Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music Andrew Sofer Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. By Philip Auslander . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006; pp. 259. $60.00 cloth, $60.00 paper. Partly because of its origins in theatre studies, performance studies has had little to say about pop musicians as performers. Applying performance analysis to the musical personae crafted by key glam rockers, Philip Auslander deftly bridges performance studies and cultural studies to assess both the historical importance and subversive strategies of glam, whose androgynous avatars dominated the British music charts from 1971 to 1975. Through its emphasis on fun and accessibility, glam flouted psychedelic rock's emphasis on virtuosity and authenticity, becoming "the first fully developed post-countercultural genre of rock music" (6). Moreover, in its performative challenge to stable sexual and gender orientations, glam decisively, if temporarily, queered rock culture. Chapter 1, "Glamticipations," traces glam's roots 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). Sha Na Na turned John Lennon's badge of authenticity—1950s rock-and-roll—into a celebration of artifice, 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 performer and spectator, rock theatricality was poised to make a comeback. Chapter 2, "Glamography," limns glam's history and phenomenology. Musically eclectic, glam is less a musical than a sociological category: "Glam's valorization of style and pose over authenticity may be its most profound challenge to the 1960s counterculture" (66). Making it up as they went along, so to speak, "glam rockers specifically foregrounded the constructedness of their effeminate or androgynous performance personae" (61), even as they brazenly recycled past styles. Auslander ponders why glam never really caught on in the United States, conjecturing that this country succumbed to homosexual panic. (Admitting to a few sequins in my own closet, I would also cite the hegemony of the chart-countdown TV program Top of the Pops over the British record-buying public of the time.) Chapters 3 and 4 consider the two most prominent glam rockers, T-Rex frontman Marc Bolan and David Bowie. These exact contemporaries embodied the cultural transformation from countercultural authenticity to queer performativity. Outgrowing hippie-inflected psychedelia, Bolan kicked the hobbit and mutated into glam's first epicene icon; on record, he pioneered what Auslander insightfully calls the queer rock voice, "whose implied gender and sexuality were polymorphous and malleable" (104–5). Thus Bolan "demonstrated definitively that a performance persona is not an organic outgrowth of a musician's individuality and relationship to a community but a performative construct" (104). Taking glam to the next level, Bowie transitioned from a familiar performance of fey masculinity to a "multiply subversive" queer persona (135). By treating both gender and sexual identity as performative rather than expressive, Bowie's performances as ambisexual glam alien Ziggy Stardust exemplify, for Auslander, Judith Butler's theory of subversive resignification. Further, Bowie's framing of rock heterosexuality "reveals the extent to which rock's normative heterosexuality is also constructed through and by the music itself" (138). Perhaps Auslander's most fascinating chapter, "Inauthentic Voices," shifts the emphasis from showmanship to musical content. Here, Victor Turner's concept of liminality illuminates two of glam's most unusual success stories: Brian Ferry (Roxy Music) and Roy Wood (The Move, ELO, Wizzard). If Bolan's and Bowie's performance styles destabilized gender roles and sexual identity, Ferry and Wood "extended that challenge further into the realm of musical style and vocal expression" (152). Ferry's mannered singing style, which played freely with ambiguous sexual and gender roles, fit Roxy Music's "liminal musical identity [that] seemed to border on all sorts of stylistic categories without truly belonging to any of them" (163). A multi-instrumentalist and vocal mimic, Wood expertly pastiched the Beach Boys, Neal Sedaka, and others—sometimes within the same song. "If glam...