Reynolds makes a point of contrasting the stiffness and scepticism of contemporary critics of glam with the simultaneously unbridled and sharp insights of bands’ teenage apostles. Read critic reviews It could slay the living, revive the dead, and bend the laws of nature. As they work the case of a missing person and a body found in the water, they are also guarding a little girl, Annabelle, from danger. Asked about Shock and Awe, Wolfowitz said, “I don’t care for that phrase.” Gen. T. Michael Moseley, then the Gulf War II combined force air component commander, was of similar opinion. He writes not only about glam’s big guns, but “failures” such as Jook and the Heavy Metal Kids. Of Roxy Music’s song “Mother of Pearl”, he observes: “Every line is delivered with a deranged archness of emphasis, suffusing the entire song with a kind of poisoned camp.”. Reynolds’s book is broader, of course, having been years in the making since his 2011 exploration of the power of nostalgia in a technological age, Retromania, but you still sense it being reshaped in the shock waves of that loss. You just let yourself go.” Bolan himself once described a hit record as “a magic spell”, and Reynolds offers suggestive parallels between pop and magic: in previous centuries, it was commonplace to talk of canny individuals who “cast the glamour”. Its leading lights were inspired by music hall, mime, children’s and mythological literature – a distinctly non-rock and un-American family tree. A mixture of bubblegum pop and football-terrace stomp: the Sweet, 1971. This is an art of shock and awe, of violence, bloodshed and ecstatic laughter. The horror-masked, anti-establishment Iowa band’s showbiz tactics still whip up their enthusiastic fans. Early on, Reynolds also puts forward the interesting notion that glam rock popularised ideas that became known to the masses as postmodernism, as past forms were embraced and infused, fondly, with irreverence, from the off. He pumps feeling into you. "Shock and Awe" only shows us the heroes of a time when the press unwittingly laid down on the job and allowed our pens to be used as propaganda tools. Over Shock and Awe "The truth matters!" As they work the case of a missing person and a body found in the water, they are also guarding a little girl, Annabelle, from danger. here’s a lightning bolt on the cover of this book, in bright red and blue, a logo still alive with the shock of the new. gargantuan study of “a time when pop was titanic, idolatrous, unsane, a theatre of inflamed artifice and grandiose gestures”. There is a long tradition of pop musicians, especially British ones, suffering ridicule for being effete or androgynous. All told, though, this is a wonderful celebration of – and reckoning with – a generation of chancers, chameleons and lunatic geniuses who proved, as Adam Ant later claimed, that “ridicule is nothing to be scared of”. According to The Guardian correspondent Brian Whitaker in 2003, "To some in the Arab and Muslim countries, Shock and Awe is terrorism by another name; to others, a crime that compares unfavourably with September 11." Cassidy and Ty once again find themselves involved with a situation that could adversely affect the island inhabitants. Glam harked back to the baroque stagecraft and outsized personae of Arthur Brown, Lord Sutch, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. Shock and Awe has a worthy story to tell and some fine actors trying to bring it to life; unfortunately, the end results are still as derivative as they are dramatically inert. It didn’t crave the respect of critics so much as the hormonal lust of teenagers. Blokes sporting make-up and vertiginous platform boots, songs that were precision-tooled melodramas of bubblegum pop and football-terrace stomp, a belief in pop itself as a liberating space for fantasy and shape-shifting: it’s perhaps unsurprising that glam, in whose rise Bowie played a huge part, has never been taken very seriously. It is now the lifeblood of the modern world, fueling our lives and underpinning every aspect of technological advancement. “The term Shock and Awe has never been a term that I’ve used. They convinced him that pop should be “alien, sensationalistic, hysterical in both senses, a place where the sublime and the ridiculous merge and become indistinguishable”. As the movie is re-released, its maker Victor Schonfeld relives the horrors that inspired his work - and wonders if TV would have the guts to show it today. The rise of the audio processor Auto-Tune and other technologies that process and reshape the human voice has led to a growing interest in how to describe and understand vocality. Until recently, electricity was seen as a magical power. “Shock and Awe” reminds us all of this, and of the American media’s shameful complicity in fomenting an unjustified and vastly destructive war. The book moves chronologically, kicking off with Reynolds’s own Bowie figure, Marc Bolan (“[he] androgynised rock – but without sacrificing urgency or heat”), then proffers detailed mini-biographies of others who took glam in their own wayward directions. Often these excursions are exhilarating, though, like Reynolds’s delvings into the term “Roxy” from which came the north-east’s Roxy Music (it’s the name of the dancing club in Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar, a novel about another young dreamer from the industrial north, and of the huge 1920s New York movie palace, designed, much like glam rock, “to make the average citizen feel like royalty”). The lack of joy in this sentence says much about Reynolds’s usual uber-serious style, recalling Caitlin Moran’s description of him in her bestselling memoir How to Be a Woman, remembering the early 1990s, when both were Melody Maker writers: “[He is] a pre-Raphaelite Oxford graduate, into unlistenably cutting-edge dance music… so clever, half of us are too scared to talk to him.”. Read 5 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Artfully dropped cultural and sociological theory – particularly about the choreography of self-identity – can be found in every chapter, but even more pleasing is Reynolds’s eye for odd details: Bolan initially spelled his surname with an umlaut; at Dulwich College, Phil Manzanera (later of Roxy Music) formed a band called Pooh and the Ostrich Feathers; Slade’s Dave Hill had a personalised licence plate (YOB 1); the “coloured girls” on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” were actually a trio of all-white British girls called Thunderthighs. A Lycra-jumpsuited Bowie putting his arm around Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops was one thing; across the Atlantic, Wayne County was squirting dildos full of milk at clubgoers and singing, while sprawled across a gynaecological table, “You’ve Got to Get Laid to Be Healthy (And I’m the Healthiest Girl in Town)”. From Bowie to T-Rex, glam was a gaudy, fun reaction to serious beardy music, as well as a risky celebration of androgyny. It reminds us of a time when British pop was arguably at its boldest, its flashiest, its most fun, throwing glitter on its eyes and its boots, through the sounds of its electric guitars and skin-tight thumping drums. Still, the net effect is palpable. Reynolds writes of Freddie Mercury’s “diabetic delirium”; he describes Cockney Rebel’s Steve Harley as “all fey chirrups and goblin sneers” and Alice Cooper’s scream as “a dark whooshing sound like a kamikaze closing in exultantly on death”. Commenting has been disabled at this time but you can still. This is the British Museum’s first new show since reopening, and it never ceases to startle. Shock and Awe is published by Faber. Without it, we would be lost. Shock and Awe is published by Faber & Faber (£25). Books heavy with the legacy of David Bowie (from whom that lightning bolt came, painted down his face on the cover of 1973’s Aladdin Sane) have landed quickly and fiercely since his death back in January. Was there ever a more piercing account of Marc Bolan’s auratic dynamism than that of 15- year-old Noelle Parr who, in a letter to Melody Maker, sighed: “His body actually ripples. Elsewhere, Disc magazine ran a story headlined “Lock Up Your Sons, It’s the New York Dolls”. (beginning of war in iraq. But at its best, Shock and Awe still feels like it strains to be Spotlight-lite and comes up lacking. The Guardian and VICE News, among others. Usher Hall, Edinburgh. Anti-war protesters in 2003 also claimed that "the shock and awe pummeling of Baghdad [was] a kind of terrorism." Reynolds situates these people and their songs stimulatingly in relation to their times, and in relation to historical movements such as dandyism, and in the original meaning of concepts such as glamour (a word about visual illusions, popularised by Sir Walter Scott in the 1820s). It also marked a return to the thrill of the pop single rather than the themed or concept album. Cassidy and Ty once again find themselves involved with a situation that could adversely affect the island inhabitants. Operation Shock and Awe does not frighten me, but Richard Perle's chilling words do (Thank God for the death of the UN, March 21). Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 23.58 GMT. It reminds us of a time when British pop was arguably at its boldest, its flashiest, its most fun, throwing glitter on its eyes and its boots, through the sounds of its electric guitars and skin-tight thumping drums. It viewed rock as beardy and hirsute, hobbled by its desire to be taken seriously as an art form. 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. Partly, Reynolds suggests, this was a matter of historical timing: national service was a distant memory and the emergence of more liberal child-rearing philosophies was changing models of masculinity, while the rise of gay rights activism and the heady transgressions of Alternative Miss World created a climate for talk and displays of sexual experimentation. And yet, perhaps because he was so young, the records by the Sweet and Alice Cooper he heard on the radio had an outsize impact on him. The final chapter, Aftershocks, about glam rock’s late, shuddering impacts, also offers some interesting connections. In de nasleep van de terreuraanslagen van 11 september 2001 werkt George W. Bush aan een plan om Irak binnen te … It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium.” All those qualities could be found in glam rock, the phosphorescence of sound, image and avant-absurdism that lit up the British charts in the early 70s. Put on your silver platform boots, Last modified on Wed 16 Oct 2019 12.10 BST. In publishers’ terms, Shock and Awe – a hefty, intellectual book about glam rock – is timely. 5. stars 5 out of 5 stars. Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy by Simon Reynolds – review | Books | The Guardian. Pop music, David Bowie told Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, suffered by being taken too seriously. Film Review: ‘Shock and Awe’ Rob Reiner's well-meaning drama about journalistic integrity prior to the Iraq War is a little too cozy for its punchy politics. I get that: his writing can be so heavily serious, it can make you feel afraid to read more of him. Its purpose is (a) to terrorize the targeted masses into a state of submission, (b) to irreversibly destabilize their society, so that it can be radically “restructured,” and (c) to convincingly demonstrate an overwhelming superiority of force, so that resistance is rendered inconceivable. “Having immersed myself so intensely in his life’s work, and his whole era, as a historian, [Bowie] had curiously come to seem like history to me,” he writes staunchly. Few films will be as shocking as this year's Violation (available on Shudder). Simon Reynolds, widely regarded as one of the world’s most important music writers – The Sex Revolts (co-authored with his wife Joy Press), Energy Flash (about rave), and Rip It Up and Start Again (on post-punk) are all classics – wasn’t even a teenager when glam was in its ascendancy. Reynolds is always focused on how teenage this genre was in its appeal and its market, quoting a great Noddy Holder statement from the time: “We don’t want no underground leftovers, we are going for the kids.” Catch your fans while they are excitedly, fantastically, working out what they could be, goes the logic, before earnestness, or pretentiousness, or workaday adulthood, kicks in. In publishers’ terms, Shock and Awe – a hefty, intellectual book about glam rock – is timely. “Shock and Awe” reminds the audience that few if any Bush administration officials were held to account for deceiving the public in any meaningful way. With Jim Al-Khalili, Jon Agar, Patricia Fara, Iwan Morus. The title is a misnomer. The era’s dark undertow (in discussions of Gary Glitter and of Kim Fowley’s alleged rape of the bassist of the Runaways) is handled well. Music historians, with exceptions such as Fred and Judy Vermorel in Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans (1985), don’t tend to explore the relationship between performers and fans very deeply. This book, Shock And Awe, in the Lantern Beach Guardians series is an outstanding book. Occasionally there’s the tiring sense of a man spotting a word – oh, “charisma”! Decades later, Wolfgang Voigt, co-founder of revered techno label Kompakt, would sample T-Rex’s ‘“Life’s A Gas”. “I think it should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. Sheffield arena, Sheffield. Commenting has been disabled at this time but you can still. It’s too much. T Rex on Top of the Pops, 1972: Marc Bolan ‘androgynised rock – but without sacrificing urgency or heat’. )so yeaah. Rating: C. The new Rob Reiner film, Shock and Awe begins with a quote from Bill Moyers: “There is no more important struggle for American democracy than insuring a free independent and diverse media.”. 1. 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