If you walked into a record store in 1971, you’d probably see a lot of denim. Beards, too. Serious men playing serious, ten-minute guitar solos about the "truth" of the earth. Then came the glitter. It wasn't just a bit of sparkle; it was a full-scale tactical assault on reality.
In his massive 700-page tome, Simon Reynolds Shock and Awe dissects this exact moment when pop music decided it was bored with being "real." Honestly, it’s a bit of a monster of a book. It’s dense. It’s opinionated. It basically argues that everything we think we know about the 1970s—that they were just the drab, brown-and-orange hangover of the Sixties—is completely wrong.
The Philosophy of the Fake
Most people think of glam rock as just a bunch of guys in platform boots. Reynolds argues it was actually a sophisticated, somewhat cynical philosophy. He calls Oscar Wilde the "first philosopher of glam." Why? Because Wilde understood that "being natural is simply a pose."
Glam was a middle finger to the hippie ideal of authenticity. While the Woodstock generation wanted to get "back to the garden," the glam kids wanted to get to the moon, or at least to a very expensive nightclub.
Simon Reynolds Shock and Awe tracks how this happened. It wasn't organic. It was constructed. You’ve got artists like David Bowie, who spent the better part of the late sixties failing at every image possible—from mod to hippie to mime—until he realized that the "mask" was the whole point.
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The Big Two: Bowie and Bolan
You can't talk about this era without Marc Bolan and David Bowie. They were friends, sure, but they were also desperate rivals. Bolan got there first. With T. Rex, he turned from a "boogie poet" into a teen idol who basically invented the seventies. Reynolds describes "T. Rexstasy" as a teenage rampage that hadn't been seen since the Beatles.
Then there’s Bowie.
Bowie is the spine of the book. Reynolds dedicates nearly half the chapters to him, which some critics found a bit much, but it makes sense. Bowie wasn't just a singer; he was a "theatre of inflamed artifice." He didn't just play songs; he inhabited characters like Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. In Simon Reynolds Shock and Awe, Bowie represents the "high glam" intellectual side—the guy who read Nietzsche and wanted to turn himself into a living work of art.
High Glam vs. Low Glam
One of the best things about the book is how it doesn't just stick to the "cool" stuff. Reynolds makes a distinction between "High Glam" and "Low Glam."
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- High Glam: The art school crowd. Roxy Music, Bowie, maybe Cockney Rebel. These were the ones obsessed with retro-futurism and high fashion.
- Low Glam: The "brickie-glam" or "stomp" bands. Think Slade, The Sweet, or Gary Glitter.
This was the music of the football terraces. It was loud, it was simple, and it was precision-tooled for 12-year-olds. Reynolds has this great bit about the "startling primitivism" of the production on those early glitter records. It wasn't meant to be "good" music in a traditional sense; it was meant to be a physical impact. A shock.
The Dark Side of the Glitter
It wasn't all just fun and platform shoes. Simon Reynolds Shock and Awe doesn't shy away from the darker stuff. There was a weird, uncomfortable flirtation with totalitarian imagery. Bryan Ferry wearing jackboots. Bowie’s "Thin White Duke" period where he made some truly regrettable comments about Hitler.
Reynolds argues that glam was reactionary in its own way. It retreated from the "we" of the sixties counterculture into an "I" of individualized stardom. It was about escaping the drab reality of 1970s Britain—the strikes, the power cuts, the economic gloom—through a private bubble of narcissism.
There’s also the elephant in the room: the sexual politics. While glam was radical for its androgyny and for bringing gay aesthetics into the mainstream, it was also a scene where adult men were marketed to very young girls. Reynolds handles the Gary Glitter section with a necessary coldness, acknowledging the musical impact of the "Glitter Stomp" while never ignoring the man’s later crimes.
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Why it Still Matters
So, why should you care about a book about guys in makeup from fifty years ago?
Because we’re living in a glam world now.
Reynolds ends the book with a chapter called "Aftershocks." He traces the DNA of glam through the New Romantics, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Prince, and all the way to Lady Gaga and Kanye West.
Basically, glam taught pop music that the image is the art. It’s why we obsess over celebrity "eras" and rebranding. Every time an artist deletes their Instagram and comes back with a new look, they're doing a Bowie.
If you want to understand why pop culture is so obsessed with fame and artifice, you have to look at the "titanic, idolatrous" mess of the early seventies.
Actionable Insights for the Modern Listener
- Listen to the "Low Glam": Don't just stick to Ziggy Stardust. Check out Slade's Slayed? or The Sweet's Desolation Boulevard. The production is surprisingly heavy and weirdly futuristic.
- Look for the "Masks": When watching modern pop stars, ask yourself: is this a "confessional" artist or a "theatrical" one? Glam fans always prefer the latter.
- Read the Sources: Reynolds mentions 19th-century aesthetes and 1950s rock-and-roll. To really "get" the era, you have to see it as a mix of old vaudeville and sci-fi.
- Watch the Visuals: Glam wasn't meant for headphones; it was meant for TV. Find old Top of the Pops clips from 1972-1974 to see the "shock and awe" in its original, grainy glory.