The Cockettes
David Bowie
The question of what these performances ask us to ignore seemed relevant to me in the Auslander reading. The queer reading of glam rock he presents led me to think about the paradigm presented of queering rock n roll, but still producing rock stars (Marc Bolan, David Bowie) who served as heterosexual sex symbols, at least, to the mainstream audience.
Auslander writes that hippies hated glamour, which may be true, but he ignores "hippie" collectives/performance groups like the Cockettes who embraced a sense of drag and glamor at the same time as part of their Bohemian lifestyle. They were, however, openly queer, not in a mysterious way or as rumors (Mick Jagger and David Bowie had sex!) but as not-straight individuals.
I think this relates to Auslander's idea that to be a successful musician is not only to sell a performance of music that people like, but to sell the performance of a genre-specific (or perhaps bending) identity. He writes about cross-dressing being a "creating a sort of anxiety" in the United States, but the glam rock groups not only had large amounts of angry homophobic anti-fans, but also large amounts of female fans who found the performance of androgyny sexually provocative (in a good way).
I suppose I'm saying it seems like it might be a function of the form of glam rock to preference the idea of creative rebellion and exploration and ignore the possibilities of calculated gains both in shock value and female attention.
2 comments:
You are exploring some interesting things in this post. In particular, I enjoyed finding out about the Cockettes, which I had previously been unaware of. Based on the web pages I've just finished reading about them, The Cockettes seem to be in a very different category from either glam rock or opera, although there are some very interesting parallels to be seen with both. Since you are familiar with The Cockettes, it would have been great to read a more detailed explanation of what you see as the similarities and differences between the Cockettes and these other two genres of performance.
At the end of your post, you say that the form of glam rock seems to "preference the idea of creative rebellion and exploration and ignore the possibilities of calculated gains both in shock value and female attention." I was wondering if you could explain what you mean when you say that glam rock performances ignore the possibilities of calculated gains in shock value and female attention. I found this statement provocative but opaque, and wished you had elaborated on it, particularly by explaining what kind of calculated gains you mean, as well as why you feel that glam rock ignored those gains, since to me it seemed that glam rock traded partly on shock value (at least initially in 1971-2) and also that they attracted a lot of female fans as consumers of albums, concert tickets, fan goods, etc. Did you feel that glam rock was not outrageous enough? or that music promoters should have done more to trade on their outrageousness in order to make more money?
My confusion may be the result of not understanding the body of your post and how the Cockettes fit into the picture. I'm relatively unfamiliar with these things, so maybe there will be a chance to talk about it in class on Thursday.
Hello Derek!
Thanks for your very detailed commentary. I think most of the confusion here stems from my perhaps less than clear phrasing. Since we will get to discus the larger issues at hand in class, I wanted to give a quick run through of the specifics.
With an example such as the Cockettes, I was trying to do something similar to what Cody wrote, that is, provide a "glam" performance parallel that did not have the benefit of an assumed heterosexuality.
In this quote "preference the idea of creative rebellion and exploration and ignore the possibilities of calculated gains both in shock value and female attention," I actually just left out a word! No wonder it was unclear. I meant to say that it asks the audience to ignore the calculations and mechanization of music as a business.
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