Overview
Everyone Says “Hi”: The Fandom of David Bowie explores the way that fans reflect upon their identification with, and connection to, this seminal figure of contemporary art and culture. Built from the stories and memories that self-defined Bowie fans shared with us, the book is a journeyed account of individual life stories and collective fan practices, revealing the way Bowie existed as a figure of renewal and redemption, lining these collated recollections with hopeful, desiring and enchanted reflections. Everyone Says “Hi”: The Fandom of David Bowie also critically assesses this fandom , showing how Bowie navigated individual traumas and loneliness , his outsider status resonating with those on the margins of society, marginalised often because of their gender , sexuality , race and ethnicity.
In this book we seek to find Bowie in the streams of fandom that swell around him, including harvesting nostalgic fragments, recollections (via personal interviews), memorabilia , diaries, letter writing, collective and communal gatherings, and artistic impersonation. Within the context of contemporary changes to the media landscape, the book will also assess the nature of the present digital conversations taking place about David Bowie and the fan interactions that emerge on social media . Finally, and perhaps rather uniquely, the book assesses Bowie’s own fandom and the fandom of the authors, who draw upon auto-ethnography to make personal sense of what he means to them. By the end of the book we will have seen the remarkable influence that David Bowie has exerted over those who gladly call themselves his space cadets.
Mixing Methods, Theories and Stories
The idea for this book started by way of a chance conversation before a dreary work meeting, where we discovered we were both Bowie fans and agreed on how little there was written about him at the time , particularly from a fan’s perspective. In a very direct way, this conversation and the route it took mirror the mixed methodological and theoretical approach we have since taken here. First, we began our conversation with our very own fan stories , in effect adopting the storying the self approach to memorial work. This approach draws on a,
Model of the self as ‘storied’ and of culture as both moulded and moulding through the personal stories of individuals… It extends the idea of ‘culture’ and media beyond the organizational structures of, say, the culture industries, broadcasting or the published media, into the everyday modes in which we express and construct our lives in personal terms, telling our own stories. (Finnegan 1997: 69)
The emphasis on ‘writing the personal’ (Probyn 2011) has also been central to the epistemological and political interventions of popular culture theorists and those interested in ‘hearing’ the stories of the marginalised and politically disenfranchised. Connected to this approach is the recognition that researchers also have stories to share and in a way that democratises the empirical process—no one story is more important than the other—and through shared storytelling , experiential equivalences and thematic ‘clusters’ emerge. Through storying the self , we find out about how people directly experience their own, often marginalised, subject positions, and within this context, we found out how important David Bowie is to the modern narratives of selfhood our respondents shared with us.
Second, our different academic backgrounds meant that we approached the question of fandom through different critical entrance points, recognising and embracing these differences to foster an innovative mixed methods approach. However, this fusion approach to the research design is not simply to do with having both qualitative and quantitative data at our disposal but through the mechanisms that data are collected, organised and interpreted. Through this ‘triangulation ’ or ‘multiple operationalism’, we follow Denzin (1978) who identified four types of interlocking data gathering and interpretation:
- a.data triangulation or the use of a variety of sources in a study;
- b.investigator triangulation or the use of several different researchers;
- c.theory triangulation or the use of multiple perspectives and theories to interpret the results of our study; and
- d.methodological triangulation or use of multiple methods to study Bowie fandom .
The project design of Everyone Says “Hi”: The Fandom of David Bowie involved five central data gathering methods. First, self-defined Bowie fans were asked to respond to an online questionnaire. These fans were recruited from within our peer network, through wider fan networks , and by a call to participate, circulated across media, screen and cultural studies listservs. Entitled, Turn to Face the Strange: The Fandom of David Bowie, the online questionnaire was composed of 16 questions and offered in both English and Japanese languages (see Appendix A). Answers to the questions produced both qualitative and quantitative data (see Appendix B). The questions were designed to elicit both factual and descriptive responses and to allow and enable participants to emotively story their memories, recollections and interests. For example, ‘Question 15. Do you have a cherished piece of David Bowie memorabilia ?’ was designed to not only have respondents recall these favourite items but to allow us to gauge the level of affective attachment they had through the way they remembered them—the word choices, the scene setting and the personalisation. The question would also allow us to count ‘items’ if we so desired to see if repeated forms of memorabilia were cherished.
Second, focus groups were held in seven international locations during 2016: Melbourne (February), Tokyo (June), London (June), Amsterdam (June), New York (July), Berlin (September) and Lisbon (September). Each focus group comprised of between 5 and 30 people and lasted for approximately 60 minutes. Participants were invited to respond to questions about David Bowie’s star image , music and art, and the role it plays (has played) in their lives. Participants were also asked to bring a special piece of memorabilia that they were invited to speak to, but not compelled to discuss. For the London , New York and Tokyo focus groups , participants were drawn from those who had previously completed the online survey and who had indicated a willingness to do so, furnishing us with ‘deeper’ or ‘extended’ data . For the Amsterdam and Lisbon focus groups , these took place in 2016 as part of academic conferences: the former the 3rd International Celebrity Studies Conference: Authenticating Celebrity (28–30 June) at the University of Amsterdam , and the latter the David Bowie Interart|text|media CEAUL/ULICES–University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies Conference (22–24 September) in Portugal. The participants for ...