Read Strange Stars David Bowie Pop Music and the Decade SciFi Exploded Jason Heller Books

Product details Paperback 272 pages Publisher Melville House; Reprint edition (June 4, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 1612197760

Strange Stars David Bowie Pop Music and the Decade SciFi Exploded Jason Heller Books Reviews

• Amazing book that not only makes you want to keep reading it, but start diving through old music and breaking out your library card and pick up all those old sci-fi books and settle in for an adventure.
  
  This is exactly what Dean Venture must have felt like in "Perchance to Dean" when he lets his science mind explore the outer reaches of the universe though music.
  
  Great history, great insight, great book!
• My husband loved this book. Much "heavier" than he thought at first, but he learned a lot. He had the best time making the connection between music he has known for a long time with books that he now would like to read. Also the whole David Bowie/Dr. Who connection was fascinating.
• Gift for secret pal
• Jason Heller's STRANGE STARS chronicles the strange cross-cultural influences that led to an infusion of science-fiction imagery in rock 'n' roll. It bridges its story from Bowie's "Space Oddity" to his return to the song's stranded astronaut Major Tom nearly a decade later in "Ashes to Ashes." In between, he touches on everything from huge hits to one-hit wonders and blind alleys, from Elton John's "Rocket Man," to the Afrofuturist mythology of George Clinton's P-Funk, to the android chic of Kraftwerk and Gary Numan. It's full of tantalizing nuggets of information... like how young Davey Jones' childhood fascination with Robert A. Heinlein's STARMAN JONES led to him becoming the "Starman" Ziggy Stardust, or how the other, forgotten "Rocket Man" influenced Bernie Taupin, or how science fiction maven's Michael Moorcock's visions invaded the songs of Hawkwind, Blue Oyster Cult, and beyond. However, as the book unfolds, the forest gets a bit lost for the trees. Too many chapters devolve into breathless catalogs of forgotten songs by one-hit wonders, which the author concedes had no real influence on pop culture and are included only because they touched on sci-fi themes. (Tellingly, in the acknowledgements, Heller mentions that without his editor, this book would have been an encyclopedia, not a a story -- yet the encyclopedic instinct takes over again and again.) There's a bit of frustrating hair-splitting, as Heller seems determined not to cover songs and bands more influenced by science fiction's sister genre, fantasy; and there are missed opportunities, as Heller barely touches on the many ways rock music's influence affected literary science fiction and beyond. (For example, Mick Farren's peculiar evolution from anarchist rocker to sci-fi visionary is barely touched on, even though many of his works – like JIM MORRISON'S ADVENTURES IN THE AFTERLIFE and THE TEXTS OF FESTIVAL – hinge on rock themes in a science fiction context.) The book also often hesitates to ask what it all means -- what's the importance of this confluence of sci-fi and rock? When sci-fi's imagery became a bigger influence on rock than its futurist storylines, did that reflect the cyberpunkish collapse of future shock into the present moment? I was hoping for a book more like Gary Lachman's TURN OFF YOUR MIND and Peter Bebergal's SEASON OF THE WITCH, which both track how occult ideas influenced rock culture, and keep their eyes on the bigger picture. STRANGE STARS is an admirable, necessary book on a strange confluence of influences, and we can only hope that Heller deepens & expands on his thesis in a future edition or sequel.
• Science fiction and music or sound is a woefully under-developed area of written analysis and history, and while a few existing essays, articles, or books (Eshun's "More Brilliant than the Sun," for one) may turn up the volume of an informed discourse, Jason Heller's "Strange Stars" is like Nigel Tufnel's famous amp plugged into a starship's drive -- it takes us right to 11! This is a thrilling, fast-paced flight through science fiction and the music of the '70s, linked together by the ever-evolving David Bowie, but touching on every genre of music that has some connection to sci-fi. Some artists discussed -- like Bowie, Devo, Meco, Paul Kantner, Gary Numan, Sun Ra, George Clinton and P-Funk, and many more -- are eager to make music a science fictional form in its own right. Others, like Boston or ELO, get caught up in the image of sci-fi on album art and stage shows but without necessarily writing sci-fi songs. But in either case, the author makes the important point that science fiction in image, word and sound, is more than a mere meme but an important means by which we navigate technically accelerated culture.
  
  The book is relatively short, and my only wish is that at times the author had delved more deeply into the philosophical implications of his discoveries and observations before moving on from one artist or album to another. With that said, the book is not only fun and informative but thought-provoking, and its smart focus on the '70s (with brief discussions on either side of the decade) leaves the reader plenty of room to think about ongoing connections between music in its many forms and the field of science fiction as something that goes well beyond pop culture to get at the heart of the human drive through technoculture.
  
  Another bonus? I ended up with a hell of an awesome space disco playlist after reading this! How had I never heard Mandré?
• Damn, what a book. If you thought you knew about the links between sci-fi and pop music, trust me – you didn't. Heller clearly tracks the impact and influence of sci-fi on some of our favorite music, and does so will seamlessly tying this music into important cultural and political touchstones in modern history. Truly a must-read.