" they were like an explosion of otherworldly glamour"
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Andrew Parker reminds me of this: " In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people ." - Momus I suspect the graffiti...
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Came across this snippet from Kevin Rowland 's The Q & A in The Guradian a few weeks back (Kev promoting his memoir Bless Me Fathe... -
Andrew Parker reminds me of this: " In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people ." - Momus I suspect the graffiti... -
Watching a bunch of Dame Edna Everage stuff - a doc, chat show appearances, those An Audience With Dame Edna specials done in front of an...
Expanding on your thesis - I don't think the Roxy aesthetic (clothes or album sleeves) is BAD, but I also don't see why it's treated as the fulcrum point of the whole group by so many UK writers. I think there's a gap between old-school American and English music fans where the former isn't insensitive to visual aesthetics (as they're often accused of being), but do treat it more like an accent instead of the primary matter. Obviously, punk-and-after scrambled the geographic particularities of this, but I'd still say it's more true than not.
ReplyDeleteWhy English music fans/writers often treat the fashion as paramount is an interesting question - maybe because the UK 'youth cults' were so hyper-specific, polarized, and co-existing (as opposed to the more diffuse, overarching, and successive US cults, where an aspect of a fashion could float through several different groups in time and space without such a specific meaning attached to it)
There is plenty of aspirational dressing in American music, from blues/R&B/country/hiphop, but it borrows from each other an awful lot more (a Nudie suit is a pimp suit with wagon wheels) - there's not this expected maniacal fixation on particular details and what they signify, at least not usually
DeleteConsidering Tyler's contention, off the top of my head I can recall more British genres than American genres that derive their name from fashion: skinhead, two-tone, baggy, handbag house and (at a push) crusty. With Americans, all that comes to mind is Paisley Underground (seemingly a joke that got out of hand) and hair metal (which I acknowledge is a laboured suggestion, but the bands did at least have lots of hair).
ReplyDeleteI'm discounting skate punk (because you can't wear a skateboard, and also if I did include it, I would logically have to include surf rock, and that's stretching the conceit to snapping). What about shoegaze?
Yeah, that sort of thing - plus the meticulously clothing forward push of teddy, mod, glam, UK punk and so forth - was what I was thinking of. Shoegaze falls outside of this, I'd say - it's all about looking at (or rather near) your shoes, and says nothing about what those shoes should be like....
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