punk / glam - glam / punk

" Punk was glam ripping itself apart" - Barney Hoskyns

"Punk... represents a deliberately scrawled addendum to the 'text' of glam rock - an addendum designed to puncture glam rock's extravagantly ornate style" - Dick Hebdige

True, and yet I am always surprised by how much punk is already contained within and preempted by certain glam and glitter tunes - sonically (glam's rarely ornate, musically - quite the opposite), attitudinally, philosophically 

 

like, why was pub rock even necessary? this is Watneys Red Barrel converted into sound (I might be channeling Bob Stanley here)

Not even mentioning all the direct transitions -  County, Dolls / Heartbreakers, Slaughter and the Dogs...  TV Smith had a glam band before the Adverts 

continuity versus rupture = a big dilemma for historians - which one to emphasize? 

i generally opt to honor how it felt at the time, to the agents of history and the onlookers

musically the bit that goes in the transition between glam's hard rock and punk's hard rock is the little bit of boogie left in glam - that shuffle you can still hear in the Quatro tune

glittr

 

the children of PC Music = surprisingly legion 

[from S+A Aftershocks section]

Digi-glam’s final frontier is pure fiction. Step in much-discussed and highly polarizing label PC Music and its roster of semi-imaginary pop stars like Lipgloss Twins, Princess Bambi, and Hannah Diamond.  Released in August via XL Records, but co-produced by PC mastermind A.G. Cook, QT’s “Hey QT” sounds like 4-year-old Lola from the British animated TV series Charlie and Lola, now grown up enough for first crushes and texting. In a nice joke, QT (in real life, the performance artist Hayden Dunham) is linked to the fictitious product DrinkQT, an energy drink.  But in a world where K-pop and J-pop already approach the state of animation, what is the point of PC, exactly? Not satire or parody, says Cook. Others identify the aesthetic as “post-irony”: a simulation of the mainstream that is very slightly askew, replacing critique and commentary “with ambiguity and uncanniness.”