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Title details for Shock and Awe by Simon Reynolds - Available

Shock and Awe

by Simon Reynolds
ebook
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"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." —Los Angeles Review of Books
NPR Great Read of 2016
Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late Sixties, glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. In Shock and Awe, renowned music critic Simon Reynolds takes you on a wild cultural tour through the early Seventies, a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up, thrilling music and larger-than-life personas.
Shock and Awe offers a fresh, in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon, placing it in the wider Seventies context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genre's major themes—stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse—Reynolds tracks glam's legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from Eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to twenty-first century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga. Shock and Awe shows how the original glam artists' obsessions with fame, extreme fashion, and theatrical excess continue to reverberate through contemporary pop culture.
"Giddy and wonderful . . . Shock and Awe is hard to rein in because it's about more than glam rock. It's about the magic of the popular (important word: popular) arts at their most inventive and curious, about adventure dressed up and turned up, brazenly changing the world." —The Guardian
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Publisher: HarperCollins

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9780062279811
  • File size: 7432 KB
  • Release date: November 21, 2023

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9780062279811
  • File size: 7608 KB
  • Release date: November 21, 2023
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Formats

OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

History Music Sociology Nonfiction

Languages

English

"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." —Los Angeles Review of Books
NPR Great Read of 2016
Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late Sixties, glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. In Shock and Awe, renowned music critic Simon Reynolds takes you on a wild cultural tour through the early Seventies, a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up, thrilling music and larger-than-life personas.
Shock and Awe offers a fresh, in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon, placing it in the wider Seventies context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genre's major themes—stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse—Reynolds tracks glam's legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from Eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to twenty-first century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga. Shock and Awe shows how the original glam artists' obsessions with fame, extreme fashion, and theatrical excess continue to reverberate through contemporary pop culture.
"Giddy and wonderful . . . Shock and Awe is hard to rein in because it's about more than glam rock. It's about the magic of the popular (important word: popular) arts at their most inventive and curious, about adventure dressed up and turned up, brazenly changing the world." —The Guardian
Expand title description text
History Music Sociology Nonfiction