Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds
Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds
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Shock and Awe
Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century

Author: Simon Reynolds

Narrator: Nicholas Camm

Unabridged: 23 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 10/11/2016


Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of Rip It Up and Start Again and Retromania—“the foremost popular music critic of this era (Times Literary Supplement)—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 genre’s major themes—stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse—Reynolds tracks glam’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 artists’ obsessions with fame, extreme fashion, and theatrical excess continue to reverberate through contemporary pop culture.

About Simon Reynolds

Simon Reynolds started his journalistic career in 1986 as a staff writer for the British weekly music paper Melody Maker. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Spin, Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Artforum, The Wire, The Guardian, Slate, Frieze and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of four books and five collections of essays and interviews. His books have been translated into ten languages.  Born in London, he now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nigeyb

'Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy' by Simon Reynolds is a whopper. Almost 700 pages devoted to Glam Rock. I'd heard from a fellow Glam devotee, whose opinion I respect, that 'Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy' was a big boring yawn which over intellectualises the simple pleasures of Gla......more

Goodreads review by Tosh

Simon Reynold's "Shock and Awe is probably the 'over-all' best glam history book. Although he does leave out Perfume Genius who I think is the 'new' glam. And the other thing that struck me while reading the book is that he's not that crazy about the New York Dolls first album. But that is all in a......more

Goodreads review by Casey

What an overstuffed mess. I see a tendency in British music writing to overdo it with cultural/historical context. This may work for some, but for me it seems like an attempt to make up for the fact that writing about the actual music is hard and the author didn't have anything particularly insightf......more

Goodreads review by Stefano

Simon Reynolds ha un difetto bellissimo: elabora una teoria, sintetizza una formula (per la gioia del "memificio" dei social), la fa diventare il polo magnetico su cui puntare la bussola, quindi parte come uno schiacciasassi in un escursus tutto inclinato verso il soddisfacimento e la solidificazion......more