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    Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century
    Unavailable
    Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century
    Unavailable
    Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century
    Ebook875 pages15 hours

    Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century

    By Simon Reynolds

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    NPR Great Read of 2016

    From the acclaimed author of Rip It Up and 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 11, 2016
    ISBN9780062279811
    Author

    Simon Reynolds

    Simon Reynolds is a music critic whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Spin, Rolling Stone, and Artforum. He is the author of books including Retromania and Rip It Up and Start Again.

    Read more from Simon Reynolds

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    Reviews for Shock and Awe

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      In this sprawling work the noted rock critic tries to give a comprehensive account of the whole "glam" phenomena and probably comes as close as one is going to get in a single book that challenges the limits of paperback technology! That said about 45% of this history is devoted to David Bowie in his prime, ranging from Bowie's pre-glitter career while trying to find an image (with the exception of the hit "Space Oddity") and essentially finishing with Bowie in Berlin after which he himself was basically done with glam (if not success). In between a wide variety of bands and personalities are dealt with, ranging from significant players who are still beloved like Mark Bolan & Roxy Music, to the successful but now almost forgotten like Slade & Sweet, to the mostly-marginal denizens who made up the scene in New York & Los Angeles. Reynolds then winds up with an extended overview of the influence of glam rock before finishing with an elegy to David Bowie; having been wrapping up this book when the great man died.Was Bowie a great man? Reynolds certainly thinks so, with the mark of Bowie's greatness being his enthusiasm for new and innovative concepts and how he transmitted those enthusiasms to his fans, not to mention the way Bowie maintained a certain level of character and decency through most of his life, so long as you disregard the 'Slough of Despond' that L.A. represented for Bowie. Even Reynolds displays a certain level of exasperation with his subject at this point. That this could have turned out otherwise is represented by examples such as Gary Glitter (in jail for his moral degradation), Bryan Ferry (who became uninteresting after achieving social success) or the band Slade (who failed to develop as an enterprise and became irrelevant). I myself know that I was taken aback at the out-pouring of affection for Bowie back in 2016; as I could vividly remember the figure of menace he seemed to be, as opposed to becoming the clarion prophet of the right to define one's self as one saw fit.As for why I don't rate this book a bit higher partly that is due to how it's suffused with some of Reynolds' own world-weariness, as one of his main concerns in the last few years is the tendency of pop to be on a constant "wash, rinse, repeat" cycle and the dearth of actual artistic innovation. Also, it is to be kept in mind that this is a history of glam rock, not glitter pop. For example, Iggy Pop (who Bowie took under his wing) gets much more attention than Elton John.