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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fans used to be seen as an overly obsessed fraction of the audience. In the last few decades, shifts in media technology and production have instead made fandom a central mode of consumption. A range of ideas has emerged to explore different facets of this growing phenomenon. With a foreword by Matt Hills, Understanding Fandom introduces the whole field of fan research by looking at the history of debate, key paradigms and methodological issues. The book discusses insights from scholars working with fans of different texts, genres and media forms, including television and popular music. Mark Duffett shows that fan research is an emergent interdisciplinary field with its own key thinkers: a tradition that is distinct from both textual analysis and reception studies. Drawing on a range of debates from media studies, cultural studies and psychology, Duffett argues that fandom is a particular kind of engagement with the power relations of media culture.

This book explores popular music fandom from a cultural studies perspective that incorporates popular music studies, audience research, and media fandom. The essays draw together recent work on fandom in popular music studies and begin a dialogue with the wider field of media fan research, raising questions about how popular music fandom can be understood as a cultural phenomenon and how much it has changed in light of recent developments. Exploring the topic in this way broaches questions on how to define, theorize, and empirically research popular music fan culture, and how music fandom relates to other roles, practices, and forms of social identity. Fandom itself has been brought center stage by the rise of the internet and an industrial structure aiming to incorporate, systematize, and legitimate dimensions of it as an emotionally-engaged form of consumerism. Once perceived as the pariah practice of an overly attached audience, media fandom has become a standardized industrial subject-position called upon to sell box sets, concert tickets, new television series, and special editions. Meanwhile, recent scholarship has escaped the legacy of interpretations that framed fans as passive, pathological, or defiantly empowered, taking its object seriously as a complex formation of identities, roles, and practices. While popular music studies has examined some forms of identity and audience practice, such as the way that people use music in daily life and listener participation in subcultures, scenes and, tribes, this volume is the first to examine music fans as a specific object of study.

David Bowie was one of the world’s most famous rock stars. But, as David Bowie FAQ shows, he was also far more than that. After spending the latter part of the 1960s searching for the best medium through which to express his artistic aspirations—and trying out several performing arts in the process—he experienced fleeting but significant success in music with the top-ten UK hit “Space Oddity,” released at the time of the successful Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Subsequently he achieved true international fame in the early 1970s through playing the role of the androgynous alien rock-star Ziggy Stardust. From here he went on to a career that spanned five decades, exploring numerous artistic disciplines, challenging societal mores and conventions, and building a platform of constant change and reinvention. Whereas most rock stars would find a winning formula and rigidly stick to it to avoid alienating their fans, David Bowie made stylistic variation his cornerstone—an entirely new and model for rock stardom. But David Bowie was more than a rock star. Reflecting an approach to art that knew no boundaries, he also made his mark in movie acting, legitimate stage acting, and more. There was a unifying factor in all of the roles he played, regardless of medium, because even from childhood he’d felt himself to be an outsider, alienated and estranged. Bowie’s fans quickly recognized this quality in him, and it created a bond that went far beyond the usual star-fan relationship. Through David Bowie, fans found themselves able to accept their sense of difference as a positive thing rather than a negative one. David Bowie didn’t simply entertain people—he empowered them.

A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies offers scholars and fans an accessible and engaging resource for understanding the rapidly expanding field of fan studies. International in scope and written by a team that includes many major scholars, this volume features over thirty especially-commissioned essays on a variety of topics, which together provide an unparalleled overview of this fast-growing field. Separated into five sections—Histories, Genealogies, Methodologies; Fan Practices; Fandom and Cultural Studies; Digital Fandom; and The Future of Fan Studies—the book synthesizes literature surrounding important theories, debates, and issues within the field of fan studies. It also traces and explains the social, historical, political, commercial, ethical, and creative dimensions of fandom and fan studies. Exploring both the historical and the contemporary fan situation, the volume presents fandom and fan studies as models of 21st century production and consumption, and identifies the emergent trends in this unique field of study.