successor to Shock and Awe whose feed no longer seems to be working properly - original blog + archive remains here: http://shockandawesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ the blog of the Simon Reynolds book about glam and artpop of the 1970s and its aftershocks and reflections to this day
Some people have compared Kevin Ayers's debonair image to Bryan Ferry - the genuine genteel article as opposed to the faux. Some even see him as a prototype, glam just a little too early
Not sure about that, the music in the first three or four solo albums is nowhere near glam. But I am struck by the use of eye make-up in these Soft Machine appearances
There is another intersection with glam: the theme of decadence, broached by name in this double-edged tribute to Nico, and implicitly in the apocalyptic hedonism of "Song from the Bottom of A Well" - capturing the disillusion / dissolution / dissoluteness of the post-hippy backwash
Watch her out there on display
Dancing in her sleepy way
While all her visions start to play
On the icicles of our decay.
Fading flowers in her hair
She's suffering from wear and tear
She lies in waterfalls of dreams
And never questions what it means.
And all along the desert shore
She wanders further evermore
The only thing that's left to try¡
She says to live I have to die.
She whispers sadly well I might
And holds herself so very tight
Then jumping from an unknown height
She merges with the liquid night.
Lovers wrap her mist in furs
And tell her what she has is hers
But when they take her by the hand
She slips back in the desert sand.
But what she leaves is made of glass
And lovers worship as they pass
Each one says - now she is mine
But all drink solitary wine.
(drink it to Marlene)
This is a song from the bottom of a well
There are things down here I've got to try and tell; It's dark and light at the very same time, The water sometimes seems like wine.
I learned some information way down here That might fill your heart and soul with fear; But don't you worry, no don't be afraid I'm not in the magical mystery trade.
My imagination begins to purr As things don't happen, they just occur. Softly crackling electrical smell, There's something burning at the bottom of this well.
Sitting here alone I just have to laugh I see all the universe as a comfortable bath; I drown my body so my mind is free To indulge in pleasurable fantasies.
There's something strange going on down here A sickening implosion of mistrust and fear. A vast corruption that's about to boil A mixture of greed and the smell of oil.
This is a song from the bottom of a well I didn't move here, I just fell. But I'm not complaining, I don't even care Cause if I'm not here, then it's not there.
Glam can be nutshelled as "illusion and disillusion".... a reversal, an inside-outing of the Sixties's belief in truth and revolution
"Oh! Wot A Dream" captures that slide from Sixties inordinate hopes to 70s atomized numbness - it's an elegiac tribute to friend Syd Barrett but also an entire era. Barrett being the decade's prime casualty, someone who had "too much to dream"
Oh! you pretty thing - a pop star that should have been but never was.... and in the career slide twilight, he puts out a single titled "Star"
Not to be confused with the earlier much more stellar-sounding 1971 tune that was absurdly thrown away on the B-side of "Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes"
"Assad's cult is a strategy of domination based on compliance rather than legitimacy. The regime produces compliance through enforced participation in rituals of obeisance that are transparently phony both to those who orchestrate them and to those who consume them. Assad's cult operates as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens act as if they revere their leader ... It produces guidelines for acceptable; it defines and generalizes a specific type of national membership; it occasions the enforcement of obedience; it induces complicity by creating practices in which citizens are themselves "accomplices", upholding the norms constitutive of Assad's domination; it isolates Syrians from one another; and it clutters public space with monotonous slogans and empty gestures, which tire the minds and bodies of producers and consumers alike ... Assad is powerful because his regime can compel people to say the ridiculous and to avow the absurd."
- Lisa Wedeen, "Acting "As If": Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria"
You could substitute another five-letter leader name here and it would work just as well.
Struck me as an interesting way of describing the mechanisms of autocracy. It's like a particular authoritarian mutation of the Spectacle
The dictator forces everybody to participate as extras in a giant theatrical production that is the State
Individual mass spectacles are part of this (as in the North Korean style synchronized stadium pageants) but at the ultimate degree the spectacle encompasses the entire social field
As a subject, you simultaneously spectate the collective fakery even as you play a bit part in it
It's all for show, but it doesn't work through convincing people that it's true, it works through making people pretend, participate is a mass lie.
Does the dictator believe this pageant of make-believe? Is it the externalisation of his own grandiose inner fantasies,? Like Billy Liar imagining himself the caudillo of Ambrosia - except a dream come true, in this case, as exacted social fact.
Doesn't matter - the point is the submission to the charade that is enforced and obeyed.
Interesting comments from Quentin Crisp about music here (similar to Nabokov and Freud's antipathy to music as disequilibrium) which confirms my belief that music in its essence is Dionysian whereas the glam-stylist-dandy impulse is Appollonian.
x
Ed directs our attention to this Cherry Red Miniatures compilation track by Quentin Crisp
More glammish perceptions from Quentin C
“ Charisma is the ability to influence without logic. I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave”
Nick Kent: There's a quote about fame in a play by one of your favourite writers, Heathcote Williams, that it's God's way of punishing people, of marking them out. Can you relate to that?
M: I just think that human life is considered so insignificant now that the only thing one can do, in order to do anything at all, is 'to become famous'. This current obsession with 'fame' runs rife through all the people I know. They have to do it or else their life is absolutely, shambolically useless. And I don't believe that was always the case. I believe that pressures have driven people to this monstrous over-emphasis on fame, on 'doing' and 'being seen'. Not even 'doing' now. You just have to be 'seen' doing something and you're famous. That's strangulating."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Morrissey on Sparks
"At 14, I want to live with these people, to be - at
last! - in the company of creatures of my own species."
