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ABSTRACT
This article considers Glam Rock in the historical context of the development of the society of the spectacle in the United Kingdom. Glam Rock is usually discussed as a youth culture. This article places Glam Rock in relation to the acceptance of television, especially colour television, the associated importance of advertising and the establishment of the UK as a consumption society. One important aspect of this was the emphasis on fashion. All together, this development is what Guy Debord described as the society of the spectacle. The most important Glam Rockers, Marc Bolan and David Bowie, understood the centrality of colour television and developed images that were enticing to a television audience.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See: Taylor and Wall, “Beyond the Skinheads,” 105–123; Hebdige, Subculture, 59–62, and Stratton, “Why Doesn”t Anybody Write About Glam Rock?” 15–38. In that article I argued that Glam Rock was not a class-based youth culture and could be understood through the prism of the ending of the myth of classlessness in British society and, as I put it then, ‘a last attempt at a politics of affluence.’
2. See: Cagle, Reconstructing Pop/Subculture Art.
3. Robins and Cagle, Knuckle Sandwich, 81.
4. Bennett, “Subcultures or Neo-Tribes?” 605.
5. I discuss the idea of Glam Rock in terms of a neo-tribe at greater length in Stratton, “Glam Rock: Youth Culture, Performativity and Sexuality.”
6. Fowler, Youth Culture, 11.
7. The germ for this article can be found in Craik and Stratton, “Fashioning Music Culture”, 31–38—this is one of the catalogue essays for Music, Melbourne and Me: 40 years of Mushroom & Melbourne’s Popular Music Culture.
8. Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” 101.
9. Hoskyns, Glam!; Reynolds, Shock and Awe.
10. Auslander, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” 39.
11. Another good book but from a musical rather than performance perspective is Chapman and Johnson’s Global Glam and Popular Music.
12. Auslander, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” 6.
13. Ibid., 14.
14. Ibid., 49.
15. Novick and Middles, Wham Bam.
16. Auslander, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” 50.
17. Jenks, Transgression, 3.
18. Glynos and Stavrakakis, “Encounters of the Real Kind,” 210.
19. Cited in McCabe, Feminist Film Studies, 96.
20. See: Antonia, Much Too Soon, 77.
21. Hoskyns, Glam!, 69.
22. Ibid., 69.
23. See: Chambers and Weiner, “KISS, Glam Performance,” 129–141; Stratton, “KISS.”
24. See: Stratton, “KISS.”
25. See: Chapman, “Alice Cooper,” 113–128.
26. Reynolds, Shock and Awe, 128.
27. Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary, 29–30.
28. Whitworth, “Alice Cooper.”
29. Galucci, “45 Years Ago.”
30. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, thesis 1.
31. Ibid., thesis 4.
32. Best and Kellner, “Debord and the Postmodern Truth,” para 9.
33. Ibid., para. 16.
34. On the Situationist International, see: Plant, The Most Radical Gesture.
35. Best and Kellner, “Debord and the Postmodern Truth,” para 44.
36. Simpson, Top of the Pops, 38.
37. Reynolds, Shock and Awe, 1.
38. Ibid., 1.
39. Quoted in Hoskyns, Glam!, 19.
40. Ibid., 17.
41. Sheffield, “David Bowie,” para 2.
42. Gildart, Images of England, XX.
43. Paphides, “When Ziggy Played Guitar.”
44. Howard, “Starman!” para 2.
45. Moran, ““Stand Up and Be Counted,”“ 187.
46. Ibid., 189.
47. Marwick, The Sixties, 7.
48. Ibid., 117.
49. Marwick, British Society Since 1945, 117–118.
50. Dandy, “You Have To Think Differently,” para 6.
51. See: Chapman, Experiencing David Bowie, 69–70. Ian Chapman has a detailed discussion of the cover in Experiencing David Bowie. He concludes that it is more likely a visual realisation of a description in a poem of Rossetti’s.
52. Sandbrook, White Heat, 245.
53. Shaw et al, “Rise of the Supermarket in Britain.”
54. Beckett, “Habitat,” para 8.
55. Laing, “The Package Holiday,” 18.
56. Curtis, “CREATIVE REVOLUTION 1962–1972,” para 13 and 14.
57. Ibid., para 15.
58. McKevitt, The Persuasion Industries, 184.
59. Curtis, “CREATIVE REVOLUTION 1962–1972,” para 19.
60. In 1967 Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, along with the virginal pop star Marianne Faithfull who was Jagger”s girlfriend and a number of others, were at Richards’ country house Redlands when it was raided by police looking for drugs. The most widely circulated urban myth was that the police found Faithfull naked under a rug with a Mars bar in her vagina being eaten by Jagger. This myth brings together consumption and eroticism along with a sense of consumption being a deviant, guilty pleasure. The Rolling Stones were the ‘bad boys’ of British popular music. Chocolate Mars bars had been advertised on television since 1960 along with the slogan: A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play. By the early 1970s the consumer society was being celebrated. A decade after 1967 the myth would have been unlikely to have had the same amount of power.
61. Blair, “Cosmic Dancer,” 25–41.
62. Bolan owned both a Rolls Royce and a Jaguar as well as the Mini Clubman in which he died. He never learned to drive.
63. Baird, “Colour Television in Britain,” para 14.
64. Moran, “Stand Up and Be Counted,” 181.
65. Baird, “Colour Television in Britain,” para 1.
66. Moran, Armchair Nation, 163.
67. Ibid., 164.
68. Wheatley, Spectacular Television, 57.
69. Heller, “How Bowie Invented Stardust,” para 11.
70. Lupro, “Keeping Space Fantastic,” 14.
71. Wikipedia, “Hot Love,” para 2.
72. Some versions have ‘Who needs TV when I’ve got T. Rex’ which suggests a more conservative meaning but ‘I need a TV when I’ve got T. Rex’ is more authoritative. Certainly, this is the version sung by Ian Hunter with Mott the Hoople. This is also the line sung by Bowie on his version of the song.
73. Bowie, Backstage Passes, 44.
74. See: Auslander, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” 1–16.
75. Quatro Unzipped.
76. The idea for the leather jumpsuit, which Quatro attributes to Most, may have come from the Marianne Faithfull film Girl on a Motorcycle, released in 1968. In this film Faithfull”s character rides a Harley Davidson Electra Glide.
77. Gregory “Masculinity, Sexuality and the Visual Culture of Glam Rock,” p. 51.
78. Hoskyns, Glam!, 4.
79. Meese, (Sem)Erotics, 36.
80. Barton, “Back From the Black,” para 7.
81. I have discussed the relationship between death and the society of the spectacle elsewhere. See: Stratton “Death and Spectacle,” 3–24.
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Jon Stratton
Jon Stratton is an adjunct professor in UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia. Jon has published widely in Cultural Studies, Popular Music Studies, Jewish Studies, Australian Studies, Media Studies, and on race and multiculturalism. Jon’s most recent books are, coedited with Jon Dale and Tony Mitchell,An Anthology of Australian Albums: Critical Engagements (Bloomsbury; 2020) and Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia (Palgrave Macmillan; 2020).