How to Be a Glam Rocker

1. Change Your Name
Have you ever heard of a Glam Rocker with the name John Smith or Mary Jane? No, you haven’t. So add some shimmer, throw in some alliteration, sprinkle in some fun. Your name is Sarah Gill? Not any more! Now it’s Sasha Sequin.  Your parents gave you the name Rodney Lee? Well why don’t you call yourself Skylar Sedsky? Or if you want to stay a little closer to your roots, Romping Rodney Redler?

2. Get A Make-Over*
Get rid of the frumpy jeans, the ratty T-Shirts, and the pathetic attempt at a hair style and start dressing for the job you want.
If you’re a guy, go for girls clothing. V-Neck shirts are good, and so are brightly colored tights. So what if you’re not supposed to wear them as pants, it’s America! At least you’re WEARING pants. Grow your hair out and get acquainted with an eyeliner pencil. It’s your new best friend.
If you’re a girl, go for motorcycle wear. Leather, jackets with skulls or indiscernible writing on the backs of them, weirdly cut pants, things like this are what you’re going to be wearing for the rest of your career. If you’ve got long hair, chop it off. And you can say adios to everything in your make-up bag. Except maybe some red lipstick. And of course, your eyeliner.

3. Learn To Play An Instrument
Seriously, you’re not in a boy band, learn to play something. If you’re female, drums or bass would be a great way of saying “I’m Glam Rock, don’t mess with me”. If you’re a guy, go for piano. I mean, let’s be real. With pants as tight as yours, you’re not going to be able to do any prancing around onstage.

4. Fall In Love
Half of all the hit songs on the radio are about love, and how can you write about something you don’t know? So fall in love, and whip up a few singles.

5. Get Dumped
And the other half is about getting your heart ripped out of your chest, thrown into the garbage disposal, and being dumped into a land fill. So please, go on a emotional rollercoaster of hurt and pain and wring a song out of your mangled heart!

6. Get Hired
Now that you’ve got the look and the lyrics, it’s time to move out of your parents’ basement and get a job.
Before you go for an interview, make sure you research the place. And just in case, tell someone where you’re going and when you should be back. Just in case.
And if one place doesn’t work out, don’t sweat it! Different record labels have different tastes, and someone somewhere HAS to like what you have to give, right?

7. Enjoy Your Fame
Go out and party (responsibly), fall in love again, and make your music. Live it up, but keep yourself grounded and remember the little people. And for goodness sake, DON’T RUN OUT OF EYELINER.

8. Have A Scandal That Ruins Your Career
To be a real star, you’ve got to fall. Get caught shop lifting from Dollar Tree, run over a dog and refuse to apologize, write a post on Twitter (a social networking site similar to Facebook) about how you can’t stand Dr. Phil or Oprah, just about anything will do.
Just get everyone to hate you, it’s not that hard.

9. Live The Rest Of Your Life In Shame And Anonymity
Now that you’ve ruined your career and are too scared to go out in public as yourself for the next ten years, it’s time to look over the choices you made in your life and doubt every single one of them.
And whatever you do, DON’T LOSE YOUR EYELINER.

* Second only to eyeliner, glitter is very important. Bathe in it if you have to, just make sure you’re covered with it. Every time you touch something, you should leave glitter on it. It’ll be your own personal calling card.

Glam Rock

Here in 2012, music isn’t really about the music, it’s about the image. If you don’t have the right hair style, the right clothes, the right everything, you’re not going to make it in the business. Fans expect you to be perfect yet relatable. They want to be entertained.
And I think it’s safe to say that we can thank Glam Rock (the brief seventies phenomena often mistaken for eighties hair metal) for all of this.
Glam Rock, for those of you who don’t know, is, as this man said, “crunchy guitar rock put across outrageous theatricality”.
To be classified as Glam Rock you had to be big, brash, obnoxiously loud, and (above all) a star. You had to be the first penguin to jump in to test the water so others could follow you, knowing they would be safe. You either went big, or you went home.
For most Glam Rockers, home was in the UK. Unsurprisingly, Glam Rock never caught on in close-minded America.
Glam Rock relied heavily on aesthetics, and allowed people to do things previously unthinkable, not only in music, but also in society. Women were playing Bass guitar and wearing leather and men were wearing platform heels and make-up. People were starting to play around with gender roles, and they were having fun doing it.
If you ask someone what artist they think of when you say “Glam Rock”, the most common answers you’ll get are “Huh?” and “What?”, but every once in a while you’ll get a “Um, Bowie?”
But there’s a lot more than that. There’s Queen, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Queen, Suzi Quatro (one of the rare female Glam Rockers), Rocky Music, the New York Dolls (an even rarer American Glam Rock band), the Sweet, and even Lou Reed. Even now there’s a few newer Glam Rock bands, hidden behind pop and rap artists, like Cinema Bizarre and Foxy Shazam.
Foxy Shazam is a modern day Glam Rock band. The clothes (and facial hair) is ridiculously strange boarding on cool, just like the members names. The line up includes lead singer Eric Nally, guitarist Loren Turner, pianist Sky White, bassist Daisy Caplan, drummer Aaron McVeigh, and trumpeter Alex Nauth. Nally says the band name came from a slang term for cool at his high school. About their music, it has been said that “Foxy rocks with the inventiveness of Modest Mouse, the epic nature of Queen, the chaos of Blood Brothers, and the soul of Reverend Al Green.”.
One of the main reasons female Glam Rockers are and were so unusual is because rock was already being feminized by men in drag, so real women weren’t needed. So the few that got into the Glam business often did the opposite, wearing leather and playing bass guitar. Suzi Quatro (born Susan Kay Quatrocchio) was one of these women. She dropped out of school at fourteen to become a Go-Go dancer, but instead joined a band called Cradle with her sisters. They never got signed, but Quatro went on with her solo career and became very popular in Great Britain. At one point in time, she even played a character based on herself in the T.V. series Happy Days.
Paul Francis Gadd, known as Gary Glitter after the beginning of his debut in music, was credited with blending together Glam Rock and Rock n’ Roll to create what we think of Glam Rock as now days. Focusing on the music itself, Glitter did pretty well for himself. Over his career, he had twenty one hit singles in the UK. Unfortunately, we can’t ignore the fact that the man had some serious problems. By the time he retired, he owed over £180,000. In 1999 he went to jail for a short while and earned the title “classified sex offender”, and he was arrested again in Vietnam in 2005 for molesting two under aged girls. When asked about it when he was first arrested, the only thing he would say is “I haven't done anything. I'm innocent. It's a conspiracy.” Needless to say, he doesn’t get out much any more.
On Long Island in 1942, Lou Reed was born. After six years of being in Velvet Underground (a band that was “more than just an alternative to the prevailing 1960‘s culture of hippies and flower power, the Velvet Underground was a band with a artistic and political vision beyond the realms of popular music”#), Reed started his solo career, and is continuing to make music to this day. Most notably, his last CD was a collaboration with the band Metallica, which wasn’t as great of a success as nobody thought it would be. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, because it was “still preferable to the Cookie Monster vomit that passes for…metal records”.
And last but certainly not least, David Bowie. Born David Jones in Brixton in 1947, Bowie listened to Jazz as a child and learned to play the saxophone. When The Monkee’s got popular, Bowie changed his last name so he wouldn’t be mistaken as Davy Jones. Once when an interviewer asked him what he was planning to do next (he had already stared in movies and his music was becoming more and more popular everyday), he replied saying, “I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.” Bowie had many odd things about him, but the most noticeable was his different colored eyes. According to Bowie, when he was in school he got into a fight with his friend George Underwood over a girl they both liked, and he got punched in the eye. After several surgeries, his sight was restored completely, but one eye stays open and cannot be closed.
The music of Glam Rock originated from  a mix of Rock n’ Roll, Folk Music, and Psychedelic Rock. Common instruments include drums, piano/keyboard, guitar, and bass, similar to any other type of music. Synthesizers are also frequently used.
Most lyrics from a genre convey the same kind of message, such as in Rap (where artists tell you it’s alright to do drugs and drink) and even Country (where singers tell you whiskey is the answer to everything from heartbreak to bank troubles), and Glam Rock is no exception.
In this line from Sweet Jane by Velvet Underground, “Jack is in his corset and Jane is in her vest, and me I’m in a Rock n’ Roll band”, the normal gender association with clothes is reversed, with a man in a corset and a woman in a vest. And of course, the man in a Rock n’ Roll band.
“And Wendy’s stealing clothes from marks and sparks, and Freddie’s got spots from ripping off the stars from his face” from Mott the Hoople’s song All The Young Dudes, is reminiscent of Lewis Carol in how it sounds very important and urgent, even though it’s a bunch of nonsense.
The lyric “I’m here for your love and I’ll make my stand, we were born to be
princes of the universe” by Queen from their song Princes of the Universe, tells that the narrator doesn’t care what anyone else says, he’s going to love who he wants and everyone else can just get over it.
And this last example, “You’d be my air supply if we lived on Mars, we’d put some Bowie on and admire the stars” from I’m In Love With a Boy by Foxy Shazam is similar to the Queen song, conveying the thought that love is what you need, not the approval of others.

Speech About Optimism

For this assignment, we were forced (most against our will), to write a speech on how optimism can help us reach our goals and overcome obstacles. Personally, I don’t believe that optimism is any more important than say, hard work and morals, but my own opinion need not color my writing.
In the tenth edition of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, optimism is defined as “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcomes”.
And even though Oscar Wilde once said, “Quotation is serviceable substitute for wit.”, I decided to ask two students what they thought optimism was and how it effected the outcomes of their tribulations. I found myself with two very different answers. The first (from a somewhat incompetent seventh grader), was, “It means a learning disability, people are born with it, they can’t help it”. I don’t think she had a clue what we were talking about, but I decided to humor her and keep the answer. The second, from a bright eighth grader, said “I honestly hate optimism. It just creates disappointment if things don’t work out”.
When I asked the young lady to elaborate further, she said “I find optimism to be depressing. Watching people put on a smile and believe everything will work out and then have their world crash around them? We should be more realistic. Odds are, things won’t work out and we’ll live miserably. Why lie to ourselves and be even more disappointed?”
Now, I don’t believe that optimism is always a good thing, but neither do I think that being a pessimist is the way to go. I agree with a statement made by Gil Stern, “Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.” Think of it this way. There’s a big test coming up soon. One student, (an optimist), says “Well golly gee, I’m sure I’ll pass this test because life is filled with rainbows and puppies!” A second student, (a pessimist), tells everyone “I’m going to fail this test because life is unfair and full of storm clouds and spiders.” The third, who just happens to be a realist, says “I’m going to go home and study, so I’ll have a better chance at passing.”
Now, who do you think will most likely pass this hypothetical test? If you said anyone besides the realist, then you’re wrong.
To put these character traits into a new light, lets personify them.
For an optimist, lets think of a goody-two-shoes kind of character. They’re always  telling you to look on the bright side of life and goes around quoting every happy thing they hear.
As for a pessimist, lets draw a bit from every gloomy fellow you’ve ever had the misfortune to meet. Sloop shouldered, tired of the idea of happiness, and ready to share with you all of their woebegone memories and wretchedly learned lessons.
For a realist, think of a lesser version of Sherlock Holmes. A good head on their shoulders without the business of downcast thoughts or jubilant notions.
As for obstacles, you should be stable enough to trust yourself to overcome them, and not have to lean on optimism as a crutch. Optimism isn’t going to help you on that test unless you study for it, and the same goes for life. If thinking nice thoughts makes you feel better about yourself, then go for it! But if it just serves as a distraction to things important to you, feel free to leave it in the dust and catapult your own self forward. You shouldn’t feel the need to strive for an earthly Nirvana, but neither should you settle for anything less then what you’re capable of.
In short, by being absolutely set on the idea that everything will go badly seems like a pretty miserable way to live, but staying happy all the time kind of sounds like a drag as well. But by taking the time to focus on things you can change or could do in order to improve your life, you’re more likely to achieve an agreeable outcome.