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.
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.
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.
Editorial Reviews
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940170065912 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins |
Publication date: | 10/11/2016 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
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