The Most Brutal Burnout Ever

So listen, the 60s died brutally. We all know that. All that optimism and goodness, the fond things, just got absolutely suffocated and beaten down by too many years in the jungle, unforeseen technological advances and the inevitable rise of globalization. The Beatles broke up in 1970. Looking back, as someone born in the late eighties, I can’t imagine that anyone did not see that coming from a mile away. It seems like the Fabs were on the verge of calling it a day for the last three or four years that they were together; what with being the biggest band ever and all, obviously it couldn’t last forever.

Same goes for all of that stuff that gets tagged on to everyone’s memories of the 1960s and all of the things that those of us who never saw it associate with the period: it was always going to collapse into itself. The movements, all of them, didn’t work out as well as everyone had planned. Vietnam was still happening. The Cold War, in full force. Advertising and mass-media reached incredible new heights. All of those usual things. The Me-Decade.

And so we turn our focus of Postmodernism in Popular Music to the early 1970s. A lot happened in the early 1970s, music-wise that would be worth noting: Harvest, Songs of Love and Hate and Ege Bamyasi all happened and those were all great. R&B and Motown begat 70s soul beginning of course with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On in 1971 which would be perfected a year later with Al Green’s less political, but more overtly baby-making Let’s Stay Together. George Clinton and his Funkadelic produced Maggot Brain, thus unleashing vast hordes of funk imitators wielding science-fiction bass guitars. George Harrison surprised everyone by becoming the first Beatle to have a successful solo record with his mammoth triple-LP, All Things Must Pass.

To bring things back to Earth a little bit – though given what I’m about to say, bringing things back to Earth might be an inappropriate phrase – this section is about Glam Rock. That’s right, Glam Rock: androgyny, sci-fi, fuzz, rockabilly, strings and heaps of blow. What could be more appropriate a discussion point for discussing the advent of the excesses of the 1970s than men in women’s clothing singing songs about aliens? Of course, the majority of the Glam Rock that would be actually produced was more or less tripe, so I will obviously be focusing on the artier wing of the subgenre. Specifically, this section will primarily revolve around, for the sake of both brevity and quality, the early 1970s input of T. Rex, Roxy Music and David Bowie. To be even more specific, I will be mostly be discussing the albums Electric Warrior, For Your Pleasure, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Aladdin Sane here to illustrate the direction that pop music took in the post-Beatles era with regards to music, culture and literature. Hang on to yourself.

The Hippy’s Lament

Marc Bolan formed Tyrannosaurus Rex in 1967 as a psychedelic folk group and would release several albums under this name and format – the group achieved decidedly middling levels of success. Meanwhile, the young David Bowie was treading in similar waters with his “Space Oddity”, that is, cutting his teeth as a minor player in the overcrowded late-60s folk scene; Brian Ferry was teaching ceramics, apparently. Thousands of bands trying to be both psychedelic and poppy as well as to more or less be the Beatles in a standing room only British rock scene; as with everything, something had to collapse.

By 1970, Bolan and his group, which typically consisted of a rotating cast of supporting players, began to incorporate electric instruments into their sound as well as elements of rockabilly, British blues and hard rock, which would eventually synthesize the glam aesthetic. Though Bolan and his cohorts, as well as countless other British musicians including the Rolling Stones had been incorporating makeup and androgynous theatrics into their stage show and persona for some time, this trend came to a boil by the first years of the decade. Bowie had already appeared on the cover of his Man Who Sold the World album wearing a dress and by 1971 would release Hunky Dory, a record which would again feature the apparently bisexual Bowie on the cover in an overtly feminine look.

Hunky Dory, though featuring a number of Bowie’s most well-known songs including “Changes” and “Life on Mars?”, was only a mild indicator of the sexually-charged glitz and glamor that would appear in the music of David Bowie barely a year later. However, many elements of what was to come are very evident on the record: science-fiction imagery, the aforementioned blatant sexual overtones and almost comedic, grand, epic string arrangements and instrumentation all run rampant on the record.
This is likely the natural extension of the direction that the most influential pop music of the late 1960s was heading: the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Velvet Underground had all, by close of the decade launched into the practice of, as Brian Wilson would describe, using the studio as an instrument unto itself. Pop music was getting bigger, and not just in popularity; less concerned with writing simple, catchy confections, pop musicians developed an aesthetic of expanding their music in all directions sonically and thematically while at once remaining wholly accessible. Coupled with the advent of the sexual revolution and the death of the decade of ideals, in the case of hard rock groups such as Led Zeppelin, the music of the 1970s would be dirty, pessimistic and positively dripping with sex.

Going back to Lyotard, “it is well known that during the 1960s, in all of the most highly developed societies, it [narrative knowledge] reached such explosive dimensions among those preparing to practice the professions – the students – that there was noticeable decrease in productivity at laboratories and universities unable to protect themselves from its contamination. Expecting this, with hope or fear, to lead to a revolution (as was then often the case) is out of the question: it will not change the order of things in postindustrial society overnight. But this doubt on the part of scientists must be taken into account as a major factor in evaluating the present and future status of scientific knowledge.” (Lyotard 128) Lyotard is of course suggesting that to have a knowledge of the issues at hand, particularly when faced with the realization of a harsh industrial framework, is not merely enough to achieve liberation, and this is why the movements of the 60s failed – all that existed was idealism.

Flying Saucer, Take Me Away

In 1971 Tyrannosaurus Rex, now going by the shortened moniker, T. Rex, unleashed Electric Warrior and Glam was official and unavoidable. The highest selling album in Britain for 1971 and with a deliciously appropriate front cover featuring Bolan with his guitar and a giant amplifier all outlined in gold on a black plane, Electric Warrior is a fabulously loud and brash hard rock stomp with a psychedelic twist and a groove so tight, one can scarcely get through track one without aimlessly pelvic thrusting in every possible direction.

By taking the aforementioned genres folk, country and blues and tossing them through the sexy-sci-fi filter, T. Rex with their Electric Warrior here crafted a grimy Postmodern masterwork that mixes and matches genres at will under a vast shield of thick irony. Make no mistake, this record is the very essence of camp - it is campy as hell - steeped in both tongue-in-cheek giddiness and almost tragic sincerity at once; it is a chaotic mess of contradictions and sidetracks. The most famous song from the record, the hopelessly rambunctious party anthem “Get It On”, brilliant as it is, is completely misleading to the multifaceted personality of the remainder of the record: Electric Warrior is the early 1970s embodied in all of its confusion, chaos, sincerity, and glitz, it is a seething ball of frustration and angst wrapped in a warm blanket of fuzzy, fabulous boogie.

When we get to Ziggy Stardust, these issues will take a profound one-eighty into clarity; however, Bowie’s album, Glam’s climactic moment, is an exercise in self-assuredness, where Electric Warrior is a hesitant dive into more or less uncharted territory. As Derrida says, “Prefaces, along with forwards, introductions, preludes, preliminaries, preamble, prologues, and prolegomena, have always been written, it seems, in view of their own self-effacement. Upon reaching the end of the pre-, the route that has been covered must cancel itself out. But this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it.” (Derrida 150) With that in mind, Electric Warrior proves separate from the cannon of Glam and indeed Pop itself. Being a preamble, the first major example of a movement, it is almost a separate entity altogether as it is an experiment, both the summing of a number of elements and something which is yet to be perfected and which would be totally modified barely two years later.

Of course, it is known that Bolan intended the record to be his American breakthrough, an achievement which would allude him well past his 1977 death. T. Rex was a strictly British phenomenon, which is extremely interesting as it is a rather unusual take on our paralleling of High and Low forms as demonstrated in the earlier section: Bolan attained spectacular mainstream success in his native United Kingdom, however would be forever eluded by the holy grail of rock-stardom, America. Thus, he is both legend on the small-scale and utter failure on the large and his blatant pandering with Electric Warrior is proof of this. The record is a failed attempt to conquer the largest market of them all, that is, an effort designed to appeal to mainstream audiences but nevertheless denied likely due to its overt sexuality and camp value, things that American audiences would be unlikely to embrace easily.

Curiously, 1971 was also the year that Led Zeppelin released their untitled fourth album, which proved to be a spectacular, overwhelming success; a record that with its allusions to Tolkien and mysticism was not without its share of camp. What was the difference? What led to “Stairway to Heaven” becoming the most fantastically overplayed song of the decade, where the far superior “Cosmic Dancer” was relegated to a minor blip on the American radar? Both songs contain elements of rock, psychedelia and folk, as well as a lyrical focus on science-fiction/fantasy imagery. Likely it would have been the overt sexuality of the latter that would lead to its place in the forgotten bin of minorly successful singles as Bolan’s flamboyant dress, makeup and lyrical penchant for female perspective with hyper-masculine twist would have been deeply confusing for American audiences.

However, it is this exactly what makes the androgynous aspect of Glam so profoundly Pomo: this blending of polarities. David Bowie appearing on album covers in drag and Marc Bolan discussing dancing his way out of the womb represent the shifting view of what is masculine and what is feminine becoming blurred and united. As Irigaray notes, “To remember that we must go on living and creating worlds is our task. But it can be accomplished only through the combined efforts of the two halves of the world” the masculine and the feminine.” (Irigaray 228) the Glam-rocker’s devotion to merging of sexualities only suggests a manner in which music can be improved and it is a direction that follows popular music well into the present.

Rock and Roll Suicide

In 1972, David Bowie unveiled Glam Rock’s defining moment, a dense concept album about the degeneration of hippy culture into vice and disillusionment titled The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The narrative of the record follows the eponymous spaceman, an alien rock star come to earth preaching peace, love and hope for a planet which, according to Bowie, has only five years left in which to exist, only to be consumed by drugs, disease and fame. Again, where Electric Warrior is a vague stab at new territory, Ziggy Stardust is almost too confident for its own good; it is a ballsy, flashy and grand eruption from one of rock’s most important figures, an announcement of Bowie’s prowess not only as a fiercely skilled songwriter, but also as a highly idiosyncratic, intelligent and flamboyant artist.

Equally steeped in duality and contradiction, Ziggy Stardust is again flashy and brash, yet deeply pessimistic and dark. The narrative is indicative of the postmodern notions of disillusionment, chaos and paranoia in contemporary culture with Ziggy’s inevitable fall from grace triggered by a harsh society that in its excesses was simply not able to sustain itself and handle the message. Through greed and corruption caused by the sheer availability and convenience of vice and production, the naïve Ziggy Stardust is as doomed as those he is trying to save. Ziggy falls into the demands of constant satisfaction, desire and property that have in turn led to the profound excess of the postindustrialist Western culture and in this way, the narrative of Ziggy Stardust parallels the narrative of the culture of the times. The hopefulness, the peace and love simply could not sustain themselves in the face of gluttonous capitalism.

This is of course reflected in the ways that the Glam Rockers presented themselves on stage and the elements of their music, lyrical content aside. David Bowie, during this period based his stage persona around the Ziggy Stardust character with flaming red hair, glittery and outrageous makeup and flashing, sequined catsuits. Bowie at the time was the epitome of 1970s excess with not only his dress but also his offstage behavior, which included a prolific cocaine addiction rumored to be on par with that of Sly Stone who himself was liable to tout about a violin-case packed with powder. Then again, which rock stars of the 1970s weren’t cocaine addicts? However, no one did it so flamboyantly as Bowie who would come to parallel the character that he created; his stage performance would often feature Bowie performing mock-fellatio upon guitarist Mick Ronson as he played along with numerous other displays of fierce fuck-you sexuality and outrageous theatrics.

Furthermore the actual music that was being played was clearly indicative of the moniker ‘Glam.’ Dramatic string arrangements contrasted with sparse acoustic ballads along with blaring horns, epic guitar solos and Bowie’s strutting, theatrical delivery made Ziggy Stardust a swaggering, cocksure opus of postmodern culture. Drowning the sorrows of failure in drugs and sex, the sheer excess of everything surrounding David Bowie’s music and persona circa 1972 is a stark reflection of the uncertainty and chaos that would come define the Postmodern era. Ziggy Stardust is merely an instrument through which Bowie conveys the song of the times: everything is not as we were led to believe, thus we will drown out our disillusionment with drugs and meaningless sex, which, of course, will only make things worse.

The increased access to knowledge has strengthened this disillusionment wholly for as knowledge is increased, so too must occur what Lyotard defines postmodernism as at its very base: “an incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard 123) We learn more about the world in which we live and as such, we learn to question the foundations that we were told that society is built upon. Postmodernism rejects the Grand Narrative of culture just as Ziggy Stardust does through his own messages of hope, however, like the hippy movement, he too was unable to stop the forces that he was rebelling against and thus met his downfall.

Fallout '73

Bowie immediately followed Ziggy Stardust a year later with another record under the Ziggy Stardust banner titled Aladdin Sane, a denser, darker album that Bowie would refer to as “Ziggy goes to America.” The record toes a very pessimistic line, being the very aftermath of Ziggy’s fall from grace, and as such can be seen as Bowie’s ultimate lashing-out against the chains that bind him. The sexual, artistic and cultural boundaries that keep things static: “David Bowie is a male,” “David Bowie is a pop singer”, “David Bowie is a British Citizen,” etc. – are entirely indicative of this Grand Narrative which is there to be challenged.

With Aladdin Sane, Bowie, though he would continue to be an innovator well beyond the close of the 1970s, gave his last gasp as a member of the hippy movement. Ziggy Stardust was dying, his message crushed and now he was pissed off and it shows in the smoldering ten tracks including a scathing cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, a bouncing pop number turned warped and adrenalized meltdown by the thrashing and flailing Ziggy Stardust. Not surprisingly, the last album Bowie would record with the band the Spiders From Mars would follow later in the same year and would consist entirely of covers, thus representing Ziggy Stardust’s death by assimilation in the square mass of drones. Bowie for his part would round out the decade with an album based around George Orwell’s 1984, a harsh British appropriation of American (Black) Soul music and a trio of albums recorded with Brian Eno in Berlin that would be integral to the rise of electronic music.

Meanwhile in 1973, Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno and their Roxy Music would take Glam into arty new territory with their album, For Your Pleasure, which may well be considered the subgenre’s swan song. In a way, this record represents the streamlining of Glam as Roxy Music reduce it to its essentials, taking away the flamboyant arrangements and flourishes and replacing them with a much more foreboding and ominous set of synthesizers and saxophone trills. Less of an overt pastiche than Electric Warrior and less conceptual than Ziggy Stardust, For Your Pleasure is more of an embracing than a rebellion, a fluid merging of ideas and styles, a welcoming of new sounds and territories. It is equally an expression of disillusionment, however unlike the kicking and screaming of David Bowie, it is a slow-burning formal rather than lyrical protest. Led by Eno’s innovative soundsculpting, Roxy Music carved out dense new forms of rock and roll. Disjointed song structures, unusual instrumental arrangements and bold new sound ventures led to a colder and more mechanical interpretation of Glam that manages to never skimp on the things that really matter.

For Your Pleasure grabbed pop and took it into modernity – no longer would pop music be warm, fuzzy and organic; pop in the post-Eno era is harsh, digital and economical. The eight tracks presented on this album bounce, hop and soar with the best pop songs of the era, however, there is an unusual feel to the set: it retains many of Glam’s essential traits including the overt sexuality, traditional pop sensibility and madcap pastiche wrapped in a hard rock sheen that had previously characterized it, however it feels desolate and sleek. This very polished vision is extremely appropriate in relation to the arc of Postmodernism in popular music and as well to that of Glam Rock as For Your Pleasure is, like Aladdin Sane (both albums were released within less than a month of each other), Glam post-Ziggy, the aftermath of the realization of the great death of the hippy and the subsequent acceptance of said death. Where Electric Warrior had wisps of that dream lingering about and saw Glam rise as a response to the death of the 1960s, and by extension exposed T. Rex as an unlikely heir to the Beatles on the pop throne, it would eventually give way to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, the peak of the movement and the signal for its eventual downfall and finally to the Pop Apocalypse of For Your Pleasure, the moment when robots took glam from the aliens.

Oddly, this extremely brief reign and subsequent downfall of Glam Rock lasted only three years before it imploded onto itself, however, it remains extremely important to the scope of pop history as it is the direct descendent of the Brit-Pop of the Beatles, a direct response to the breakup of that institution as well as the death of the decade that spawned them. It is the direction that pop took immediately following the disillusioning of its inventors, a harsh, aesthetically-driven blast into modernity that sometimes appears as a dream and sometimes as a nightmare. This was the moment where the 1970s came into bloom, when the culture reared its head and rolled all over itself – nothing was as it seemed, though this prospect need not be as terrifying as it might seem, in fact, the possibilities for growth would prove to be endless.