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PERFORMING GLAM ROCK: GENDER AND THEATRICALITY IN POPULAR MUSIC. By Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006; pp. 259. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Partly because of its origins in theatre studies, performance studies has had little to say about musicians as performers. Applying performance analysis to the musical personae crafted by glam rockers, Philip Auslander deftly bridges studies and cultural studies to assess the historical importance and subversive strategies of glam, whose androgynous avatars dominated British music charts from 1971 to 1975. Through its emphasis on fun and accessibility, glam flouted psychedelic rock's emphasis on virtuosity and becoming "the first fully developed genre of rock music" (6). Moreover, in its performative challenge to stable sexual gender orientations, glam decisively, if temporarily, queered rock culture.
Chapter 1, "Glamticipations," traces glam's to 1970 when dissident rumblings could be heard beneath the counterculture's ideology of authenticity. Thus when Phil Ochs appeared at Carnegie Hall dressed in a gold lamé Elvis suit he implicitly embraced the emergent rock values of "characterization, self-consciousness, and spectacle" (19). Na Na turned John Lennon's badge of authenticity- 1950s rock-and-roll-into a celebration of while Alice Cooper's proto-glam transvestism exposed the counterculture's implicitly homophobic gender politics. Held in suspicion by youth culture because of its implied split in values between and spectator, rock theatricality was poised to make a comeback.
Chapter 2, "Glamography," limns glam's history and phenomenology. Musically eclectic, glam is a musical than a sociological category: "Glam's of style and pose over authenticity...