Reading Brian Johnston and Susan Mackey-Kallis’s Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music of U2: A Love Story is an uplifting experience. Building on work in fan culture studies, Johnston and Mackey-Kallis offer a compelling account of U2’s musical biography while intertwining autoethnographic insights drawn from their experiences as long-time fans of the band. The result is a powerful love story, both of fans’ love for the artists who move them and of a band whose entire musical career has illustrated the inseparable and liminal nature of three types of love (eros, agape, and amor). Together, the authors vividly illustrate how U2 and its fans travel together on a quest for “unity and social justice in the world.”

Roger C. Aden, Ohio University

Johnston and Mackey-Kallis deliver an original, compelling, and intimate analysis of U2 across the last four decades. An essential book for scholars of music, mythology, politics, and popular culture.

Tony Adams, Bradley University

Johnston and Mackey-Kallis’ Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music of U2: A Love Story is much more than an academic study of the super-band U2 and its fan community. It is a deeply moving meditation on the complex character of love – one that deftly draws critical inspiration from psychoanalysis, medium theory, and media erotics to illuminate the ways that the music, at its best, stirs the soul, creates community, and calls on all of us to realize our better natures. Full of passion, pleasure, and insight, U2: A Love Story invites readers to fall in love with a band that has left an indelible mark on both rock music and its fans.

Brian L. Ott, Texas Tech University

It is rare to see a critical analysis of popular culture in which love is the organizing principle, and for this alone Johnston and Mackey-Kallis' book is distinctive and meaningful. They take great care to explicate the ways in which agape, eros, and amor are articulated by the Irish rock band in their songs, music videos, social action and performances . . . Along with its distinctive organizing principle, the book's most important characteristic is its transmodern perspective. This philosophical viewpoint argues that the interconnectedness of all things can and should be considered in the analysis of cultural phenomenon. This perspective, which reclaims the spiritual, also allows for the symbolic, the mysterious, the archetypal, and the transcendent. As transmodern critics, Johnston and Mackey-Kallis aim to interpret the songs, performances, music videos, and social action of U2 so to articulate the ways in which the band co-constructs interconnectedness with its fan communities.

Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies