From Bowie to Gaga: How Glam Rock Lives On

[yASSsss 35,510]

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 Gagagetting the Golden Globe—and then the news broke on the internet,” 

(This is what the author has to say about Gaga)-

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?   

Read the full interview here:

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1333-from-bowie-to-gaga-how-glam-rock-lives-on/

 

[Bebe 16,562]

Queen of Glam Rock

[Sakrai 4,759]

Queen of gravitating towards schlockiness

[Cerny 4,095]

I concur, Her image, her name and her statements carry more weight than her music, and that's why her music gets some terrible reviews.

Nice read, thanks for sharing.