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A review by jessferg
Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded by Jason Heller
5.0
This is fantastic.
I was a child in the '70s and I am familiar with much of the music and books Heller discusses (not so much on movies although I do know Star Wars and Star Trek which was more than enough to get me through) so I figured this would be a fun "trip down memory lane," as it were.
Nope. Not one piece of nostalgic fluff in sight! (That's not a bad thing, in case you aren't sure.) I was so absorbed with the connections I hadn't considered (or wasn't aware of) that it was as if I'd never heard/read/seen/lived it. To have a new view of David Bowie's Space Oddity, for example, just seems impossible. It's decades old, overplayed, clearly in the cannon of songs that pretty much everyone knows, and yet here I am, listening to it with new ears and new insights. (The old lady in me is supremely happy about this since she will do something drastic if she has to hear one more auto-tuned piece of shit while searching for new music, but we'll talk about that some other time.)
That said, the list of unknown (to me) musicians and songs is embarrassingly long. I can't even begin to imagine how Heller found them all (it must be a personal passion.) Even more impressive is that despite the overlap of themes, topics, and names, despite the levels of influence from authors to musicians and back again, the timetable is seamless. Rather than feeling insulting, repetition is relevant and short, assuming the reader can remember something said twenty pages ago and be reminded with a little "shorthand."
I'm making it sound too academic Really, this is a book I could not put down. It's encyclopedic in the content but it is also compellingly written. And did I mention it's fascinating?
Bowie, of course, takes center stage but we also see a good bit about Jefferson Airplane/Starship, P-Funk, Hawkwind and some other biggies I'm sure I'm forgetting. You're probably saying to yourself, "Yeah, but I bet he doesn't cover (insert obscure '70s band here)." If they wrote a sci-fi song, I'd put good money down that you're wrong. The only two omissions that surprised me were Frank Zappa and the Residents but neither of them could, in any reality, be considered pop.
I ended up with three pages of notes (mostly stuff I need to listen to, watch, and/or read) and can't stop obsessing over the topic so I think this has become a long-term commitment for me. I doubt it would be easy for anyone to read it and forget it.
Apparently it is good form to tell you that I received a pre-pub of this book for free, but as I like to point out, I get books from my library for free all the time, too, and you just need to look at my reviews to see that it doesn't seem to influence me.
I was a child in the '70s and I am familiar with much of the music and books Heller discusses (not so much on movies although I do know Star Wars and Star Trek which was more than enough to get me through) so I figured this would be a fun "trip down memory lane," as it were.
Nope. Not one piece of nostalgic fluff in sight! (That's not a bad thing, in case you aren't sure.) I was so absorbed with the connections I hadn't considered (or wasn't aware of) that it was as if I'd never heard/read/seen/lived it. To have a new view of David Bowie's Space Oddity, for example, just seems impossible. It's decades old, overplayed, clearly in the cannon of songs that pretty much everyone knows, and yet here I am, listening to it with new ears and new insights. (The old lady in me is supremely happy about this since she will do something drastic if she has to hear one more auto-tuned piece of shit while searching for new music, but we'll talk about that some other time.)
That said, the list of unknown (to me) musicians and songs is embarrassingly long. I can't even begin to imagine how Heller found them all (it must be a personal passion.) Even more impressive is that despite the overlap of themes, topics, and names, despite the levels of influence from authors to musicians and back again, the timetable is seamless. Rather than feeling insulting, repetition is relevant and short, assuming the reader can remember something said twenty pages ago and be reminded with a little "shorthand."
I'm making it sound too academic Really, this is a book I could not put down. It's encyclopedic in the content but it is also compellingly written. And did I mention it's fascinating?
Bowie, of course, takes center stage but we also see a good bit about Jefferson Airplane/Starship, P-Funk, Hawkwind and some other biggies I'm sure I'm forgetting. You're probably saying to yourself, "Yeah, but I bet he doesn't cover (insert obscure '70s band here)." If they wrote a sci-fi song, I'd put good money down that you're wrong. The only two omissions that surprised me were Frank Zappa and the Residents but neither of them could, in any reality, be considered pop.
I ended up with three pages of notes (mostly stuff I need to listen to, watch, and/or read) and can't stop obsessing over the topic so I think this has become a long-term commitment for me. I doubt it would be easy for anyone to read it and forget it.
Apparently it is good form to tell you that I received a pre-pub of this book for free, but as I like to point out, I get books from my library for free all the time, too, and you just need to look at my reviews to see that it doesn't seem to influence me.