Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth

by Karen Kelly (Editor), Evelyn McDonnell (Editor)

Music industry insiders on the nature of fame

Our cultural darlings make music; we make them mythic. Every musical genre begets a community of listeners, performers, and critics, and quite often those categories are blurred. From the principled punk refusal of celebrity to hip-hop's celebration of its power, the music world is self-obsessed.

Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky assembles scholars, music writers, industry workers, and musicians, who offer a range of opinions and experience of the nature of fame. The collection focuses on commerce, the crowd, performance and image, history and memory, and romance. Contributors discuss black women icons, love-songs, the legacy of the blues, the image of the tortured rock star, MTV, the politics of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the joy of line-dancing, and more.

The contributors are James Bernard, Anthony DeCurtis, Katherine Dieckmann, Chuck Eddy, Paul Gilroy, Daniel Glass, Lawrence Grossberg, Jessica Hagedorn, Kathleen Hanna, James Hannaham, Dave Hickey, Jon Langford, Greil Marcus, Angela McRobbie, Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), Barbara O'Dair, Ann Powers, Toshi Reagon, Simon Reynolds, Robert Santelli, Jon Savage, Danyel Smith, Arlene Stein, Deena Weinstein, and Ellen Willis.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academic

400 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1998

Reviews

[Kurt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book full of essays on how and why rock music resonates with so many people. Archetypes of power, glory and transcedence all come into play, and how our culture pushes deification on our stars, creating heroes of mythical proportions. The best articles are written by the non-academics, IMO. The academic essays sometimes seem to be stretching, pushing and pulling to make their points, which just feels forced, or worse, boring and dry. Something writing about Rock music should never be. A lot of good points are made throughout, which makes it a worthwhile read, even if you disagree with them. I enjoyed Kathleen Hanna's article the most. She's a smart one, that Kathleen.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a surprising book. I bought it for Greil Marcus's introduction - "All this Useless Beauty" - that probed the nature of Elvis Costello's songwriting and voice. That formed a great introduction, but the rest of the monograph is a deliciously tortured book. Musicians, rock journalists and academics spend their chapters writing past each other.

The focus on memory, myth, legend and history in popular music is a rich terrain. While there are weak chapters in this edited collection, James Hannaham's chapter on Goth and Jon Savage's "Sound of the Crowd" are worth further attention both inside and outside popular music studies.

This was an unusual book, and productive in its intellectual dissonance.

A note for GoodReads, it was edited by Karen Kelly and Evelyn McDonnell.

[Sophie Swengel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of the true curios of rock anthologies I’ve come across. It’s pretty obvious that this book’s articles were written in haste for some deadline pertaining to the conference it stems on. Ellen Willis and Angela McRobbie, being two of the most fascinating female voices on culture, expectedly hold their own within such a crunch, but most of the others flounder. Arlene Stein’s promotion of one of rock’s most lasting myths — that The Who are, as Townshend himself said in a recent Quadrophenia-adjacent interview, “a band for boys” — is accidentally quite charming. And Kathleen Hanna’s mission statement, both a true relic of the riot girl heyday and oddly relevant given her cultural resurgence a few years back and more recent embrace of Rock Hall sponsorship, is as self-indulgent as you’d assume it to be. While collage-like formats defined much of nineties culture, from zines made in bedrooms to professionally shot surrealist music videos broadcast on 120 Minutes, this book would have benefited from a tighter focus on its supposed primary theme, which is that of myth. Some of the more diaristic contributions, such as Toshi Rogon’s great “Freedom Songs, Love Songs”, are interesting, but most fall flat due to this lack of a real center. What individual myths are these essays trying to dispel, really? What can change in society as a result of the decadent gushing and chiding snark-quips, or, alternatively, aca-bytes that appear promising but go nowhere because they last just four pages? For most of them I cannot tell. Dispelling myths obliquely is one thing; confronting them directly is another.