Glam Rock

Explores the many ways glam rock paved the way for new explorations of identity in terms of gender, sexuality, and performance

NPR Great Read of 2016 From the acclaimed author of Rip It Upand Start Again and Retromania—“the foremost popular music critic of this era (Times Literary Supplement)—comes the definitive cultural history of glam and glitter rock, celebrating its outlandish fashion and outrageous stars, including David Bowie and Alice Cooper, and tracking its vibrant legacy in contemporary pop. Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late Sixties, glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds takes you on a wild cultural tour through the early Seventies, a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up, thrilling music and larger-than-life personas. Shock and Awe offers a fresh, in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon, placing it the wider Seventies context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genre’s major themes—stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse—Reynolds tracks glam’s legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from Eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to twenty-first century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga. Shock and Awe shows how the original glam artists’ obsessions with fame, extreme fashion, and theatrical excess continue to reverberate through contemporary pop culture.

Drawing on the collections of the V&A, Glam Rock narrates the story of glam and explores its impact on fashion, theatre and film. In the early 1970s, glam rock changed the face of popular culture in Britain and, against a backdrop of a nation racked by economical and social crises, its flamboyancy and theatricality provided an excuse for a party and an escapist dream for musicians and fans alike. British acts like David Bowie, Roxy Music, T. Rex and Mott the Hoople - together with American fellow-travellers including Lou Reed, Alice Cooper and Sparks - drew on the original blueprint of rock and roll, as well as a host of other traditions, from Hollywood to the music hall, Berlin cabaret and Broadway musicals to science fiction and pop art. The resulting music was a wild blend of camp artifice and avant-garde decadence. By 1975 the era had come to an end, but glam never truly went away. Indeed, its attitudes and aesthetics have shaped much that has followed since, from disco to punk, the new romantics to Britpop, Prince to Lady Gaga.

Glam Rock investigates the origins, development and impact of an under-valued and misunderstood musical genre. Exploring artistic, political, psychological, sexual, and commercial contexts, this book develops the transatlantic cultural history of this unique movement in popular music with fresh depth and connections.

“Glam was about make-up, mirrors and androgyny. It was narcissistic, obsessive, decadent and subversive. It was bohemian, but also strangely futuristic. It was Oscar Wilde meets A Clockwork Orange. It was a mutant bastard offspring of glitter. But while glitter was sparkling distraction, glam was anarchy in drag. It was sexy, glamorous, on the edge. It was the moment hippie finally died. It was absolutely rock’n’roll. But it was also fashion, art, theatre, lifestsyle. It was gay, straight, multisexual. It was totally titillating and absolutely naughty. Everybody held hands with everybody, kissed everybody, went home with everybody. It was an age of accelerated discovery, when all the kinks of sexual yearning were flushed out. It was absolutely self-indulgent and it was ridiculously camp. It was a time we thought would never end. A time so long ago now it seems like a dream. But it wasn’t and I have the pictures to prove it.” Mick Rock

Since the emergence of rockOCOnOCOroll in the early 1950s, there have been a number of live musical performances that became hugely influential in the way they shaped the subsequent trajectory and development of popular music. Each, in its own way, introduced new styles, confronted existing practices, shifted accepted definitions, and provided templates for others to follow. Performance And Popular Music explores these processes by focusing on some of the specific occasions when such transformations occurred. An international array of scholars reveal that it is through the dynamics of performance OCo and the interaction between performer and audience OCo that patterns of musical change and innovation can best be recognised."

This book is the outcome of a series of discussions at the Philips Symposium on Intelligent Algorithms, held in Eindhoven in December 2004. It offers exciting and practical examples of the use of intelligent algorithms in ambient and biomedical computing. It contains topics such as bioscience computing, database design, machine consciousness, scheduling, video summarization, audio classification, semantic reasoning, machine learning, tracking and localization, secure computing, and communication.

Bowie, Bolan, Bryan Ferry and Iggy Pop are the icons that defined the particular type of music that came to be known as glam rock in the early 1970s. It was a period characterized by visual excess and ambisexual confrontation, where performance came to be as important as the music. Glam gave pop back to disaffected teenagers who lapped it up and reinvented themselves as space-age androgynes. Tying in with the release of Todd Haynes' film, Velvet Goldmine, Barney Hoskyns' Glam! is a trenchant survey of a thrilling, thoroughly over-the-top time in pop's life. From Oscar Wilde to Ziggy Stardust, from Liberace to Lou Reed, Hoskyns explores the flamboyant decadence, the bisexuality, and the sheer unadulterated fun of the early seventies. 'It was a brilliant pop era, wasn't it? The last proper pop era, probably.' Mickie Most 'I think rock should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the pierrot medium.' David Bowie 'Our function really is to relieve adolescents of their ills, of all the mental cruelty that's been bestowed on them.' David Johansen, New York Dolls