![]() ![]() He seemed like the man who’s at the center of it all. And then all of a sudden, almost in a matter of months, he’s not only the person everyone’s talking about but he’s like the person who has the Midas touch, and his heroes have become his proteges and he’s mentoring them and producing them. What surprised me is he sort of went from seeming like a loser, he seemed like a one-hit wonder. He gave Mott the Hoople their biggest hit and sort of changed their direction a lot. He put Lou Reed back on, in the direction to his only real hit, I think, “Walk on the Wild Side.” He tried to make Iggy Pop a star. He did more moves, more changes, more stuff, really. He’s a central thing because he did - he was more active. I wonder how central he seems to you and to the glam movement, and also the degree to which he was a follower and to what extent he was a leader. Since his death people are assessing Bowie’s complicated place in everything. I wanted to talk specifically about Bowie because he’s a figure who runs through most of the book and also because he’s such an enormous artist. I mean, that’s when androgyny becomes a thing men with two inches of hair longer than normal was considered like ragingly effeminate.īowie kind of upped the ante on that the next step of being shocking is taking on ideas from the gay underground. He wanted to do something more shocking than Mick Jagger, and so some of the things of glam, you already see glimpses of them in the mid-to-late '60s. They were wearing makeup, they were camping it up on stage - I feel like Bowie had this rivalry with the Stones. The Rolling Stones sort of actually anticipated a lot of these things. ![]() The Rolling Stones were as important as Lou Reed was during that period. ![]() You know, I think that they’re all sort of jumbled together. ![]() Bowie wrote a song inspired by the bright young things of 1920s, the dandies of 1920s. Glam kind of drew inspiration from these somewhat garbled ideas of what decadent Berlin was like. Decadents are often aristocrats who didn’t do their ancestral duty of going out to defend the empire. You know, one of the things is the idea unmanliness, of men failing to do their duty, having a stiff upper lip, and sort of be basically military or patrician. All these things lead to another, and then decadence is another concept, you know. You know, like androgyny and sexual fluidity relate to dandyism and men taking an excessive interest in their appearance, but androgyny and gender bending relate to camp which relates to theatricality. Well, I think it’s a mix of all of them and they’re all linked in a way. Is that what you see holding together all these different acts? This is the idea that Dick Hebdige floated in “Subculture.” You’ve argued that it’s really about artifice and a self-conscious kind of persona and theatricality. The standard take on glam said it was about sex and gender, with the musicians coming up with various ways to re-imagine them. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Salon spoke to Reynolds from Los Angeles, a few hours he left for his British book tour. After a few years of visual dullness and denim in rock culture, glam (often called “glitter” in the UK) channeled glamour, theatricality, style, and sexual ambiguity.įor all of its visual extravagance, much of the music itself was straightforward - pumped-up blues songs played by musicians in wigs and fancy shoes.Ī new book, “ Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century,” chronicles the movement and argues that its influence is deeper than ever.Īuthor Simon Reynolds is a veteran British rock critic, now living in Los Angeles, who is also the author of “Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1984” and “Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.” One of the most important but also briefly lived chapters in rock history was glam, the primarily British movement that produced David Bowie, Roxy Music, T. ![]()
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