[Simon Reynold’s history of glam sounds pretty great. -egg]

This gap between image and reality, rock and theater, advertisement and product, reputation and sales, is where much of glam’s appeal lay. It’s why so many gay, bisexual, and transgender kids have found power and strength in the songs of mostly straight, often-oafish men wearing mascara and fishnet stockings, and why so many future punk and New Wave musicians were born again on the night they first saw Bowie on Top of the Pops. (Reynolds devotes a lengthy epilogue to “a partial inventory of glam echoes and reflections” from 1975 to 2016, with attention to Adam Ant, Prince, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Marilyn Manson, Britney Spears’s Blackout, and Ke$ha, among many others.) With glam, the audience is the ultimate star; it was the first pop genre, Reynolds claims, where “fans turned up to concerts dressed like the star performer.” In D. A. Pennebaker’s film of the Ziggy Stardust “farewell” concert, much of the real action is out in the audience. Bowie may be plotting his escape, but the kids are committed, entranced, equals of the star they worship.

To paraphrase Alice Cooper, glam has no class and no principles. It’s a subculture with little of the scene-policing found in punk and indie rock; it’s hard to imagine anyone accusing a glam act of “selling out.” Glam is constantly selling out; it was born to sell out. To be glam is to lack convictions and to steal anything that moves. “It’s a rip off!” Bolan howled in delight at the close of Electric Warrior. Tawdry, ridiculous, pretentious, and crass, glam produced some of the most sublime pop music of its era. Now it has a history worthy of it.

Source: A Glitter-Run Through History: Simon Reynolds’s “Shock and Awe” – Los Angeles Review of Books