“Daphne Brooks remains one of our most thoughtful and incisive thinkers when it comes to music and its impacts on corners of culture that might otherwise go overlooked. This book is rich with research, but even richer with language, and delivery of information that is warm, inviting, and feels like you are bearing witness to someone, eager and excited to share a world with you.”
- Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance
“Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign offers an interdisciplinary deep dive into two iconic musicians who died within months of each other. Mixing a rich variety of formats, including critical essays, interviews, and ‘critical karaoke,’ a who’s who of pop writers and scholars tackle the lives and loss of these two figures. There are no books to my knowledge that offer this depth and breadth of thinking about David Bowie and Prince, or indeed about popular music in general.”
- Evelyn McDonnell, editor of Women Who Rock: Bessie to Beyoncé. Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl
"Rife with rigorous analysis, careful scholarship, and a few delightfully quirky sections. . . ." -