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
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."
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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."
On the first of September, a Club 57 Reunion - "Glam Homecoming Prom" - at Zebulon in LA, rather than in New York, where it originally happened. This Sunday, 6pm to 9.30 pm - free admission.
Guest of Honor Michael Des Barres participated an eon ago in the so-called "Death of Glitter" at the Palladium in Los Angeles, October 1974. A.k.a. Hollywood Street Revival and Trash Dance.
Homecoming Prom DJ Kristian Hoffmann, a Dolls diehard, did this saucy sketch that was used in the inner artwork of the Dolls debut.
On the Glam + No Wave / Mutant Disco continuity -
[from Rip It Up - US edition]
If the B-52’s had a spiritual second home in New York, it was at a place called Club 57, which was closer to a kooky arts lab than a nightclub. Indeed, the people behind Club 57--performance artists Ann Magnuson and John Sex, and painters Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring--have been described as a gang of B-52’s groupies. “We went to all [their] shows and gave the band presents,” Scharf recalled in an East Village Eye interview, adding that Keith Haring “gave them plastic fruit once and they loved it.” The sensibility that united the B-52’s and the Club 57 clique was an ironic affection for American pop culture at its most grotesquely phony or over-the-top: majorettes and cheerleading troupes, Miss America, Liberace, pajama parties, beach movies, and the campy, misguided B-movie/Las Vegas phases of Elvis Presley’s career.
Club 57 began as a spin-off of an event called the New Wave Vaudeville, whose cast of freaks included Klaus Nomi, briefly famous for his opera-meets-Kabuki performances. Taking up residence in the basement of a Polish church at 57 St. Marks Place, the club initially showed horror B-movies such as The Blob. But soon the 57 crew started hosting elaborately designed theme parties that distilled a whole new sensibility from elements of Pop Art, drag, the trash aesthetic, and performance art. “I would create a set, a soundtrack, and a framework for people to come in and be their own characters, costume themselves,” says Ann Magnuson of theme nights such as Name That Noise: Punk Rock Game Show, Lady Wrestling: Battle to the Death, Salute to NASA (complete with simulated space flight), and Brix Deluxe Barbecue Patio Partying. “Once we started doing themes, I'd be going to thrift stores almost every day, getting costumes and props. There was also a lot of stuff on the street you could pick up, like refrigerator boxes. So we'd drag all this stuff back to the club and create, say, a Jamaican shantytown and make a putt-putt miniature golf course through it and play reggae. It was a conceptual art piece that you could be involved in”.
Scharf designed the Club 57 logo, a TV set with the word FUN underneath the channel control dial. ”I really saw Club 57 as an exorcism of Americana,” says Magnuson. “Because there were only three network channels of TV at that time, you watched all these old movies, and you'd pick up the sensibilities of vaudeville, the Marx Brothers, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, horror films. All that stuff informed the art.” Beneath the camp delight, though, was a semi-serious impulse to use mass culture’s tatty ephemera as a prism through which to view America’s political unconscious. As Kate Pierson from the B-52’s put it, “without being too pretentious, you can look at a K-mart Shopping Center as a modern cultural museum and learn something from what’s there and what that means.”
Fueled by acid, mushrooms, and poppers, Club 57’s vibe was kitschadelic. It helped pave the way for the mainstreaming of camp and Mondo aesthetics that took place in the Nineties and included Deelite, Nick At Night, Mystery Science Theater 3000, the crossover success of John Waters films, and Tim Burton movies like Ed Wood and the lamentable Mars Attacks! The Club 57 ethos was playful in both the childlike and theatrical senses of the word “play.” Artifice was celebrated and gender treated as performative rather than innate.
[from the Aftershocks section of Shock and Awe]
A Berlin transplant to New York’s late Seventies clubland, Klaus Nomi’s own act merges Queen/Sparks-style popera, Kraftwerk’s Germanic formality, and Zolar X’s extraterrestial image. Nomi first made a name for himself as the closing act at “New Wave Vaudeville”, a postmodern take on the variety revue staged in 1978. Appearing onstage amid clouds of dry ice and the sounds of a landing space ship, he sang an aria from Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila. Transfixed by his “transcendent, peculiar, inexplicable but undeniably otherworldly artistic vision,” a watching Kristan Hoffman of the Mumps introduces himself to Nomi. Soon Hoffman has become his music director, pulling together a backing group and developing a set of original songs penned by himself ("Nomi Song," "Total Eclipse", “Simple Man”, “After The Fall”) and covers (Lou Christie’s “Lightning Strikes”, Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”, Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling In Love Again”), plus baroque pieces by the likes of Purcell.
The closest Nomi ever got to proper opera was working as an usher at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, but in the rough-edged context of New York postpunk, his pipes are astonishingly pure and celestial. “With that voice, and that eerie amorphous charisma, Klaus would be OUR Bowie,” Hoffman believes. Nomi’s adapts Bowie’s stylized black-and-white tux + tie from the SNL performance and makes it his own signature look: a stage suit whose very wide, straight shoulders create a triangle as they taper sharply into the waist before flaring out with a tutu-like effect. In combination with his snow-white foundation, dark lipstick in silent-movie bow shape, and stylized black-dyed hair (huge brow, extreme widow’s peak, angular tufts sculpted like the fins on a 1950s car), the overall effect is startling: like Nomi’s been scooped out of a black-and-white 1920s science fiction movie and dropped into the garish present....
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Here's Ann Magnuson from 2012 flying her glam freak flag high with an album in tribute to Jobriath. It's titled The Jobriath Medley: A Glam Rock Fairy Tale. Produced and arranged by Kristian Hoffman. Guest vocal from Russ Mael on "I'Maman".
One star review and skin-crawly loathing from an early '90s edition of Rolling Stone Albums Guide - not sure who M.C. is (Mark Coleman?)
But wait, there's more!
Propaganda [Island, 1975]
Admirers of these self-made twerps certainly don't refer to them as pop because they get on the AM--for once the programmers are doing their job. So is it because they sing in a high register? Or because a good beat makes them even more uncomfortable than other accoutrements of a well-lived life?; "Never turn your back on mother earth," they chant or gibber in a style unnatural enough to end your current relationship or kill your cacti, and I must be a natural man after all, because I can't endure the contradiction. C-
Introducing Sparks [Columbia, 1977]
On its five albums for Bearsville and Island, this skillful brother act compounded personal hatefulness with a deliberately tense and uninviting take on pop-rock. But with their Columbia debut, Big Beat, they began to loosen up, and here one cut actually makes surf music history, in the tending-to-hyperconsciousness section. This is tuneful, funny, even open. But the fear of women and the stubborn, spoiled-teenager cynicism is still there, and it's still hateful. B
No. 1 in Heaven [Elektra, 1979]
Anglophilia's favorite androids were destined from day of manufacture to meet up with some rock technocrat or other, so thank Ford it was Giorgio Moroder, the most playful of the breed. They even got a minor dance hit out of it--"Beat the Clock," a good one--but that's not the point. The point is channeling all their evil genius--well, evil talent, then--into magic tricks. Like the ultimate voice-box song. Or the title tune, which sounds like "Baba O'Riley" and then breaks down into Eno (or is that Gentle Giant?). Fun fun fun. B+
That's from Dean Christgau's running compendium of judgments on anything and everything.
But this relatively recent snit takes the biscuit - item in a Greil Marcus Real Life Rock Top Ten from only last year
Since 1972, Sparks, a.k.a. the vaguely incestuous brother act of Ron and Russell Mael, have followed the path of effete cabaret. They are the epitome of the cult band: anything resembling a hit, anything suggesting that everyone knows who they are, would erase their whole reason for being. It’s worked: while most of the world has ignored them, all kinds of people adore them, including Leos Carax, who more than two decades ago made the completely uncategorizable Pola X, perhaps the least likely literary adaptation in the history of cinema — it’s based on Melville’s nearly impenetrable Pierre; or, the Ambiguities — a movie I’ve always found impossible to remember in any detail and impossible to forget for its drive toward self-destruction. The result is a very long picture starring Adam Driver as an L.A. stand-up comedian who is above laughter — all of his routines seem to be based on King Lear — and Marion Cotillard as an opera singer with a two-octave range, and not a moment of believable human feeling in its 140 minutes. And the Maels have nothing to fear from Hollywood: the film cost $15.5 million and took in $3.1.
Peculiar things about this take:
- "vaguely incestuous", followed closely by "effete cabaret" - American rock critics of a certain generational stripe really do seem viscerally unsettled by the not-quite-maleness of the Maels
- "the epitome of the cult band: anything resembling a hit... would erase their whole reason for being"
Erm, they were pop stars in the UK and in bits of Europe! I know the United Kingdom and Europe don't figure in the Greil-i-verse, rock being inherently American. But "most of the world has ignored them" - not quite!
When pop stardom started to slip away, Sparks tried a series of maneuvers to recover it - including teeming up with Giorgio Moroder, the biggest hit-maker in the world at that precise point. And it worked: they were in the UK pop charts again with "Number 1 Song in Heaven" and "Beat the Clock". Hardly sounds like a group content to be a cult. Moreover, Sparks desperately wanted to match their overseas pop success with similar chart impact in America. So in the gap between the glam-era Brit stardom and the Moroderized Eurodisco recovery, they toned down the popera aspects for a couple of more conventionally rocking albums (like the boring Introducing, which garnered Xgau's tempered approval). Then in the '80s, they went New Wave (having prefigured it to some extent), teamed up with Jane Wieldlin from the Go-Gos, etc. Over the years the Mael bros have tried again and again and again to have hit records.
(Also - why would it matter if they'd cultivated culthood anyway? Vulgar Boatmen, Mekons, Sleater-Kinney and other GM-approved outfits aren't exactly in the business of pop universality.)
Right about one thing, though - Annette was awful, I could only get about half an hour into it before turning it off.
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The running theme - or closely entwined themes - to Sparks-aversion among US rock critics of a certain generation is the feeling that the Mael Brothers are:
1/ un-American
2/ unmanly
An alternative title for this post could be: Springsteen or Sparks - the Choice is Yours.
Even back in the 1970s - when unexamined assumptions about substance, integrity, truth, were like microplastics in the generational bloodstream, when people believed in a thing called "street credibility"... even back in the '70s, it's hard to see how someone could attend a Springsteen concert and see it as less theatrical than Sparks - as somehow more "real" or "true".
Here's a counter-view from one of those Britkids electrified by Sparks on Top of the Pops, reviewing a best-of around 1990.
(Proximity to someone else's review of The Animals oddly appropriate - Brits infatuated with Black America versus Sparks as Californians injecting Gilbert & Sullivan into rock 'n' roll).
In this review - like a poptimist to the manor born! - I do some crafty transvaluation: taking exactly the sort of negative terms (whiteness, hysteria, overwrought, highly-strung, castrated, perverse, baroque) applied by Yankcrits (see also Dave Marsh on Queen) and positivizing them. Not that at the time of writing I would have been aware of how hated Sparks were in their homeland. For me and other Britkids now grown up and trying to explain to ourselves the fascination of the Maels on our TV screen, it is precisely Sparks's distance from "rootsiness" or "feel" or the category of "the natural" that makes them interesting and exciting.
Obviously, the Brit Rock Experience starts with unrootedness and imposture; it is inherently inauthentic from the off. Sparks-as-Anglophiles amplifying that English not-quite-realness and cleaning up in the U.K. - it makes sense as a historical phenomenon, but more than that, it's bound to hit a Brit on a vibrational level. What's that they say about Sparks? "The best British band to have come out of America". Or perhaps it was "the most English group that isn't actually from England" Either way, the deficiency of Creedence-ness is what gives them credence - where we live, at least.
