Friday, April 15, 2011

Further to yesterday's Ibiza-ification of pop column, and its coda swerve into "but the little girls understand" territory...

There's another parallel between the now-pop and glam 'n' glitter--the older generation of music fans, who had grown up with the original music that the later phase of teenybop pop was based on (Nineties techno-rave with the now-pop, Fifties rock'n'roll with glitter), these older-and-wisers would naturally tend to see the new chartpop as a lumpen travesty of the original's wildness and innocence and primal purity. As a cynically manufactured, crassly manipulative, coarsely hysterical bombast, empty of meaning. That's how glitter was largely seen by discerning rock fans at the time.

And it wasn't just the Fifties that the glitter bands remodeled, it was also the Sixties, or at least the middle bit of that decade: the big beats and riffing simplicity of early Kinks, Dave Clark Five, The Troggs. Slade with their Lennon/"Twist and Shout" raucousness. The Sweet talked of being influenced by The Who and then there were the Sixties-echoes like the mock-revolutionary scenario of "Teenage Rampage" (a bubblegum version of The Doors's "Five To One" almost) and the strange line "where were you in '68?" in ""The Six Teens".

So like the Peas et al vis-a-vis 90s techno-rave, glitterbeat took all the most exciting tricks and moves of rock'n'roll's peak moments to date, glossed them up and plasticizing the whole package, turned it all into this remorseless machine for euphoria-generation.

Now I think about it, "Dynamite" could be the title of a great lost Sweet single.