Cats! Dogs! Geese! Laura Loomer! Look, now he’s attacking Taylor!
- Pete Buttegieg
Mike Johnson will not shut down the government.
This is just the humiliating failure theater that Trump drags his most loyal supporters into before they have to surrender.
And surrender he will.
- Ron Filipkowski
"Failure theater" - love it.
This is a trope-meme they used against AOC, that she was just an actress, mouthing lines written for her by shadowy behind-the-stage-curtain figures.
The convergence of glam and Oi! four years ahead of schedule - The Jook's "bovver rock" from 1974
Waving the class war banner - a bit, anyway
Aggro rock - except they mean "aggravation" more than aggression
Heavy Metal Kids had the thematics and the accent - and sort of the image - but not the sound at all
Again, with Hustler, the music is rough-arsed boogie but the voice and the imagery is proto-Oi! Well, perhaps more Chas N' Dave, "Gertcha".
However the persecuted character in the song is a longhair with a trench coat - a prog rock fan, "a scruffy little 'ippie"
Good Lord actual footage of the band
"the geezer upstairs'll take me in"
Another convergence - the sharpies down Under - aka the Bogan Boogie
The song here is by Rose Tattoo - more AC/DC meets Oi! than glam meets Oi! - but lyrics referencing "working class streets" and factory life.
And yet more - Third World War (not really glam but meaty beefy stompy and class-war conscious)
Slade matured to full ideological consciousness
Also Slaughter and the Dogs, who started out as a glam band
I wrote about the bootboy glam / terrace stompers / punk-before-punk thing in this review of a junkshop glam compilation - also the idea of a 1970s hard rock continuum in which the once-crucial differences melt away into indistinguishability as the era recedes further into history
Various Artists - All the Young Droogs: 60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s
(Pitchfork, 2019)
The title of this glam rock box set is a cute twist on “All the Young Dudes,” the hit 1972 song Bowie gifted to Mott the Hoople. People, then and since, took it as an anthem for rock’s third generation—the kids who were babies when rock’n’roll first arrived, missed out on most of the ’60s, but craved a sound of their own in the ’70s. The Bowie/Mott/Roxy Music side of glam—literate and musically sophisticated—is not really what this collection is about, though. “Droog” is the true clue, a slang term for a teenage thug from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of the Anthony Burgess novel. Scandalous upon its 1971 release, the film was blamed for a spate of copycat “ultraviolence” and chimed with existing UK anxieties about feral youth and rising crime: soccer hooliganism, skinhead “bovver boys” in steel-capped Doc Martens brutalizing hippies and immigrants, subcultural tribes warring on the streets.
All the Young Droogs: 60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s largely celebrates the music that sublimated and safely vented the disorderly impulses of working-class kids in the not-so-Great Britain of the early ’70s. It’s packed with the coarse, rowdy rock whose shout-along choruses and stomp-along drums shook concert halls from foundations to rafters. Compiler Phil King’s focus, though, is not the huge-selling glitter bands like Slade or the Sweet, but the nearly-made-its and the never-stood-a-chancers: “Junkshop glam,” as collectors and dealers call this stuff, a term that exudes the musty aroma of digging through cardboard boxes of dirt-cheap singles.
Glam as punk-before-punk is an argument convincingly made on the first disc of Droogs, titled “Rock Off!” Ray Owen’s Moon’s “Hey Sweety” launches things with a stinging attack and pummeling power just a notch behind the Stooges, although the oddly phrased title-chorus diminishes the menace slightly. Most Droogs inclusions are fairly frivolous affairs lyrically—anthems of lust, celebrations of rocking out—but Third World War anticipate punk themes with the proletarian plaint and Strummer-like sandpaper vocals of “Working Class Man.” Hustler forge a link between the Faces and Cockney Rejects with “Get Outta My ’Ouse,” which is like Magic’s “Rude” recast as pub boogie: the hilarious lament of a longhair hassled by his girl’s disapproving Dad. In Supernaut’s “I Like It Both Ways,” the bisexual protagonist is confused by stereophonic propositions from a girl in the left speaker and a boy in the right. Other highlights include the chrome-glistening grind of James Hogg’s “Lovely Lady Rock” and the grating lurch of Ning’s “Machine,” akin to being run over by a bulldozer driven by a caveman.
Things stay stompy and simplistic on the second disc, titled “Tubthumpers & Hellraisers,” but with a slight shift towards pop. On Harpo’s “My Teenage Queen,” a lithe, corkscrewing melody contrasts with a relentless beat, which is interrupted by an unexpected outbreak of hand-percussion like a belly-dancer abruptly jumping onstage to join the band. Frenzy’s “Poser” sneers sweetly and Simon Turner’s “Sex Appeal” is a delicious bounce of bubblegum. Compared with the ferocious first disc, though, this radio-friendly fare often feels flimsier, stirring those doubts familiar with similar archival enterprises: Is this really lost treasure? Or is it deservedly obscure?
Shrewdly, on the final disc “Elegance & Decadence,” King switches gears and zooms in on what some call “high glam”: the Bowie-besotted, Bryan Ferry-infatuated side of the genre, which appealed to older teenagers and middle-class students with its thoughtful lyrics, witty cultural references, and the exquisite styling of the clothes and record packaging. The backings favored by performers like John Howard, Paul St John, and Alastair Riddell are svelte and lissome, shunning the beefy power-chords and leaden kick drums in favor of strummed acoustic guitar and swaying rhythms. The vocal presence on these songs is likewise willowy and androgynous: sometimes an unearthly soar above the mundane, other times highly-strung and histrionic.
The most fetching specimens here in this post-Hunky Dory mode are Steve Elgin’s “Don’t Leave Your Lover Lying Around (Dear),” with its saucy asides about how “trade is looking good,” and Brian Wells’ archly enunciated “Paper Party.” Themes of fame and fantasy abound, with many owing a sizable debt to Bowie. “Criminal World,” by the debonair Metro—who described their style as “English rock music, but influenced by a hundred years of European culture… Baudelaire and Kurt Weill”—would be later covered by Bowie himself on 1983’s Let’s Dance, a well-deserved compliment. Even more genteel-sounding is “New York City Pretty,” which could be an outtake from Rocky Horror Picture Show, so closely does Clive Kennedy mirror Tim Curry’s phrasing.
Like other retroactively invented genres such as freakbeat, part of the appeal of junkshop glam is its generic-ness: the closeness with which artists conform to the rules of rock at that precise moment. In many cases, these performers were opportunists: a year or two earlier, they’d been prog or bluesy-rock artists. Some would later adopt New Wave mannerisms, swapping escapism and decadence for lyrics about unemployment and urban deprivation. Droogs does contain an example of glam juvenilia from a future prime-mover of punk: “Showbiz Kid” by Sleaze, the early band of TV Smith of the Adverts.
Although this kind of aesthetic flexibility seems suspect and unprincipled, it reveals a couple of things about rock. First, it points to a sameness persisting underneath all the style changes. From today’s remote vantage point, the differences—once so significant and divisive—between ’60s beat groups, bluesy boogie, heavy metal, glam, pub rock, and punk start to fade and a continuum of hard rock emerges. The dominant sound on Droogs is situated somewhere between the Pretty Things, Ten Years After, the Groundhogs, on one side, and the Count Bishops, Sham 69, Motörhead, on the other. I’ve picked British names but you could just as easily throw Steppenwolf, Grand Funk Railroad, and Black Flag in there, or for that matter, AC/DC.
The other thing that Droogs shows is that originality is both uncommon and overrated. Herd mentality, which is to say the willingness of the horde of proficient but not necessarily creative performers to be influenced by the rare innovators in their midst, is what actually changes the sound of the radio. It’s the arrival of the copyists that definitively establishes a new set of musical characteristics, performance gestures, and lyrical fixtures, as the defining sound of an era. Send in the clones, then, because sometimes you can’t get enough of a good thing.
The classic Iggy-glam-phase photograph would be this one from the back of Raw Power
THE glam bassist.
Although I think he didn't actually play on the record, just mimed for TOTP
But he's in the band for Marc's last TV series.
He didn't just play on glam records though, Herb was in demand session bassman all over the first-half-70s shop.
Check out this amazing performance
Less salubriously, he wrote this monstrosity with Kenny Pickett
There is also this questionable song, as later interpolated by the Happy Mondays (and sung by Alan Partridge in one of his series, in an idle, mooching around sort of way).
I mean, they meant well, I'm sure.
At any rate, Herbie didn't write it, so that's okay.
Herbie was in a heavy rock band called Rumpelstiltskin.
And a blues-jazz collective alongside Alexis Korner, called Collective Consciousness Society - aka CCS.
The latter's version of "Whole Lotta Love" was the Top of the Pops intro theme when I was a kid.
And post-glam, as Phil points out in the comments, he was a member of Sky - a classical rock supergroop also including Francis Monkman ex-Curved Air and the dude who did the triffic snazzy OST to The Long Good Friday.
Herbie Flowers also put out a solo album, Plant Life.
And another one called Potty.
Herbie Flowers - the name is quite close the gangster boss in Performance, Harry Flowers - was also adept at playing the tuba. He did that as a bandsman in the RAF, during which he time he also picked up double bass.
Before he got involved in rock, he had been in trad jazz bands, then a more modern jazz band, and then switched to electric bass and started becoming an in-demand session man.
But let's remember Mr. Herbie Flowers this way
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....
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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".
"We do not need 4 more years of bluster and bumbling, and chaos. We've seen that movie before, and we all know the sequel is usually worse" - President Obama at the DNC.
"In her acceptance speech, Harris recalled her own mother telling her, “Never do anything half-assed!” Pretty much every DNC speaker this week used this same plainspoken all-American vernacular, scrubbed of anything that could be mistaken for “woke” or elite language. The language at the DNC was pitched at the same kind of level as the World Series or America’s Got Talent, meeting all kinds of Americans where they are. The DNC’s TV ratings are actually higher than both, with an average of 20 million people watching each night so far this week. The convention was a political reality show positing a new, inclusive monoculture and implicitly framing MAGA as an extreme counterculture, out of step with broadly shared values of most Americans."
- Joy Press, Vanity Fair
"Emhoff’s potential to be a quietly transformative figure in American politics: Female ambition is now the stuff of a million power breakfasts and lapel badges, but if Kamala Harris becomes America’s first female president, her husband will break the real “hardest glass ceiling” in American politics. Behold, a man who is content to be the supporting actor in someone else’s drama."
- Helen Lewis, The Atlantic
"There are folk on social media already saying, 'go back to your TV show!', 'shut up and act!'. But I am not here tonight as an actor. I am here as a mother, a daughter, as a proud union member. I am here as the granddaughter of immigrants, as a Black woman who descended from enslaved people. I am here tonight because I am an American and because I am a voter!... I know I am the one standing this stage. But I am not the lead character in the story - you are. All of you. You are the messengers, you are the fixers... Dare I say it, you are the Olivia Popes! You are the superheroes saving this democracy"
- Kerry Washington, aka Olivia Pope.
"When Washington was cast as a political fixer in the Shondaland series Scandal, she became the first Black woman in 38 years to star in a network TV drama. Her character, Olivia Pope, was the fictional West Wing’s most potent secret weapon, but Washington has kept a hand in real-life politics for a long time. She spoke at the 2012 and 2020 Democratic conventions, appeared at the 2017 L.A. Women’s March and did her part for Stacey Abrams’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign, on top of her Vision Into Power Cohort, which provides resources to grassroots organizations. She’s also a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. (Oh, and did I mention her performance as Anita Hill in the HBO movie Confirmation?)
"But forget her serious credentials. What fans really wanted to see was a reunion between Olivia and her Scandal lover President Fitz Grant, played by Tony Goldwyn, who hosted night 1 of the DNC. The two (known by the ship name “Olitz”) took selfies on the convention floor last night.. As Washington posted, “Giving the people what they want.” And they made it even more official by taking a selfie tonight on live television."
- Joy Press, Vanity Fair.
"Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. A small man pretending to be big. A faithless man pretending to be righteous. A perpetrator who can't stop playing the victim. He puts on quite a show. But there's no real strength there."
- former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger at the DNC
The Democrats’ Spectacular Show
This must be one of the most successful political
conventions in my lifetime, marrying political messaging with showmanship,
emotion and momentum. DNC started out on night one feeling like a conventional
convention, but the Dems continued to rev up the intensity so successfully that
it feels more like a music festival, where you might’ve come to see the
familiar faces (Michelle Obama! Oprah!) but you’ll pick up
new favorites every night (Jasmine Crockett! Hakeem Jeffries!).
I worried after night two—with its dynamic rollcall, dueling
Obama speeches, and sweet Emhoff-athon—that it would be hard to keep the
enthusiasm aloft. Yet night three ratcheted up the rizz. It’s the most artfully
paced set of climaxes I’ve seen this side of Love Island. And for
this final night, the social media hive is wildly abuzz over tonight’s
“surprise guest.” The emphasis all week has been positivity, leavened with
precision targeted putdowns. (Insert Barack Obama’s re-roasting
Trump or Elizabeth Warren’s couch joke here). Last night Kenan
Thompson offered a perfect dose of edutainment while explaining how
Project 2025 will affect Americans rights, while John Legend and Sheila
E offered the sheer party uplift of Prince’s “Let’s Go
Crazy.”
The Dems are using laughter to explain the stakes and music
to mobilize. Given the Dems’ lock on the entertainment industry and pop
culture, it’s not that surprising they’re putting on a spectacular show. Maybe
their new slogan should be: When we entertain, we win?
- Joy Press, Vanity Fair
On Trump's Gala for Jan. 6 "patriots" award ceremony
Rep. Jamie Raskin:
Key awards: “Bravest Assault on an Officer with a Trump Flag and Bear Mace,” “Best Use of Ram’s Horns to Express MAGA Weirdness,” “Seditionist Alum with Highest Yale Law GPA,” “Incite-and-Flight Josh Hawley Award for Speedy Exits.”
"The “ESPYs for Insurrectionists” is truly one of the most politically stupid things anyone has ever done - Dan Pfeiffer
Hopium Coda
Franklin Foer on how it's "Sorkin Again in America" (for the Atlantic)
"Instead of scrapping the traditions of the convention—which every pundit acknowledges to be a kludgy vestige of a bygone era—the Democrats have chosen to honor the old norms. That’s what made the DJ-led roll call of the states so endearing. Democrats were playfully adhering to an old ritual with genuine feeling, a loving nod to tradition. That approach extended to the speakers’ list. Whereas Republicans sought to erase the fact that their party has a heritage—with no history predating Trump’s descent down the escalator—the Democrats have honored their elders with prime-time slots.
On Wednesday, Pete Buttigieg, as normie an institutionalist as they come, gave a speech encapsulating the revived faith. He urged Democrats to choose “a better politics.” He was implying that Democrats no longer need to feel compelled to mimic the brutal power-hungry tactics of their opponents—that they can reclaim the old habits of persuasion and consensus building, become avatars of political virtue. After sitting in the darkness, stuck in a mode of outrage and desperate defense, this was the moment to mount an affirmative, celebratory case for institutions.
Of course, at some level, the Democrats were just trading excessive cynicism for overwrought optimism. But many of them seized the chance to switch from an episode of House of Cards and bathe, once more, in the strings of the West Wing theme. It’s Sorkin again in America."
Joy Press, Vanity Fair:
"Democratic Conventions have traditionally added razzle dazzle to keep TV audiences glued to the screen: superstar hosts, pop singers, even cringe-inducing musical routines like the notorious 1996 Macarena dance-along. Amidst the wild speculation about potential performances later in the week by Taylor Swift or Beyonce, the Dems kept things pretty low-key for this first night, with country singers Jason Isbell and Mickey Guyton appealing to enlightened Red State voters. Overall, it was a sensible, substance-oriented convention, in contrast to the RNC’s hypermacho Wrestlemania vibe, complete with Hulk Hogan shirt-shredding.
Strangely no mention of the Blondely Ambitious one in this piece about ambition in pop and "a certain monstrousness" of the popsta...
