Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince

The parallel careers of David Bowie and Prince get the full “academic treatment” in this intermittently illuminating anthology from Brooks (Liner Notes from the Revolution), a professor of Black studies at Yale. Bowie and Prince, who died within months of one another in 2016, each achieved notoriety for transcending gender conventions while pushing rock music into weirder, more expansive territory. Several refreshingly blunt and sometimes gossipy interviews with such decades-long creative partners as fellow musicians Donny McCaslin and Sheila E., film director D.A. Pennebaker, and costume designer Marie France discuss the artists’ impact. Scholarly offerings chart their cultural footprints; essays from Tavia Nyong’o, Francesca T. Royster, and Brooks persuasively unpack how both Bowie and Prince were creatively molded by Black women collaborators, despite being constrained in some ways by sexism (and for Bowie, by a 1970s flirtation with “white supremacist fascist cosplay”). Though some essays tread the same ground and disorienting shifts in tone can distract, the volume is rife with rigorous analysis, careful scholarship, and a few delightfully quirky sections (like “Critical Karaoke” interludes meditating on individual songs). It’s a unique if uneven contribution to the scholarship on two rock music greats. (Apr.)