video before his death, “Lazarus,” Bowie's musical output has long been intrinsically linked to images. Analyzing Bowie's music videos, planned film projects, acting roles, and depictions in film, David Bowie and the Moving Image provides a comprehensive view of Bowie's work with film and informs our understanding of all areas of his work, from music to fashion to visual art. It enters the debate about Bowie's artistic legacy by addressing Bowie as musician, actor, and auteur.

Built from stories and memories shared by self-defined David Bowie fans, this book explores how Bowie existed as a figure of renewal and redemption, resonating in particular with those marginalized by culture and society. Sean Redmond and Toija Cinque draw on personal interviews, memorabilia, diaries, letters, communal gatherings and shared conversation to find out why Bowie mattered so much to the fans that idolized him. Contextualising the identification streams that have emerged around David Bowie, the book highlights his remarkable influence.

David Bowie and Romanticism evaluates Bowie’s music, film, drama, and personae alongside eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets, novelists, and artists. These chapters expand our understanding of both the literature studied as well as Bowie’s music, exploring the boundaries of reason and imagination, and of identity, gender, and genre. This collection uses the conceptual apparata and historical insights provided by the study of Romanticism to provide insight into identity formation, drawing from Romantic theories of self to understand Bowie’s oeuvre and periods of his career. The chapters discuss key themes in Bowie’s work and analyze what Bowie has to teach us about Romantic art and literature as well.