Shock and Awe

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century (2016) is a non-fiction book by British music journalist Simon Reynolds charting the history and the ongoing legacy of the musical genre known as “glam rock,” focusing loosely on the career of David Bowie.

Reynolds opens with his own personal relationship to glam rock. He remembers, as a small boy, being enchanted by the “alien…hysterical in both senses” Marc Bolan and T. Rex, as he watched them perform on black-and-white television.

The genre’s origins, however, lie far deeper than that. Reynolds argues that glam was in part a backlash against Western culture’s long-standing “anti-theatrical prejudice.” He adduces evidence for this prejudice as far back as Plato. More immediately, Reynolds suggests, glam drew on the “dandyism” of 19th-century aesthetes. He claims Oscar Wilde as the first “philosopher of glam,” citing the author’s aphoristic pronouncement that “Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”



Reynolds also argues that glam had cultural significance. He contends that with its irreverent re-appropriation of exhausted cultural forms, glam introduced the masses to the ideas known in the Academy as “postmodernism.”

At the same time, Reynolds concedes that glam is hard to define, a fuzzy area with porous boundaries. He acknowledges that some of its elements reach back to artists like Jerry Lee Lewis. However, he identifies its true starting point in the early 1970s. He argues that the birth of glam can only be understood against the culture to which it was responding. He suggests that the pop music of 1970s Britain had become drab, self-serious, and ponderously masculine. The 20-year-olds who remembered the sixties wanted music that communicated profundity. Lengthy experimental LPs were the norm, while the single was regarded as a form of pandering to commercial concerns. In the meantime, a whole new generation of young teenagers had come of age. They did not remember the pop music revolution of the previous decade. They wanted fun, danceable pop singles.

Into that gap stepped Marc Bolan. Reynolds analyses the shock, humor, and excitement of Bolan’s “androgenized” performances. He points out that T. Rex was responsible for 3.5% of all British record sales in 1971. Bolan even managed to sell 20,000 copies of his poetry book, The Warlock of Love. Reynolds suggests that if he had not died so young, Bolan could easily have enjoyed the kind of lengthy, shapeshifting career that allowed David Bowie to remain at the top of the music industry for several decades.



Turning to Bowie, Reynolds introduces one of his central themes. More than any other glam rocker, Bowie embodies for Reynolds the idea that glam is essentially theatrical, indeed perhaps more theatrical than it is musical. He quotes Bowie telling an interviewer as early as 1966 that music, for him, was only a way to act: “I’d like to do character parts. I think it takes a lot to become somebody else.” Reynolds returns to Bowie throughout the book, examining each of the artist’s self-reinventions as a launching pad to consider a new moment in glam history.

Reynolds proceeds to consider every major artist who could conceivably be bracketed as “glam.” He analyzes the careers of Alice Cooper, Suzi Quatro, Slade, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Mott the Hoople, the Stooges, Gary Glitter, Queen and the Sweet, among others.

Along the way, he notes some interesting parallels. First, almost all of these bands contained one or more “delusional narcissists,” people “who created a bubble of unreality around themselves” and whose talent lay in convincing others to step inside. Second, many of the breakthrough stars of glam rock were by no means newcomers to the music business. Bowie, T. Rex, Slade, and Suzie Quatro had all been working musicians in the 60s, playing weddings and small-time gigs. Gary Glitter released his first single in 1960 (under the name “Paul Raven”).



Not only were the musicians veterans of the 1960s, many of them worked with managers and producers who cut their teeth during the pop revolution of the previous decade. Between them, Reynolds argued, these figures brushed off the cultural poses and provocations of the 1960s, for sale to an audience too young to remember them.

Along the way, Reynolds also looks at some of the lesser-known bands of the glam era, such as the Moodies, who Reynolds argues “anticipated…the drag-king phenomenon,” and Zolar X, who spoke only “a beetling ’n’ dribbling alien language,” never breaking character.

As well as narrative, Reynolds offers political and cultural analysis. He argues that while glam was radical in sexual politics, it was reactionary in its retreat from the collectivism of the 1960s in favor of “individualized escape through stardom.” Sometimes, he points out, glam’s aesthetics flirted with the far right. Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music affected jackboots and a Hitler mustache for the band’s 1974 tour. Bowie once told an interviewer he might have made a “bloody good Hitler.”



Roxy Music also provides Reynolds with an opportunity to examine how glam’s performativity sometimes bled into reality. Ferry, who spent much of the 1970s as an art student playing an aristocratic character eventually married a real aristocrat, effectively becoming the character he had been playing.

Reynolds concludes his narrative with a chapter entitled “Aftershocks,” in which he considers the post-glam artists who, nevertheless, owe something to the genre. He fingers Siouxsie and the Banshees, Def Leppard, Kate Bush, and Grace Jones as immediate heirs. Contemporary artists who strike Reynolds as glam include Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga.

The book closes by returning to Bowie for the last time, as Reynolds reflects on the experience of learning that Bowie was dying while he finished work on the book.