Illusion and disillusion

two interviews

1) What’s glam exactly? You said  its origin must be found in Oscar Wilde.

My book is about glam rock primarily, a 1970s phenomenon, rather than about “glam” or “glamour” in some more general sense. So on a really basic level of definition, what I’m looking at this historical phenomenon of glam rock as it was understood and written about at the time: a cluster of mostly British artists who emerged around 1971-72 and dominated UK pop culture for several years, then faded from the scene (or mutated) shortly before punk. So Bowie, T. Rex, Sweet, Slade, Roxy Music, Cockney Rebel, Mott the Hoople, many more. Glam rock also had exponents in America – Alice Cooper, New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Sparks, a few others. And there were certain US cities where the “glam vibe” was strong, like New York and Los Angeles, either through the local scene of bands, or through the strong reception for visiting English groups. But in the final part of the book I’m also looking at the legacy and “aftershocks” of glam as they reverberate through the Eighties, Nineties and into the 21st Century, ranging from the New Romantics and artists like Morrissey and Prince, through hair metal and Marilyn Manson, and onto the echoes of glam in Lady Gaga and – surprisingly – in certain rap performers.

There’s a certain core “glam rock sound” -  cleanly articulated riffs, stomping beats, an atmosphere of high-pitched vocal hysteria – but really glam rock as a genre coheres on the visual level: the clothes and make-up and outrageous hair styles, the spirit on male flamboyance and campy androgyny,  the emphasis on theatricality and showbiz spectacle.  But the glamour in glam rock is not straightforward glamour in the way that Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe or Marlene Dietrich were glamorous. Or indeed Hollywood red carpet Academy Awards kind of glamour today, which to me is a form of retro-glamour.  Glam rock’s “glamour” was deliberately excessive and absurdist, to the point of being a travesty or parody of glamour. If you look at New York Dolls, they don’t look immaculate or elegant in a Hollywood way, or even in a Diana Ross type of way. Their clothes and hair are a chaos of signifiers and trashy imagery drawn from all of the place. The same applies in a different way with early Roxy Music – there’s a wrongness, a cartoon quality. By the time you get to the pure teenpop glam of Sweet, Slade and Gary Glitter, the vibe is lumpen and ridiculous.  Bowie is the most exquisite and elegant of the glam rock stars, but even he is not really pursuing Hollywood glamour – he’s too alien and excessive, at times verging on ugliness.

In the book I look at some of the deep cultural roots for glam as a philosophy, and Oscar Wilde is definitely one of the first writers and thinkers to articulate the idea that artifice is more interesting – and ultimately more revealing – than naturalism. He has a series of brilliantly witty and challenging aphorisms that overturn common sense ideas – for instance, he asserts that sincerity is a pose, and a boring one. His critical essays like “The Decay of Lying” and his manifesto-disguised-as-a-novel The Picture of Dorian Gray lay out a view of life that rejects ethics entirely in favour of aesthetics: all that matters is the fascination of surfaces, the magical charm of physical beauty and charismatic presence. Wilde believes in a natural aristocracy of the beautiful over the plain.  It’s camp turned into a philosophy, basically: a view of the world and of life as theatre, in which we are constantly performing, constantly inventing ourselves as the personae we wish to appear to be.

 2) Glam Rock has changed the way to do music by giving space to imagination, disguises,  colours, ambiguities, gender ambiguities as well,  after the ‘70s  there was definitely a revolution on this regards

Glam rock marked a shift from the revolution talk of the Sixties, when people believed the world would be changed through the power of youth coming together as a collective force. With glam, the emphasis shifts to individual transformation – escaping your allotted social role or your fated physical identity, through reinventing yourself.  In a sense It’s about a private revolution: experimentation with gender and sexuality, becoming the person you want to be, the power of fantasy. You don’t change your material circumstances, but you escape them momentarily through posing in the club or dressing up when you go to see your heroes play concerts. And you also escape through the dream-worlds conjured by music.  And if you’re star, you can escape completely just through achieving the superstar lifestyle.

If pressed to distil glam to a core, I would say it is about: Illusion and Disillusion

In some ways glam is a retreat from the ambitions and hopes of the Sixties, there is an undercurrent of disillusionment and despair. But in other ways it finds different zones for radicalism – above all with the games with sexual identity.

3)  The name  of  David Bowie stands out among many and great artists, why, in your opinion, Bowie was so important ?

That’s too big a question – it would take a book to answer it. And in fact, it has taken a book – or a third of the very long book I’ve written! 

Bowie ended up being the spine of Shock and Awe -  but not really intentionally.  In fact my original intent was really to put Bowie in his place – to contextualize him as one artist in a whole field of glam and glitter endeavor, in which forgotten figures like Alice Cooper, Sparks or Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel were given their due. But writing the book, Bowie proved to be too insistently interesting not to cover in great detail and repeatedly through the book. He did so much and went through so many changes. 

If you were to point to just one thing of the many important aspects of Bowie, it would be the changeability – the way he kept transforming his identity over and over. He created a whole new model for rock star’s career, where you completely reinvent yourself repeatedly, jumping to a new style and a new sound. Before Bowie, rock artists were supposed to evolve gradually, organically – a Neil Young or Joni Mitchell model of artistic development.  Bowie taught fans and critics to see inconsistency as a positive -  as cool and brave, rather than a sign of a lack of integrity or artistic substance. By the Eighties with postpunk and new pop artists, it became much more common for groups to change their sound and their image with each album. These were the children of Bowie.

4)  Bowie was known because he  never took up any political stance,  which he did till the end of his life. Why?

Well, that’s not entirely true, because he did make political statements in the mid-Seventies – a whole spate of comments in interviews that were in favor of authoritarianism, in which he talked about the need for a strong leader to take control and “clean things up” – meaning the liberalism and permissive morals of the Seventies. That is what is so disconcerting about Bowie:  we generally expect rock people to be on the left politically, especially if they have progressive ideas about sexuality and gender roles. But the only really explicit political stances that Bowie ever made were right-wing – and these verged on flirting with fascism. I think there is just one interview in the late Nineties where he talks about having basically socialist ideas, but it doesn’t very convincing! For the most part, throughout his entire career Bowie either avoids politics or he makes a series of unwholesome, troubling comments on the lines of “what we need in the UK / the West is a strong leader” and even “I would make a good dictator myself”. Obviously some of this is the cocaine speaking – coke tends to make people feel in command and large amounts of it can cause megalomania and delusions of grandeur. But long before Bowie got into cocaine, there is a 1969 comment about how Britain needs a strong leader! So there’s definitely a recurrent tendency, which I think relates to his reading of Nietzsche,  his interest in the idea of heroism and the superman, and an aristocratic impulse (which I think is actually the essence of glam).  Bowie’s core essential politics are individualism and an intense work ethic, a drive to perfectionism and self-improvement.  I think mixed in there is a disbelief in the idea of equality and a misanthropic feeling about the human race. It’s the Individual Versus the Crowd.

These kind of feelings about the common mass of humanity are very adolescent, which is why “Life On Mars?” is such a great song about teenage alienation – you get that feeling from the line about “the mice in their million hordes / from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads”.  That’s not about mice, that’s about ordinary people: English working class tourists swarming everywhere. It’s a typically adolescent contemptuous view of humanity as vermin – too many stupid people breeding.  The idea of some kind of catastrophe that thins out the population is attractive to a certain kind of teenager.

5)  Does the glam culture still exist nowadays and who represents  it? Does it still symbobolizes / expresses that change of the early times?

You could see one of glam’s legacies in queer performers like Perfume Genius and Mykki Blanco. But the lineage that I track in Polvere di Stelle is more mainstream – pop superstars like Lady Gaga and Ke$ha, rap and R&B goddesses like Beyonce and Nicki Minaj, rap rulers like Drake and Kanye West.  Many of glam’s themes and traits resurfaced in the 21st Century in the songs, images and career strategies of these artists–  the cultivation of alter-ego personae, an obsession with fame and the dark side of stardom, a sense of narcissistic personality disorder and apathologically compulsive exhibitionism, an aura of decadence and excess. Gaga and Ke$ha explicitly identified with glam ancestors (Bowie for Gaga, Bolan for Kesha) and used glam imagery (outlandish make-up for the former, glitter for the latter).  Drake and Kanye West’s entire body of work is concerned with fame and the confusion and psychic damage that comes with it. Nicki Minaj has about 14 separate personae and Beyonce created the Sasha Fierce alter-ego. You ave Taylor Swift with her 2017 song/video “Look What You Made Me Do” in which she kills off the old Taylor Swift persona and then parades at the end of the video all her earlier images and identities. Her entire album Reputation is a meta-pop essay about her public self. In that sense it’s like the sequel to Britney Spears’s Blackout, which was about her fame spiraling out of control, although it also recalls Prince’s “Controversy” too.  For me the self-reflexive nature of modern pop stardom is pure glam. It harks back to David Bowie’s “Fame” and the dozens of other glam songs about being a rock idol or living the rock’n’roll fantasy lifestyle.

 6)  The glam rock  world lost many of its members  in the last few years,  I mean, Prince and obviously DB.  How did you personally react to these  losses, especially Bowie’s death?

I was saddened by both. Prince more so because I had grown up with his music in real-time and can remember buying his early records when he wasn’t that well known in the UK and then watching him getting huger and huger. Eventually as a young music journalist I would write about albums like Sign O The Times and Lovesexy as they came out. 

Bowie’s prime period in the Seventies was when I was a child, before I bought records or read the music press. So it was something I caught up with later, as Mythical Rock History. And Bowie was almost too large a figure to seem real as a human being. When I grew up he was this pop institution on the same level as The Beatles. His singles were played as golden oldies on the radio. The first Bowie album I really was aware of a real-time release was Lodger in 1979, and Scary Monsters was the first one I heard all the way through the month of its release. 

Through researching Bowie for the book, it created a weird effect of intimacy and distance at the same time. On the one hand, I felt like I really understood him and his motivations, and even identified to some extent – we were both products of middle class English suburbia, filling up our emptiness with a ravenous diet of cultural stimuli, from music and cinema to books and art. But at the same time, through approaching his work and his time as a historian, I achieved a distanced objective relationship. So I wasn’t that stunned when he died, especially as I’d known about him being sick for a while. When it came to writing the final essay on his life and his death, I approached it as eulogy for a funeral – something you write for the audience as much as for yourself. I found myself moved by other people’s reactions to the death, and also by snippets of information I’d never seen before that humanized Bowie.

1-      There were so many musicians wearing make up and androgynous costumes in the early 70s. Why do you think that Bowie stands out among everyone else who helped to shape the glam era?

Well, one way Bowie stands out is that he was actually really good at applying make-up and really creative with it. Most glam rockers would slap on lipstick and eye-shadow in a clumsy way, or they would just put a bit of glitter on their cheekbones. But Bowie studied with the master cosmetologist Pierre LaRoche and he became an expert on make-up techniques. In researching Shock And Awe, I came across a piece in Creem magazine – the American rock paper that most supported glam and glitter artists – in which Bowie offers the readers his “Makeup Do’s and Don’ts’. He describes in great detail how he gets a nice shine on his lips and eyelids, or smudges kohl along the eye-line, and how he created the iconic gold circle on his forehead circa Aladdin Sane. Bowie applied a similar sense of taste and experiment to his clothing choices, wearing flamboyantly avant-garde outfits made by designers like Kansai Yamamoto. So I would say that Bowie was exquisite looking in a way that most other glam rockers weren’t. Slade and Sweet and New York Dolls tended to look more like a parody or travesty of “glamour” rather than the actual real thing. Bowie looked weird, but also elegant. His only rivals in that area were Roxy Music, who combined being stylish with being strange. 

2-      Everyone has tried to push the boundaries in pop culture during the last 50 years, but no one (not Madonna, not Lady Gaga) has gone further than Bowie in terms of challenging aesthetics. Why is he still such a big influence nowadays for so many other artists?

I don’t think Bowie has ever stopped being influential, except for a period in the Nineties when grunge and alternative rock were dominant. In the Nineties I would say Neil Young was the admired elder rocker, someone who stuck to his guns and represented this kind of gnarly outsider image – old Neil was the role model for young groups like Pearl Jam. In the Nineties there weren’t many artists who took their cues from Bowie – there was Suede in the U.K., and perhaps Marilyn Manson. But all through the Seventies, the Eighties, and most of the 21^stCentury Bowie was hugely influential. In the Eighties you had one set of British groups inspired by his Young Americans funk-and-soul sound and wedge haircut look (ABC, Spandau Ballet, et al) and another set who were influenced by his Berlin sound circa Low – Gary Numan, The Associates, Magazine, Visage, Simple Minds.  So much of what happened in the Eighties with video pop, with movements like the New Romantics, and with style magazines like The Face and iD owed a huge amount to Bowie. In terms of the present, what seems to resonate with recent pop musicians is the idea of self-reinvention  - the fact that you can change your persona, change your sound, over and over again.  This idea of identity-fluidity seems to strike a chord with how people feel today  - that the self is infinitely malleable and adaptable, not just artistically but existentially and psychologically.

3-      Which of his artistic personas along the years do you find more interesting and why?

My favorite period of music is the stretch from Low through “Heroes” and Lodger to Scary Monsters – that’s when he’s really at the cutting edge of pop music, making music that is innovative but also beautiful and often emotionally intense. And I like that sort of outsider, exile-in-Berlin persona that he had then. In terms of an era of Bowie that I find most intriguing, though, in some ways it’s 1967 and his debut album, when he’s completely out of step with what’s going on in rock. Bowie is making comedy-pop influenced by Anthony Newley and other English music hall artists, at exactly the point when rock is becoming the major art form of the era.  Sgt Pepper’s and albums by Pink Floyd, The Doors, Cream, Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, et al are all pushing rock into new zones of musical expansion and lyrical expression. But Bowie is more interested in the previous generation’s forms of entertainment – the musical, cabaret, variety, mime. I find this oddly glorious, and it helps that Bowie’s debut album is really charming and incredibly English. It was z completely flop at the time, but I prefer listening to it than his next two albums, which are unconvincing attempts to go with the rock fashions of the time. Then with Hunky Dory, I think he finds his true musical voice again – and that voice isn’t really rock, it’s a kind of piano-centred, lushly orchestrated sound with searching lyrics: what I describe in the book as “existentialist Elton John”.