NPR Great Read of 2016From the acclaimed author of Rip It Up and Start Again and Retromaniamdash;ldquo;the foremost popular music critic of this era (Times Literary Supplement)mdash;comes the definitive cultural history of glam and glitter rock; celebrating its outlandish fashion and outrageous stars; including David Bowie and Alice Cooper; and tracking its vibrant legacy in contemporary pop.Spearheaded by David Bowie; Alice Cooper; T. Rex; and Roxy Music; glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy; denim-clad rock bands of the late Sixties; glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. In Shock and Awe; Simon Reynolds takes you on a wild cultural tour through the early Seventies; a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up; thrilling music and larger-than-life personas.Shock and Awe offers a fresh; in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon; placing it the wider Seventies context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed; New York Dolls; and Queen broke with the hippie generation; celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genrersquo;s major themesmdash;stardom; androgyny; image; decadence; fandom; apocalypsemdash;Reynolds tracks glamrsquo;s legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades; from Eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to twenty-first century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga. Shock and Awe shows how the original glam artistsrsquo; obsessions with fame; extreme fashion; and theatrical excess continue to reverberate through contemporary pop culture.
#2200630 in eBooks 2010-09-03 2010-09-03File Name: B0158ZEBY2
Review
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. HybridBy J. SanzaronishimuraArt and Globalization - this is the kind of research every arts institute should be carrying out. Here in Australia. we do not have anything of this calibre to my knowledge. we still base our art on Eurocentric standards. when our Indigenous culture has the oldest continuing art practice in the world. so why do we continue to try to associate ourselves with European art ideologies? We need someone like James Elkins and his team to look at our visual arts pracitices and our multicultural society and start asking the same questions.What I found very interesting in this book. was the section on translation and what gets lost when artists statements and rationales get translated and more often than not mistranslated or misquoted. What often gets lost in translation is the true meaning. and in the visual reading of art. assumptions are made that everyone regardless of culture makes the same reading of a symbol. image or icon. when there is so much more that an individuals phenomenology can bring into the equation.In this age of instant communication. art plays an important role in communicating on a different level. through a more personal investigation and expression of experience and ideas.I would highly recommend to anyone in the visual arts and art theory realm.
