Not a study of David Bowie's album of the same name, Mark Duffett and Jon Hackett's Scary Monsters is a sweeping thematic exploration of popular music culture's interface with a range of figures from pop culture and particularly American film. It provides a doomscrolling or dark web version of popular music culture that is miles from peace, love and understanding. In Scary Monsters, pop is associated with paedophilia, hip hop with horror and rock star celebrity with murder, while masculinity is almost always toxic. The collection of set pieces in the volume – five chapters by Duffett and three others along with an introduction by Hackett – is also strangely, perversely entertaining and seems weirdly suited for our viral, pox-ridden times in the era of post-truth.
The field of monster studies tackles a vast range of concerns from alterity to abjection, in an array of multimedia forms, usually read as manifestations of a culture's anxieties. Its theoretical free association broadens the already broadly defined gothic studies to include cultural and postcolonial and other inter- and multi-disciplinary areas from whiteness to gender studies. In theoretical terms, monster studies is a self-consciously assembled ‘hybrid’ (Cohen Reference Cohen and Cohen1996, p. 3). Scary Monsters offers eight very different case studies, focusing on the contexts of popular music – its creation, distribution, interpretation, and mythology – rather than on the music itself, although it sometimes draws tenuous connections, such as the claim that the public's fascination with John Lennon's murder ‘strangely parallels an interest in artistic intent’ (p. 119). The concern regarding masculinity's juxtaposition with monstrosity indicated in the subtitle largely trails off after the theoretical attention afforded it in the introduction, and its connection with individual cases sometimes becomes at best implicit, as Hackett acknowledges (p. 21). The account of glam rock's much-hyped gender plasticity, for example, although usefully tracing glam's relationship to punk and funk, largely overlooks glam's posturing as shock rock, calculated to garner attention rather than to perform the work of advocacy.
Scary Monsters generally is deft in establishing the radically different historical and cultural contexts of its case studies as well as in negotiating diffuse theoretical frames, although there is perhaps inevitably a certain tendency towards homogenisation and simplification in grouping diverse stories under a single rubric, however elastic. In places, ever-widening cultural and theoretical contextualisations overwhelm the specifics of the cases and, as Hackett notes in his handling of Gravediggaz, these may become overburdened ‘with rather too general cultural, political and economic frameworks’ (p. 138). Perhaps inevitably, too, universalising monstrosity encourages ahistorical or transhistorical generalisation. Lennon's murder as a result is presented as being monstrous owing to a reading of its cause in the identity confusion and shifting love/hate complexity of fandom's regard for a celebrity idol. The psycho killer becomes a victim of entrapment in fandom's house of mirrors.
Overlooked here is the monstrosity of virtually universal access to guns as an indirect legacy of slavery and terror at the revenge of the repressed, the systematic dismantling of institutional supports for those facing the challenges of mental illness, and the elevation of murder itself as a category of fame democratically accessible to all. The discussion of the distorted reasoning behind Lennon's murder, from the perspective of the now-celebrity murderer himself, tends however unwittingly to demonise the criminally insane and also to fetishise the murderer as a fascinating, self-interpreting psychological complex. It also overlooks Lennon's naive embrace of America's universal friendliness and of New York's apparent acceptance of the famous in its midst, and hence Lennon's ignoring of security in a global city. Similarly, the grotesque marketing of the physical detritus of the murder scene, as Duffett shows, has been partly driven by the fact that the holders of items – such as the copy of Double Fantasy signed by Lennon for his murderer and copies of the murderer's letters – are pressured to sell because they live in a country without universal health care and face bankruptcy when they contract cancer (p. 118). Another grotesque aspect of Lennon's post-assassination reputation not considered here is the bizarre refiguring of Lennon's mythology that would re-cast him as a working class genius whose rebellious avant-garde aesthetic was limited by being in the Beatles (Hagan Reference Hagan2017, pp. 397–401).
Three chapters examine monstrous, Svengali-like authority figures. Chapter two considers the juxtaposition of John and Alan Lomax's parading of Lead Belly with the racist containment of African savagery in King Kong. This exploration largely overlooks the economic motive behind the post 1870s’ revival of segregation and its institutionalisation in widespread incarceration via the establishment of the penitentiary industrial complex. The Lomaxes’ importance in popular music history gets short shrift. They archived disappearing vernacular traditions, and Alan Lomax directly enabled Bob Dylan's encounter with country blues. Lomax would pocket some of the royalties for ‘Goodnight, Irene’, but he used the money to collect international folk music, directly influencing Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain. While John Lomax certainly did fashion himself the anthropologist as hero, he lived in a rabidly racist America and interpreting him as in any way ‘monstrous’ seems a distorted oversimplification, as Duffett admits (pp. 65–67).
The monstrous designation seems to be on safer ground with Elvis Presley's vampiric manager Colonel Parker, the focus of Baz Luhrmann's recent Elvis biopic. While Parker himself promoted this representation, he also succumbed to the danger open to all managers of celebrity clients: craving more than attributed celebrity by association. Parker would become a much darker villain after the bathetic death of the bloated, drug-addicted Vegas Elvis. The monstrous circumstances of perhaps the first really famous example of indirect pharmaceutical murder, possibly enacted earlier in the demise of Nick Drake, are not part of Scary Monsters’ discussion. An analysis of the poster child of entertainment industry child abusers, Jimmy Savile, closes the collection. Despite persistent rumours, he was celebrated by everyone from the Beatles to Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher. Duffett details Savile's remarkable career as celebrity philanthropist in demonic clown garb and his enduring fame as a teflon pedophile. A very different perspective emerges in an account by Maggie O'Farrell, who refuses to name Savile in her autobiographical I Am, I Am, I Am (O'Farrell Reference O'Farrell2019, pp. 241–4).
Scary Monsters’ broad net inevitably leaves open for further exploration a range of monstrosities such as the Tait-LaBianca murders (rejected rock star launching a race war), the role of organised crime in the music business, the grotesque spectacle of beloved bands joining in vindictive renditions of ‘Sue Me, Sue You Blues’, and suicide and accidental overdose as accepted occupational hazards. While there may be earlier preliminary interventions applying monstrosity studies to popular music culture, Scary Monsters is in many ways an important pioneering venture, setting out broad parameters and launching a new programme for further work.
