Pale
Glitter - Fat Sound
catalogue essay for NONE MORE BLACKER
@ 200 Gertrude St., Melbourne, 2001
There
is an apotheosis of Pop Music. It isn't The Beatles or The
Beach Boys. It isn't Phil Spector or Burt Bacharach. Nor
The Monkees, The Knack or The Ben Folds Five. It is neither
retro, camp, trashy, nostalgic, memorable, definitive, quintessential,
glorious, transcendental, embracable. It is hairy, fat and
sweaty. It is a thing called Gary Glitter. If Pop is fake,
artificial, unreal, unnatural, then Glam Rock is the most
openly self-mocking travesty of anything significant that
could be peeled off the enameled veneer of Pop's liminal
skin. And Gary Glitter is the ambassadorial barge that spills
Glam's oily rainbow slick onto the murky pool of Pop's history.
Welling
up in the collapse of the sociocentric 60s, Glam inwardly
directed its trajectories of body status, sexual practice
and fashion statement, marking it typical of the solipsistic
70s. While bad hangover 60s terms tried to qualify Glam
as a sociological schism of the 70s ('gender-bending', 'androgynous',
'bisexual', etc.), Glam was more a self-inflicted form of
theatre which the individual played out irrespective of
any social effect save for shock value. In place of any
wider social concerns, Glam fuses private and social space,
as documented in reflections on Glam from Nan Goldin's to
Boy George's snapshots of their flickering photo-booth lifestyles.
Part adornment, part affectation, Glam still remains the
only musical mode which synchs to the core of sexual crisis
which halts all attempts at defining sexuality: the pre-op
transsexual. Despite the tragedy which laces the dilemma
of the pre-op (a dreadfully codifying social pressure which
still frowns on a person deciding to either accept or reject
their external bodily form), the pre-op body is that which
renders gender itself as an aberration, as if the act of
categorization creates the monstrous rather than any deviation
from the binary split which strangleholds para-gender possibilities.
Just
as Warhol infamously claimed that "Art" was short for "artist"
(and he is still right), "Glam" is short for "glamour".
Which means that anything labeled Glam is an outright perversion
of the term. Far from recalling the high-style theatricality
and neo-Grecco perfection of Garbo's cheeks, Gable's Chin,
Monroe's lips or Davis' eyes, the 'glamour' connoted by
Glam is the motley residue of an original sheen. Central
to Glam is the act of transformation &endash; sexual, sartorial,
sonic &endash; so much that no-one ever 'became' or 'was'
Glam. Rather, everyone from Bowie to Alice Cooper to Sha-Na-Na
to Generation X to Sigue Sigue Sputnik wear Glam. They dress-up
and go out as Glam. Like bogans in boas, madonnas with mullets,
sirens with stubble, they stay out all night as anything
but themselves.
One
of the most delightfully reduced sonic patinas of Rock'n'Roll
is Gary Glitter's Rock'n'Roll (Part 1). The pubic pulsation
and penile throbbing of the dual drums, baritone saxes and
low-tuned fuzz guitars (courtesy of Mike Leander's unmistakable
production) typify the totally artificial approach to reproducing
the sound of 'classic' rock'n'roll which gave Glam its sensational
clash between modernism and retroism. It's a deeply hollow
yet lusciously sonic spectacle, all the more beautiful because
of its bloated sonorum. It talks of how music 'used to sound'
while flagrantly rebuilding a new sound whose architecsonics
render accurate acoustics into fattened icons of instruments.
The 'fat' echoic sound of Glam &endash; from Roxy Music's
Remake Remodel to The Rubettes' Sugar Baby Love &endash;
deliberately flaunts this false yearning, this inappropriateness,
this innate inability to 'be', this will to transform, deform,
reform.
This
is why the most important precursor to Punk is Glam rather
than any of the 'real' crud that rock critics used to define
and 'prove' the essence of Punk. In an era when Bahaus covered
Telegram Sam and Eater covered Queen Bitch, it was not by
accident that The Human League covered Gary Glitter's anthemic
Rock'n'Roll. A perfectly para-gender father-son figure is
painted by Glitter and Oakey's love of Pop music and their
rejection of Rock's realist ideologies. Gary Glitter &endash;
possibly the least feminine figure in the history of pop
music &endash; laterally connects to the more prosaic social
reality of the pre-Gay transsexual: a northern coal miner
in tarty synthetic frocks and bargain basement make-up.
Phil Oakey is the android Ed-Woodian she-male who carries
the torch for classic Hollywood studio styling and make-overs
&endash; while electrically rewiring its sound to mirror
the musical transsexualism of Walter/Wendy Carlos. Both
are clearly masculine, yet both ridicule any pretense toward
the real, and thereby 'defrock' themselves of the macho
regalia which &endash; like the dirty rag hanging out of
Bruce Springsteen's jeans in a frayed colonic expulsion
&endash; so many he-males excrete as proof of their malehood.
The
body of Gary Glitter is Glam rendered in gorgeous cellulite.
He is no Romanesque marble statue of bland, homoerotic youthfullness;
he is a bald monster hunched in a mediarized courtroom,
snared by the social due to downloading kiddie-porn. (As
if university lecturers are solid citizens who don't fuck
nubiles; as is mid-life crisis bourgeoisie husbands aren't
subscribing to World Movies to see a bit of fresh French
tit.) Gary Glitter's 'disgrace' only intensifies his status
as Pop. Disrobed of his many layers of dress &endash; spangles,
wigs, riches, hits, management, finances &endash; he shocks
us with the very surface that was there all the time: a
hairy, fat and sweaty Pop star. Seeing most rock and pop
stars on any live or televisual stage recalls this. Consider
Dee Snider of Twisted Sister or Gene Simmons of Kiss. To
imagine the erotic in them is to want to be fucked by a
bear. Or by your father in drag.
In
a strangely appropriate way, Glam's ornate theatre of grand
sound serves as a grotesque test tube which has spawned
many a musico-genetic replicant from Glam's spermula stardust.
From Punk to Post-Punk Electronica to New Romanticism to
Psychobilly to Hollywood Rock to New Beat to Glam Metal
and beyond. Proud progeny is to be found in a disparate
trailing group that spans nearly 25 years and includes Kiss,
La Dusseldorf, Bauhaus, Siouxsie & The Banshees, The
Clash, Kraftwerk, Billy Idol, Gary Numan, Plastic Bertrand,
Jayne County, Amanda Lear, Bow Wow Wow, Polyrock, Visage,
Japan, Grace Jones, The Buggles, Madonna, Big Audio Dynamite,
U2, Tears For Fears, REM, Depeche Mode, Van Halen, Charlie
Sexton, Twisted Sister, Joan Jet, Lita Ford, The Cult, Hayzee
Fantayzee, Prince, Age of Chance, Westworld, Laibach, Brittany,
The Rentals, Red Kross, Young Gods, Zodiac Mindwarp, Oasis,
Suede, Pulp, NIN, Marilyn Manson, Stereolab, Prodigy, Add
N To X, Beck, Air, Terre Thaelmitz &endash; hell, it's a
long list. Despite a slight cross-over into the sampling
era, these acts have no concern for po-mo simulation or
technological retribution of Rock and Pop music's essentials.
To be Glam is to be inauthentic, inappropriate, indelicate.
To be Glam is to wish to be proven wrong, to wish to be
found out dressing-up; not to rebelliously bend rules or
radically break laws, but to be prosecuted rather than persecuted.
Yet
this thesis is not as tizzed-up and blow-waved as it sounds.
Despite Glam's contra-granular reconstitution of Rock and
Pop as an 'imaged sound' &endash; one which quite obviously
struck libertine, erotic, necrophiliac and fetishistic poses
against the monolithic backdrop of Rock's folkloric roots
&endash; Glam's resounding of Rock is an inevitable process.
'Real music' is the kind that vacuous studio musicians still
crank out around the world. Hearing the Rock of TV bands
like Paul Schaeffer on The Letterman Show is like sailing
through a Rock version of Disney's It's A Small World After
All ride: you are massaged with waves of slick pseudo-rootsy
detailing which subliminally intone It's Only Rock'n'Roll
But I Like It. The sound of Rock is a phenomenal history
of what is heard rather than what is said, and thus builds
more upon a series of aural distortions, regurgitations
and distillations than a set of fundamentalist texts and
ideological precepts. That is why Led Zeppelin is &endash;
knowingly so, in the hands of producer Jimmy Page &endash;
a fractured deconstruction of the electric blues as heard
through the sound of Howling Wolf. It is also why AC/DC
is &endash; knowingly so, in the hands of producers Vanda
& Young &endash; an amplified distillation of those
same fragments composed and connected by Led Zeppelin. And
not surprisingly, it is also why The Cult is &endash; knowingly
so, in the hands of producer Rick Rubin &endash; a streamlined
concantenation of the sharpened shards of 'rockness' which
defines the AC/DC sound.
Most
guffaws at Heavy Metal are really responses to the Glam
DNA which squirms uncomfortably at the centre of Metal's
excessive display. Note how grotesquely feminine Metal lead
guitarists are, with skin-tight pants and desperately bulging
crutches, and operatic guitar solos which sore to the escalating
heights first rendered by star castrati of centuries long
gone. While Metal huffs and puffs and blows the house down,
its titillating door knocks are so often heralded by Tinkerbells
in spandex and leather, whose falsetto being quivers at
the cusp of transsexual trauma. Neither unknowingly gay
nor unremittingly drag, the dissolution of the he-male in
the high-glossed fetishization of the pelvic black hole
is at the nexus of Glam and Metal. Dressed as a withered
and wigged Marlene Dietrich, Bowie drag-karaoked Boys Keep
Swinging as a statement to Glam's enduring ability to render
this transsexual effect in Pop music. Now 50, Bowie is no
less fake than Ziggy: he is tanned and married to Naomi
Campbell. Gary Glitter, similarly aged, is arguably no less
real: he remains hairy, fat and sweaty.
For
all these reasons, it is no wonder that Glam is perennially
derided, and why its distasteful cultural convulsions trigger
awkward ridicule. Glam's transsexual synchronism, its heady
sono-erotica, and its countertextual studio arrangements
are a world away from Rock as we presume it to be. As psycho-sexual
ghouls of Glam, The Cramps claimed "There's more things
down in Tennessee than dreamt of in your philosophy". They
weren't incanting some anthropological witticism typical
of Greil Marcus by detouring through a reference to Bela
Lugosi's famous line from Dracula; they were alluding to
the transformative goo-goo muck which cakes the sequined
mannequin's of Rock & Pop's descent into Glam. Unfortunately,
there will be no Gary Glitter mannequin in Madame Tussard's
House of Wax. Yet while his glitter may pale, his sound
will stay fat.
