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.