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

by Simon Reynolds

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062279804
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Pages:	704
Sales rank:	1,154,977
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Simon Reynolds started his journalistic career in 1986 as a staff writer for the British weekly music paper Melody Maker. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Spin, Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Artforum, The Wire, The Guardian, Slate, Frieze and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of four books and five collections of essays and interviews. His books have been translated into ten languages.  Born in London, he now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and children.

Editorial Reviews

Getting from [Oscar] Wilde to Alice Cooper is the kind of move that makes Reynolds…such a fun tour guide…Reynolds admits in the book's introduction that glam is a "fuzzy" category, overlapping with prog rock, hard rock and other subspecies. That fuzziness plays to one of Reynolds's great strengths: his capaciousness as a critic and listener, his ability to write about all of those categories (and more) with authority and genuine interest…Reynolds [is] a tireless researcher with an eye for entertaining diversions and a penchant for alluding to everything from the "anti-theatrical prejudice" dating back to Plato to the glam implications in a short story by perhaps the least glam human ever to live, Willa Cather. Reynolds also leaves readers (this one, anyway) enthusiastically jotting a list as they go: of songs to listen to, books to read, YouTube clips to hunt down.

The New York Times Book Review - John Williams

08/22/2016
Rock historian Reynolds (Rip It Up) explores the genre that first shaped his perceptions of pop: glam rock, or, as it’s sometimes known in the U.S., glitter. Reynolds takes a broad view of what glam encompasses, investigating its roots in soul, teeny-bop, and other disparate genres while also charting the careers of icons such as Bowie, T. Rex., and Roxy Music. His investigation, however, is hampered by his apparent hesitance to tackle difficult subjects (such as race) head-on; he veers in for casual mentions of cultural appropriation within glam culture, only to shy away from the intense analysis such a topic deserves. As wide and deep as his net is cast—he touches on Buddhist philosophy and the 1970s gay liberation movement—Reynolds seems at sea when it comes to discussing gender-variant identities, going off on several peculiar tangents. Reynolds is more at home when breaking down the concept of authenticity and defending the “fake” persona as art form, but even that leads to an off-putting set of observations about Dr. Luke’s abuse of Kesha—the last in a series of cringeworthy rhetorical snippets that mar an otherwise intriguing text. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

10/01/2016
Rather than from outer space, glam rock emerged out of the ashes of the 1960s rock underground. Lost in that scene, performers Marc Bolan and David Bowie each broke away from their 1960s obsessions for authenticity and reinvented themselves as stars. This shift from socially conscious troubadours to self-obsessed artists in makeup and glitter recalled the rock and roll showmanship of the 1950s while having a lasting legacy of its own. Music critic Reynolds (Retromania) examines the genre through the trajectory of its major players: Bowie and Bolan as well as Alice Cooper, Roxy Music, Suzi Quatro, and more. The author deftly examines the musical, social, and sexual underpinnings of glam rock, but the work is most insightful when dissecting glam's greatest contribution to rock music: the larger-than-life image of the rock star. VERDICT Reynolds's erudite yet readable approach will be of interest to glam fans as well readers of popular music histories. Expect interest in Bowie to be high after his death earlier this year.—Amanda Westfall, Emmet O'Neal P.L., Mountain Brook, AL

Library Journal

2016-07-31
“In the early seventies, decadence was what we’d nowadays call a ‘meme.’ ” The wide-ranging rock journalist probes the highs and lows of glam.What was the first glam rock song ever released? Little Richard may be in the running, but for Reynolds (Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, 2011), the era begins in the later 1960s, when John’s Children began to morph into Tyrannosaurus Rex and then T. Rex, even as hippie Marc Bolan became hippie with platform heels. As the author writes, glam rock—the term is slippery, one of those “you know what I mean” things—was a reaction to the “earnestly uncamp” rock of the era, “when things got heavy and bluesy, rootsy and backwoodsy,” leaving kids like David Jones, soon to become David Bowie, out in the cold. The case of Bowie is instructive: reacting to a complaint from his father that he wasn’t bringing down enough income as a rocker, he divined that he could mix cabaret into his act, even if his first efforts were “deemed too clever for the cabaret circuit.” Then there’s the sexuality aspect of it: gay kids needed a way to rock, too, and in the face of the “drabness, the visual depletion of Britain in 1972,” they found a subculture in shag haircuts, high shoes, and feathers. For Bowie, interested not just in sex, but in its theatrical possibilities, glam was the way forward. With him came lesser bands that sometimes morphed into great ones: Slade, Mott the Hoople, Cockney Rebel, and particularly Roxy Music, whose 1973 album “For Your Pleasure” may be the finest moment in all of glam. Reynolds gets a little gluey when he gets theoretical—“other songs on “Roxy Music” aren’t disjointed horizontally (structural extension through time) but vertically (the layering together of jarring textures and incongruent emotions)”—but for the most part, this is straightforward music/cultural history. For neo-glamsters, a blueprint for how to get things done; for oldsters, a nostalgic look into a shining, glittery era.

Kirkus Review