When Daphne A. Brooks first heard that the musical artist Prince had died, she didn’t believe it was true.
A reporter from the NPR show “Marketplace” called her with the news and asked if she, as a prolific writer on music, might agree to an interview.
“I actually hung up on them,” said Brooks, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Black Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
It was April 2016, just three months after the equally unexpected death of David Bowie. Two seismic losses in popular music culture coming so close together seemed unfathomable.
But after a Yale colleague confirmed in a text that Prince had indeed died, Brooks reconnected with “Marketplace” and provided an interview later that day.
Excerpts from Yale faculty contributors to the anthology “Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince”
“It’s a song that you cannot not love for — as advertised — its oddity. Acid guitar runs; strings; woodwinds; dialogue; an epic narrative line; a thoroughly domesticated and sweet sensibility, despite its galactic reach and its darker notes — ‘Tell my wife I love her very much.’”
— Matthew Frye Jacobson on David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (1969)
“‘Modern Love’ was an immediate hit, propelled by its pulse that made everyone want to move. This isn’t because it was fresh. It was a composition of callbacks: to kick beats and tenor sax solos, to old-time rock and roll, sixties harmonies, and doo-wop, to Little Richard and ‘My Fair Lady.’ ‘Modern Love’ succeeded because of how much wisdom it remembered.”
— Kathryn Lofton on David Bowie’s “Modern Love” (1983)
“‘Purple Rain’ was the first album I bought with my own money, and I kept up with almost every release well into his ‘Art Official Age.’ I made a pilgrimage to Paisley Park [his Minnesota estate] to lay a flower after he passed. And yet, in the scales of Princely ardor, my devotion hardly holds a candle to the true devotees.”
— Tavia Nyong’o on Prince’s influence
“To reimagine Prince with Sheila E. is to honor him — as a figure whose gift was not one of discovery or innate genius, but one labored over, borrowed, and very much influenced by fellow collaborators and travelers such as Sheila E. This is all to say: Let’s begin at another point in the record to ask not what did Prince do for Sheila E., but what did Sheila E. make possible for Prince?”
— Alexandra T. Vazquez in the introduction to her Q&A with Sheila E.
“As in any tradition of knowledge, there are two modes of advancing the musical language. The first is to work methodically, within the established system of rules and procedures. The second, more radical mode is to advance the language by forcing the system to operate under a different logic. Like Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, Brian Eno, Mick Jones, Freddie Mercury, Roger Waters, and other artistically inclined misfits, rebels, and ne’er-do-wells of 1960s England, this was the path Jones [Bowie’s given surname] chose.”
— Michael Veal on Bowie’s guitar experimentalism
“‘Fashion’ continued Bowie’s ongoing interest in the fine line between nightlife transgression and fascist repression, a recurring theme throughout his oeuvre. ‘Fashion’ was a New Wave anthem for downtown [New York’s] antifashion attitude that rejected the Beautiful People narcissism of the Studio 54 scene. Its music video is a bit of ephemera from the downtown scene.”
— Shane Vogel on David Bowie’s “Fashion” (1980)
“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.”
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).
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.
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.
Chapters include tributes to specific songs and the memories they evoke, 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.”
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.”
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.”
“Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince” (Duke University Press).
