On October 11, 1974, Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, and the local celebrities and club kids who frequented Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco buried glam rock at a public ceremony in Los Angeles. Officially titled the Hollywood Street Revival and Trash Dance, the event is better known to posterity as the Death of Glitter. In his new book, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, Simon Reynolds points out that the idea for this “self-conscious end-of-an-era gesture” likely originated with San Francisco’s Death of Hippie parade in 1967. Even so, there’s something thrillingly appropriate about a movement built on a keen awareness of rock’s rise-and-fall storylines prematurely declaring its own death.
As it turned out, the English Disco crew was only about a year early in memorializing glam’s brief moment of cultural dominance. By 1976, punk would arrive to purge rock of both its proggy and glittery excesses, just as glam had kicked off the decade with an artifice-worshiping backlash to the Woodstock generation’s authenticity fetish. But the glam aesthetic has endured a much longer life than the movement’s teenage scene and cartoonishly simplified rock sound. Its self-conscious embrace of fame and ego continues to reverberate through pop music decades after the death of its prototypical superstar, Marc Bolan of T. Rex, in 1977. As an elastic concept rather than a fixed stratosphere of ’70s personalities, it is even equipped to survive the loss of its most enduring artist, David Bowie.
Shock and Awe makes a 650-page case for taking this longer view of glam, as an “idea of what pop is and should be—alien, sensationalistic, hysterical in both senses, a place where the sublime and the ridiculous merge and become indistinguishable.” The author of Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, the post-punk history Rip It Up and Start Again, and a handful of other books that mix music journalism with cultural criticism (as well as a Pitchfork contributor), Reynolds traces the aesthetic from its antecedents in decadent 19th-century literature to its echoes in the present. After using its four years in the spotlight to survey its intellectual underpinnings, he locates glam’s ongoing influence in “aftershocks” like Prince’s hypersexual fluidity, Lady Gaga’s obsession with fame as pop-art horror movie, and Kanye West’s public battle with his own ego. A sympathetic but unsentimental guide through a movement fashioned out of fannish hyperbole, Reynolds doesn’t hesitate to confront glam’s lapses into authoritarianism and megalomania.
The book is astonishingly, if coincidentally, well timed to the resurgence of interest in Bowie that followed the release of his final album, Blackstar, and death just two days later. “I’m literally finishing the last lines of the book—I’m writing about Lady Gaga getting the Golden Globe—and then the news broke on the internet,” Reynolds recalled over tea in New York last week. Though it doubles as a biography of Bowie, following him from teenage striver to disillusioned Berlin-era post-pop star and checking in every few years afterward, Shock and Awe is even more valuable for contextualizing his emergence within a larger cultural moment. From glam’s beginnings in the stompy mysticism of T. Rex and Alice Cooper’s shock-rock, to its platinum-selling teen idols like Slade and the Sweet, to the sophisticated art-rock of Roxy Music, this isn’t just Bowie’s story.
Pitchfork: Shock and Awe isn’t just interested in glam as music. Huge portions of the book are devoted to the movement’s philosophical and political implications, which contain a lot of contradictions. What do you mean when you say that glam is radical and reactionary at the same time?
Simon Reynolds: That seemed apparent to me because, on the one hand, I enjoy the existence of superstars. But all the literature shows that people get really screwed up by being famous. It’s a counter-revolutionary thing, to want to be a star. It’s an immature desire—a desire for the attention of the world. It shows a lack of humility. And, politically, it’s about being a winner and everyone else being losers. Pop music is an oligarchy.
As someone who enjoys a lot of capitalistic stuff but is basically on the left, I’m torn. As a writer, I’m someone who strives to have attention and be a public figure. So I’m aware of the attraction of things like ambition and lust for adulation, but I think a lot of people who have that drive are damaged. Without fame, though, without stars, our lives would be emptier. Perhaps that’s a reflection of the immaturity of our civilization.
No one is a bigger character in the book than Bowie, but you also never let him take over the narrative. Was it your intention to make sure he didn’t overshadow these other huge personalities, like Marc Bolan and Bryan Ferry?
My original intention was that Bowie would be somewhat put in his place, as part of this larger field of endeavor. So that would mean elevating some of the other figures who’d dropped away as time has gone by. He’s so insistently interesting, though, trying to claw his way back [over the years] to be the dominant figure.
Generally, my interest in music has tended to [revolve around] scenes or movements. But glam is also pop music, and it’s very much about these driven personalities—people who are pushing themselves forward for maximum domination of the spotlight. There’s a limit to how much you can treat glam as a movement, because the essence of the movement is to stand out—to be a superstar. I think that’s why a lot of the people in the book would not want to be considered glam. Sparks wouldn’t, Ian Hunter wouldn’t, same with Steve Harley. A lot of these people were resistant to being bracketed as glam because they would’ve liked to transcend it.
Despite a handful of dark moments that you go into in some detail—like his mid-’70s descent into cocaine, the occult and then fascist ideology—Bowie has become a sort of saint since he died. He’s clearly a great artist in your estimation, but you’re fairly unsentimental about him. Were you glad that you’d mostly finished writing about him while he was still a living, breathing, imperfect person?
I’m quite critical of him at certain points. I didn’t want to write a hagiography. I might’ve felt like pulling some punches if I’d written it after his death, so I’m glad that all of it except for the end is not sentimental. Lord knows there’s enough books that are gushing in their praise of him.
Auteur theory says that you can find traces of genius in everything a great director does—including the hack work they did early on. Once people have decided that someone’s a genius, like Dylan, they scour all the records to find evidence of that genius. It’s the same with Bowie. But there are certain records he did where there’s nothing good in them at all. Not every B-side is a poem. If you’re a serious Bowie-ologist, the tendency is to look for the genius in everything. Because he used a lot of allusions and references, you can do that. It can be an interesting exercise to break these songs down to their constituent parts, but at the end of the day, that’s not what makes for a successful song.
In a passage on Iggy and the Stooges, you write that Bowie’s notoriously defanged mix of their quasi-glam album Raw Power“calls into question the extent to which Bowie ever really viscerally understood rock.” What did you mean by that?
It’s probably a bit of an overstatement, but Bowie said enough times, “I’m not that into rock. Being a rocker is only one thing I do. I see rock as a pose.” When you think about the things he’s really obsessed with, it’s Anthony Newley, it’s Jacques Brel, it’s this chansonnier thing, it’s music hall/musical theater. The first music he was into was jazz. And there’s the persistent vein of his love of black music, which he keeps coming back to—soul and funk.
Rock in the pure, hard rock sense of the word just isn’t that high on his list of things he’s into. He can do a convincing facsimile of it, but it doesn’t feel like it comes from that visceral, gonad place that it comes from with Iggy Pop or Suzi Quatro. Aladdin Sane has some good, tough, rock-y tunes on it. But there’s something in Bowie that makes his rock stylized and less elemental. With Iggy, you feel like there’s some electric current of rock coursing through his body, making it do all these twists. The music is taking control of him. I hardly ever feel that with Bowie.
Raw Poweris a great record, but it doesn’t have the same malevolent murk that Fun House has. That album feels like this feral cloud of noise rampaging towards you, and it’s all kind of indistinct yet totally tough—whereas Raw Power seems like it’s caught between pop and rock.
You mentioned Suzi Quatro, who’s a fascinating figure in part because she was one of the only women musicians involved in the initial, ’70s glam wave. How did a movement that so openly subverted gender roles end up being so male?
That’s one of the weird things about glam. You could say that the imagery of it is messing with patriarchy: un-manliness, effeminacy, gender games. But in terms of diversity or representation, the patriarchy was really in control. And with men making themselves look glammed-up, it wasn’t clear what the counter-move was for women.
But there were glam-influenced female musicians who managed to make it work later, like Siouxsie Sioux, Grace Jones, and Annie Lennox. There were ways devised for women to be glam, like angularity. Everything about Siouxsie is angular—her hair, her voice, even her body movements. There are no curves. The vocal lines are jagged, the melodic lines are jagged, the voice is shrill. It’s a kind of androgenizing aesthetic that is also glamorous, with Cleopatra eye makeup and the witch archetype. I don’t know why that didn’t happen until after punk, although maybe it’s partly because punk opened up a space for women to get involved [in rock].
And then Annie Lennox had the cropped, angular hair and a sort of masculine look that was glamorous as well. Female glam, which also includes Madonna and sort of Kate Bush, started to come with the second, ’80s wave.
Your epilogue follows four decades’ worth of glam “aftershocks.” One of the biggest characters in that story is Lady Gaga.You position her as a sort of 21st-century “digi-glam” star in the same vein as Bowie, but you aren’t particularly impressed with her music.
As a pop phenomenon, and visually, she’s very successful. I don’t find her music very interesting—I don’t think it’s as rich and wide-ranging as the music Bowie made. Her natural instincts lean towards the Queen—or, really, Meatloaf—bombastic end of things. There’s a kind of schlockiness that she seems to naturally gravitate towards.
What I found, in writing about Gaga, is that I was most impressed with her as a thinker. She’s made amazing statements that are very honest anatomies of the psychology of fame. I don’t even need to say that what she’s proposing is madness. She puts it right out there to consider. She says, “I want people to be psychotic in their pursuit of fame.”
You highlight some glam moments in the careers of contemporary music’s biggest stars—not just Gaga, but Beyoncé, Jay Z, Kanye West, Katy Perry, Drake. Is the aesthetic here to stay, or are we due for a backlash?
I talk [in “Aftershocks”] about how there have been cycles of glam and anti-glam. It feels like we’re overdue for a grunge-type moment, some kind of mass revolution against the idea of fame being the be-all and end-all, an invasion of un-pop. Grunge became pop, but it was originally the opposite of pop, the opposite of hair metal, the opposite of what had been selling.
I have no idea what’s going to come next. Maybe I’m describing glam’s beginning [in the ‘70s] and then its end in recent pop. I don’t see how things can get any more glam or fame-obsessed or self-reflexive. How can you go further than Kanye West or Lady Gaga?