a book about glam rock and art pop - 1970s mostly - but also tracking its echoes and reflections through the 80s, 90s and into the 21st Century - footnotes to follow here soon
“Horror is the removal of masks” - Robert Bloch (author of Psycho)
But also the placing of them over your face... in some circumstances
Think how plug ugly this dude must have been to prefer to wear this onstage under all those hot lights...
It's one of NWBHM makeweights Samson, but I refuse to do the research to identify which member.
Was thinking it was a tad 'Cambridge Rapist mask' and thus congruent with the sexual politics of HM, but this other Samson cover suggests the executioner
But this is more than enough on Samson...
Rather, let's have some highbrow thoughts on masks
“A man's features, the bone structure and the tissue which covers it, are the product of a biological process; but his face he creates for himself. It is a statement of his habitual emotional attitude; the attitude which his desires need for fulfilment and which his fears demand for their protection of prying eyes. He wears it like a devil mask; a device to evoke in others the emotions complementary to his own. If he is afraid, then he must be feared; if he desires, then he must be desired. It is a screen to hide his mind's nakedness.”
"One thinks that one wants to be understood when one wants only to be half-understood. If a person really understands you, you fear him."
"It was because I feared him and could not understand him as he understood me that I hated him."
Daft Punk made a brief cameo in the Aftershocks coda to S+A, as pioneers of the becoming-animation of pop in the 21st Century (alongside Gorillaz):
“Clint Eastwood” by Gorillaz – Damon Albarn and pals
hiding behind cartoon alter-egos - and the anime style videos for Daft Punk’s “One More Time” and
“Aerodynamic” refloat the Archies idea of the imaginary pop group. It’s a
sideways recognition of the increasingly fantastical turn taken by pop video,
with stars approaching the status of figments spun into existence by
teams of technicians: make-up artists, hair stylists, lighting crews, video and
audio postproduction. Singing itself has become hyper-real: vocal deficits
compensated for, or strengths drastically boosted, by the chopping up and
re-stitching of lines or even single words from different takes, with the
composited performance further tinted and perfected using pitch-correction
technology. The audio signature of 21st Century pop is
set to become the superhuman glisten glazed across the radioscape by AutoTune
and Melodyne. As similarly intensive processes of editing and
computer-generated imagery weave their way into video, the borderline between a
human star and an animated creation gets decidedly blurry.
You could call it digital glam, or digi-glam for short.
It’s the logical extension of pop video’s nonrealistic and nonsequential
traits. (A significant threshold was crossed in the late Eighties with the
multiple costume changes and senselessly shifting backdrops in promos like
Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and Madonna’s “Express
Yourself” and “Vogue.”). Just like sound in the ProTools era,
moving images have become a moldable goo of binary code to be recombined in
Frankenstein fashion. As the 21st Century unfurls, scenes in film and
TV lose integrity as real-world spaces, with material composited to improve the
compositional balance – why not drop a church in the background? Postproduction
technicians known as graders or colorists tweak the visual palette
dramatically, contrasting hues to make figures “pop” out of their surroundings.
Film it flat and fix it in the mix – that’s the ethos now. The kind
of Photoshop trickery long used in fashion photography becomes routine in
video, with “motion retouching” applying a perfect sheen to singers with
blemished complexions (often by “sampling” skin-tissue pixels from elsewhere),
removing lipstick from teeth, or shaving down the nose of a very famous
pop star who appears later in this epilogue.
Daft Punk sing about
“Digital Love” in 2001. But by decade’s end, they’ve fallen out of it and are
analogue-curmudgeons decrying the very techniques they’d exalted and excelled
at. On 2013’s Random Access Memories, they implore “Give Life Back
To Music.” Trop tard, mes amis: pop has entered the uncanny valley of no
return.
Daft Punk also appeared in this recent piece I did for Tidal on masks, masquerade, disguise and greasepaint-thick make-up in pop history:
"Daft Punk started wearing their trademark robot helmets to both preserve their privacy and extend their sci-fi glam aesthetic. Thomas Bangalter once told me that the futuristic kitsch of the headgear was a way of “playing with anonymity and showmanship at the same time.” The artwork for Daft Punk’s debut album, Homework, features a Kiss poster, but the duo’s biggest influence is Brian De Palma’s 1974 rock musical Phantom of the Paradise, whose protagonist is a vengeful musician who hides his deformed features behind a silver mask. “Phantom embodied everything we liked when we were 13 — rock, glam, horror, movies,” Bangalter said. “It’s the film we’ve watched the most number of times, and it’s about a guy with a leather wardrobe and a mask.” Daft Punk also see their helmets as akin to the superhero’s cape: “We love the idea of the person who has the powers, but no one knows who he is.”
Phantom of the Paradise - essentially a glam rock movie - also makes a cameo in S+A:
"Movies about rock, rock-about-rock – there was a lot of it about in the first half of the Seventies. Brian De Palma’s 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise could be seen as a “glam movie,” what with its Jobriath-like star Beef and the Alice Cooper parody The Undeads. Combining rock satire and campy horror movie, Phantom of the Paradise is the tale of a Spector-like Svengali called Swan and his diabolical schemes. De Palma also lampoons the nostalgia craze along the way: Swan declares that “the future of rock’n’roll is its past” and one of his bands is the Sha Na Na-like revival troupe The Juicy Fruits."
An excerpt from MASKS: Bowie & Artists of Artifice, edited by J. Curcio, published by Intellect Books -
Perusing the J. Curcio essay "Bowie’s Occult Art, and the Enigma of the Monster" I came across this bit and instantly thought, "aha, this is cofveve innit?" ie. the supposed gibberish that Trump once tweeted to the amusement of the world.
"The concept of kayfabe, familiar to most wrestling aficionados, is a 24/7 factor in the lives of many celebrities. Nick Rogers explains in a 2017 New York Times op-ed: [F]or at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined. […] The artifice is not only understood but appreciated: The performer cares enough about the viewer’s emotions to want to influence them. Kayfabe isn’t about factual verifiability; it’s about emotional fidelity.
"The relationship of kayfabe, camp and irony is difficult to map out in any precise terms, but they surely all play significant roles in the social phenomenon of “Bowie”, as well as most of the social and artistic movements Bowie appropriated his inspiration from. Most of us understand the Bowie we know is a construct, but our relationship remains “authentic” nevertheless."
A little bit of googling and I discovered some others had made the connection:
""Covfefe" is no mystery. It was Trump's misspelling of "kayfabe," a wrestling term with which he would be familiar, considering his ties to Vince McMahon and the WWE. The concept also explains a lot about Trump and his supporters." - source unknown
More on kayfabe:
'Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined. ... The aesthetic of World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be spreading from the ring to the world stage. Ask an average Trump supporter whether he or she thinks the president actually plans to build a giant wall and have Mexico pay for it, and you might get an answer that boils down to, “I don’t think so, but I believe so.” That’s kayfabe. Chants of “Build the Wall” aren’t about erecting a structure; they’re about how cathartic it feels, in the moment, to yell with venom against a common enemy.' - New York Times
Glam wrestler Adrian Street
More choice bits from the Curcio essay
"Most believe life isn’t art, precisely because it lacks the mediation of artifice; “real” comes to mean “unplanned”. And therein lies our self-deception. In Goffman Erving’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, most social roles are established in a manner virtually indistinguishable from those embodied by artists.
".... As Nietzsche claimed, ‘no artist tolerates reality’.
"Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition, ‘The masks do not hide anything but other masks […] The same thing is both disguising, and disguised’.
"Simon Critchley summarizes Bowie’s artistic method in this way, ‘Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and re-enactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live, and confronts us with the reality of illusion’.
True originality would be a form of madness.
"At least in regard to “the squares”, a rock star is some kind of ‘monster’.
"As Bowie put it in 1972, ‘The artist doesn’t exist. He’s strictly a figment of the public’s imagination. None of us exist. We’re in the twilight zone. We’ll all go to hell, ’cause we set ourselves up as gods’.
