David Bowie and the Art of Music Video

Lisa Perrott is Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is co-editor, with Holly Rogers and Carol Vernallis, of the Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media, and the collected volume Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Lisa is also co-editor, with Ana Cristina Mendes, of David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom. Her interests include music video, animation, documentary and transmedia, with an emphasis on the relations between sound, music and visual media. Lisa is currently completing her second Bloomsbury monograph David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video (1984-2016 and Beyond).

• List of figuresAcknowledgementsPreface1. The Art of Music Video2. Traversing Stage and Screen3. Opening the Third Eye4. Painting the Truth5. Future Nostalgia6. EclosionEpilogue BibliographyIndex

In this wonderful book, Lisa enables us to see and hear the remarkable assemblages that we find in David Bowie’s time-travelling audio-visual work. Art and culture, the aesthetics of fashion and performance, and the politics of race and otherness, are the inter-planetary orbits that are deftly explored through close examination of Bowie’s television, promotional and music video performances. Bowie emerges as a figure who remade himself and recast the artforms that he visited – always alien-like, in flux, thirsting for water that would replenish him and us. A must-read addition to the literature on the Starman who killed and saved the world.