Just in time for the upcoming 80th birthday of pop and LGBTQ+ icon Cher, a new book is dedicating itself to one of the defining milestones of her career. As Bloomsbury Publishing announced, on November 12 the world’s first book devoted entirely to the creation of her 1998 worldwide hit and dance classic “Believe” will be published (Amazon affiliate link). The English-language work is written by the renowned music journalist and author Lior Phillips.
When “Believe” blew up the charts in the late 1990s, the pop industry was heavily shaped by youth obsession and blatant age discrimination against women. Cher marked a monumental comeback at 52 and set a historic record: she became the oldest woman to top the American Billboard Hot 100. The song also reached No. 1 in Germany and in more than 20 other countries. The book examines the track as a musical stand against traditional age- and gender-boundaries.
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For the research, Phillips conducted exclusive interviews with central figures in music history. Among them is Dr. Andy Hildebrand, a mathematician and engineer who invented Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction technology that gave the vocal effect on Cher’s voice its radical and at the time entirely new use. This approach profoundly shaped the song and laid the groundwork for entire genres of modern dance-pop and hip-hop.
Phillips intertwines the story of technological innovation in music with a social analysis of Cher’s exceptional status in pop culture. The song is also celebrated as a queer anthem. Even then, the track traveled in queer clubs worldwide with its pulsating beats and became a universal anthem of resilience and emancipation. Cher herself has often stressed in performances that the queer community is the one group that never abandoned her—even when the mainstream music industry had long written her off as uncool or a fading icon.
