Review: 'Iconic Objects of the 1980s'

Like, if I'm gonna read a book called Iconic Objects of the 1980s, I'm not doing it to learn a bunch of stuff like some poindexter. I'm doing it to get totally wigged out by a bodacious buttload of bitchin' eighties junk. I want every page to be a righteous barf-bag of Rubik's Cubes, shoulder pads, Yamaha synths, leg warmers, Casio watches, Swatches, Walkmen, Pac-men, and He-Men. 

Fer sure, there's all that stuff and more on the pages of Agata & Pierre Toromanoff's new book, but when that book is called Iconic Objects of the 1980s, I expect all the pics to be from the eighties! So, like, what's up with that He-Man action figure (don't call it a doll!) from 2002? Last time I checked, 2002 was not in the eighties. What about that bizarre Garbage Pail Kid sticker that looks nothing like a Garbage Pail Kid sticker... you know, the one I could only find on-line on a stock photo site, suggesting that it's probably some kind of bogus fan art or whatever. In fact, a lot of the images used in Iconic Objects of the 1980s are stock photos. That might account for why a shelf of VHS tapes includes Kill Bill, Resident Evil, and some Harry Potter movie. Those are some great movies from the eighties... Not!

Review: 'Orbit: The Seventies'

Orbit: The Seventies is a fairly bizarre attempt to convey the biographies of four key stars of seventies rock in comic form. The weirdness starts on the cover with prominent portraits of Steven Tyler and Bruce Springsteen. Neither singer is a focus of this book. Rather, it tells the tales of David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Keith Richards, and Michael Jackson. 

Orbit begins with a cursory biography of Bowie that often reads more like bullet points than a proper story. The telling is so slapdash that the writer makes it seem as though Bowie divorced his first wife because she attempted suicide. While some panels are well rendered, much of the art looks like it was made with GIMP's cartoon filter.

A lot more thought went into the section on Alice Cooper, which uses kids messing with a Ouija board as a means to relate Cooper's story in a suitably spooky/silly manner and acknowledges when myth and fact get muddled. The inorganic, Saturday Morning cartoon style art is not exceptional, but it is more consistent and individual than the sloppy, generic art in the Bowie chapter. 

The Keith Richards story uses an unspecified overdose as a way into telling his story, although that device is quickly abandoned for another quick bolt through a career too complicated to adequately convey in twenty pages of speech bubbles and pictures.  The grey, smeary art looks like it was rendered with debris from an overused ash tray. It's appropriate to its subject but terribly ugly. 

The weirdest chapter is reserved for the weirdest artist in this book of weird artists. A sort of Jiminy Cricket character narrates a hagiography that outright dismisses all charges that Michael Jackson was a child molester. It would have been more moral and truthful to take a less firm stance on that touchy and controversial subject, but I guess it's naive to think that any life can be accurately and satisfactorily captured in a twenty page comic.

Review: 'Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year'

Judged solely on the quality of its music, 1984 wasn’t necessarily the best year of the eighties. It did have an unusually high number of blockbuster releases. While 1982 could claim Thriller, and 1983 had Synchronicity, An Innocent Man, and Pyromania, 1984 was the year of such single-spewing juggernauts as the Footloose soundtrack, Born in the U.S.A., Eliminator, Sports, Can’t Slow Down, Like a Virgin, Private Dancer, She’s So Unusual, Purple Rain, and yes, 1984. So you can’t fault Michaelangelo Matos for making the year the subject of his new book Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year. 

Review: 'Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks' (New Edition)

Prince’s genius made him the most exciting and original artist of the eighties, but his mystique is what made him such a fascinating star. In his 2011 biography, Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks, Ronin Ro struck the right balance by giving readers enough information to lead us through the timeline of Prince’s life without removing the mask completely. Perhaps this was a conscious decision by the author. Perhaps Ro simply couldn’t crack that deliberately veiled persona, leaving quite a bit of Prince’s behavior—particularly during his apparently one-sided war with Warner Brothers during his Love Symbol/Slave phase or when he skipped out on the U.S.A. for Africa recording session to go to a Mexican restaurant—seeming random and impulsive. The author sprints through the artist’s early life. By page eleven, Prince has already quit his first band and is prepping his solo career. That may be frustrating for some readers, but fans who understand what a private person Prince was will appreciate the distance.

Yet, Inside the Music and the Masks isn’t at all unsatisfying, offering the broad strokes of Prince’s career peppered with enough odd anecdotes to make the trip as fun as a ride on the back of that purple Prince cycle. We learn of his friendly rivalry with Michael Jackson that climaxed with the Purple One bonking the Prince of Pop in the nuts with a ping-pong ball. We learn of Prince’s calamitous impromptu appearance on stage with Jackson and James Brown and his hilarious mockery of Bruce Springsteen during a shared performance. Less humorously, we learn that Prince had suffered an overdose on drink and pills (aspirin,of all things) as long ago as 1996, though the author typically offers no real insight into what exactly went wrong. In the wake of Prince’s death, this will be something a lot of readers need.

The latest edition of Inside the Music and the Masks adds a new afterword to address the end of Prince’s career, but this new chapter is even more fast-paced than the rest of the book. Ro covers the last six years of Prince’s life in as many pages, focusing more on the negative media reaction to the artist’s death than on how or why it happened. This new chapter offers a bit of a skewed version of the aftermath of April’s tragic events. I read quite a bit about Prince’s death, and the majority of it was respectful and not overly speculative. I certainly hadn’t read any of the rumors that he had been dying of AIDS or that he’d been reduced to a “pauper” that Ro read. I’m sure such crackpot theories are out there, but by mainly focusing on the rumors, Ro gives the impression that such theories were in the majority. Consequently, the tone of his afterword is much more bitter than the evenhanded book he’d published five years ago, reserving sharp words for fans and journalists alike. A new introductory chapter is similarly off-putting as Ro chides those who criticized the first edition of his book, mocks Prince’s fashion sense, crows about how the fact that he isn’t a big Prince fan makes him a worthy biographer, and really tests his readers’ gag reflexes by signing off as “Hardcore King.” Readers who purchase the latest edition of Inside the Music and the Masks would do well to skip the arrogant and unnecessary introductory chapter and manage their expectations when reading the new final one. Otherwise, Ronin Ro’s book is still a very, very good Prince biography.

Review: 'Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters with David Bowie'

David Bowie was the first, possibly the last, major pop star in danger of being typecast as a Martian. As the man with two-tone eyes and painted face who made “Space Oddity”, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, and The Man who Fell to Earth, Bowie has often seemed something not quite—or perhaps more than—human. He was just as aware of this stereotype as anyone, turning down a role in an adaptation of Stranger in a Stranger Land for fear it would consign him to outer space once and for all.

Based on how he expresses himself across the interviews Sean Egan collects in Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters with David Bowie, it must have all been a little strange for the man who was so clearly playing roles as any actor would. Never does he put on otherworldly airs: not during his ethereal Man of Words/Man of Music phase, not during his “magicks”-obsessed “fascist” period, not even during his coked-up Berlin days. In fact, he was at his most humble and most self-doubting at the beginning of his career, which isn’t surprising considering how many false starts he had. His hard-R&B mod bands never took off. His Anthony Newley/psychedelic song-and-dance man persona of 1966/1967 led nowhere. By the time he hit with “Space Oddity” in 1969, which is where Bowie on Bowie begins, he’d had enough failures to keep his ego in check. He is never overly impressed with his triumphs, nor is he exceptionally crushed by his failures (he is confident that Tonight and Never Let Me Down had their share of good songs sunk by bad production and only speaks of Tin Machine as a positive experience). Bowie is also the rare celebrity interviewee who seems almost as interested in his interviewers as they are in him. He shares the hot seat with Bruce Springsteen, Brian Eno and Suede’s Brett Anderson, and in one instance, actually plays host to fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Perhaps a more accurate title would have been Conversations with David Bowie. Throughout these pieces, our star is open (about drugs, sex, his family, his beliefs, etc.), humble, gracious, charming, and thoughtful, often quite in contrast to the people who interview him, who tiresomely fixate on aspects of his career that no longer seem very important at all (his silly—and brief—flirtation with fascism; his sexual preferences; his run of bum albums in the eighties).

Egan selects his pieces wisely. While his similar book on Keith Richards favored the guitarist’s late career lopsidedly, Bowie on Bowie gives equal space to the seventies, eighties, nineties, and 2000s (ending abruptly in 2003 shortly before Bowie decided to retire from doing press). And unlike Keith Richards on Keith Richards, which basically confirms much of what we already assumed about that old pirate, Bowie on Bowie accomplishes something more meaningful by changing our perceptions. And hasn’t that always been the essence of Bowie’s art?