Forever Stardust: David Bowie across the Universe by Will Brooker (review)

This Is Not a Book Review

The title to Will Brooker’s fascinating exploration of David Bowie, Forever Stardust: David Bowie across the Universe, carefully sets up the course that the book will map and charter.¹ There is a central concern with the thickness of time and the ways it bends and arcs, and lives in and through eternal stars, allowing us—fans, viewers, listeners— to experience temporality in new and provocative ways, no longer simply linear but irregular and critical. As Brooker finds, Bowie is a mixture of past and present tense that materializes and memorializes time through the echoes and allusions shaping his body of work. This is, in one sense, the forever of the book’s title: “People—characters, personae, selves—die throughout Bowie’s work, but they die hard, and they stubbornly return. . . .They refuse to stay down, they are brought back, and they live on.”²

In this monograph, Brooker is also clearly addressing the vexing question of the identity politics of stardom and the personae that run across its retinas and tongues. Bowie’s polysemy speaks in multiple images and sounds; he offers himself up as queer, alien, marginal, taboo, aloof, alone. The book is insightfully mapped across the floating if intersecting star images of David Bowie, who appears deliberately divided as he navigates the public world and faux publicity that feed him, but who through such affecting and effective famed transgressions, “transformed the lives of people.”³

Finally, the book is keenly engaged with the near and far proximities of space (and place) that our stars are intimately connected with. London, Los Angeles, and Berlin are spatial metaphors for the way Bowie creatively signifies and is consumed. For Brooker’s analysis of David Bowie, of course, space is earthly and godly, national and transnational, of this world and both not of it and far from it. Bowie exists in a universe of universals, where “even in his everyday encounters, he came across as other-worldly, as inhuman, as alien.”⁴

In a broader sense, David Bowie’s artistic and cultural status is culturally imagined to be forever, where he is invited to exist in a starstruck canon of artistic greatness. As Brooker eloquently outlines, the critical and creative analysis of such canonization presents one not only with a compelling framework for better understanding Bowie, his “author-function,” but also with the cultural world that has made him so, and that in turn fashions the matter and minds of ordinary people. As Brooker concludes, disentangling the threads of Bowie’s oeuvre: “David Bowie did not exist; he was a character and concept David Jones invented and shared with us. . . . As such, nothing has changed. David Jones is gone. David Bowie through those who continue to cherish him, can live forever.”⁵

However, as Brooker also powerfully suggests, this reading of Bowie is not meant to be a cleanly analytical deconstruction, undertaken by a detached surgeon with scalpel in hand, hovering over a neatly preserved cadaver. Rather, he suggests that because of the rich archeological matrices that make up David Bowie, there is a need to recognize the personal and subjective in the analysis that one offers:

Traditional criticism seeks and pretends to find an objective vantage point, “outside” the text. But with a matrix or mosaic of fragmented narratives, recurring motifs and cross-references that . . . extend from the central (already-contradictory) figure of Bowie backwards into the archive of cultural history he draws upon, and outwards into the multitude of texts he has himself influenced, how can we locate a position outside the text?⁶

Forever Stardust is lovingly written from within the subject(ive) discourses it addresses, and it gathers its strength, in part, from its dedication to the subject. Its success can be measured in the attention to detail, to biography, and to the seamless navigation of the body of research work that exists on Bowie and that is deftly drawn on in the...