April 22 2011

I found this glam rock is much more easy to read and more reader-friendly than the last Women & popular music book we read.
In the chapter two, the book talked about the history of glam rock, how it started, and how it achieve a great success in the United Kingdom in the early 70's, and how it only get a limited influence in the United States, only in a few cities where glam rock get popular. Also, why its only took hold in the UK than in the US. Some people said that British rockers and their audiences had a more developed penchant for theatricality than the Americans, who "have put down outrageous acts as being nonmusical". but in the same time, Glam transvestism was relativly uncontroversial in Britain, perhaps because "cross-dressing has always been a part of British popular entertainment." American glam artists and their supporters, apparently experiencing a measure of homosexual panic, were at pains to insist that any tendency to dress lavishly and use makeup should not be taken as signs of sexual abnormality. After all the writer used some examples to further introduce the glam rock's history.

In the Third Chapter, author begin it with a discussion of Tyrannosaurus Rex, the group with which Bolan became a fixture on London's underground music scene in the late 1960's. Primarily the author focus on the group's musical style and its relationship to psychedelic rock to show that Tyrannosaurus Rex developed a kind of music that responded to the interests of the hippie counterculture. After that, author write about Bolan's musical transaction from psychedelic music to glam rock and from Tyrannosaurus Rex to T. Rex. In the final part, writer talks about Bolan's physical performance style with the two groups and suggest that Bolan established the basic elements of glam rock performance style through the implicit queerness of his persona and the self-conscious, highly theatrical manner in which he presented himself on stage.