Silhouettes and Shadows Paperback – July 15, 2023

Adam Steiner's exploration of Bowie's "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)" brilliantly combines a song-by-song analysis with the artist's philosophy, offering a unique perspective on interpretation. Steiner encourages imaginative leaps, mirroring Bowie's desire for fans to go "wide and deep." His interpretations, often uncovering meanings not explicitly placed by Bowie, showcase the beauty of messy, open-ended creativity.The heart of Steiner's analysis revolves around Bowie's life philosophy — a constant quest to transcend oneself and challenge societal constraints. Drawing connections to specific tracks, like "Up the Hill Backwards," Steiner reveals influences from Dadaism, emphasizing Bowie's message of agency and pushing against limitations.Steiner eloquently captures Bowie's fight against confinement and his embrace of obstacles as a source of creativity. The book portrays Bowie's relentless pursuit of pushing past limits, using adversity as a catalyst for artistic inspiration.Highlighting Bowie's awareness of time, Steiner quotes him on not wasting a single day. Bowie's paradoxical relationship with his past material is explored, emphasizing his continual need for reinvention and refusal to be defined solely by past successes.Through Steiner's lens, readers gain a deeper appreciation for the album and a profound understanding of Bowie's insatiable drive for creative evolution. In conclusion, Adam Steiner's book provides a rich and insightful exploration of "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)," offering a thought-provoking journey into Bowie's artistic philosophy and the enduring legacy of this iconic album.

great book detailing the creation of one of my favorite albums of all time, perfect condition, right off the rack, can't gush enough, highly recommend this vendor

This book manages to capture the feel of listening to Scary Monsters with an intense blending of abstract, almost Burroughsian cut-up imagery and deep details on the mechanics of the recording. A very worthy addition to the long bookshelf of Bowie books!

Steiner’s Silhouette’s and Shadows is another scholastically impressive offering. With comparative cultural history that would be influencing David Bowie in tandem with the artist’s personal biography we watch a precise dissection of the phantasmagoria that is the pop-punk fever dream ‘Scary Monsters and Super Freaks’.After a brief and touching opening on the meaning of this album to Steiner the author, we are heralded by the cacophony of Neoliberal politics that leads us through Bowie’s journey of addiction, a survived assassination attempt, and in-studio accounts of the creative collaborations during the making of the album and those inspired after (including a cantankerous Pete Townshend and a livid Trent Reznor). Each song gets its own chapter that meticulously breaks down the sonic and lyrical elements at play, how they inform the song’s meaning, and the origin of what inspired their place in the album. Richly researched and warranted, Steiner successfully explains the deconstruction at play in the album while doing exactly that – deconstructing it.For the Bowie fan who especially loves the Berlin era of Bowie, this book will serve as means to enrich the journey of those albums. At the end of the experiment in exile was a sense of nothingness for Bowie. In ‘Silhouettes and Shadows’ we read about what that nothing did to him and what he did with it. Steiner paints ‘Scary Monsters and Super Freaks’ an apt album for the era of late-stage capitalism and the struggle for meaning inside it.