Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 80

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Popular Culture Review

based on an androgynous physical image: died orange hair, white
face make-up and a gaunt face and physique which defied
categorization in terms of sexual placement. As Simon Frith so
accurately comments, "Bowie-ism was a way of life-sty le as
meaning-and no other idol had such intense influence on his fans as
David Bowie . . . His voice and body were aesthetic, not sensual,
objects."^ If rock music has always been centered on subversion,
Bowie's influence seems located on the periphery of sexual boundaries
and conventions. Indeed, Bowie's shifting persona, from Ziggy
Stardust to the thin white duke to the urban aristocrat, can be
articulated most fruitfully in terms of personal style and fashion,
with the early sexual experimentation shifting from the androgynous
to the more recuperable realm of nule fashion histoiy. By fixating on
outer appearance, Bowie and the other glam rockers chose to ignore
dealing overtly with political, social and ideological issues in their
music, with their subversion shifting instead to gender and sexual
identity.^
In direct contrast to the glam rockers, the punk movement, which
is often traced to the Sex Pistols and their single "Anarchy in the
UK" in 1976, was motivated by a clear political agenda. Responding
to the escalating unemployment, inflation, racial conflicts and the
declining opportunities for the young in mid-1970s Britain, the punks
dismantled pop music and the devalued society, arguing for chaos and
destruction. li\e music reflected the social malaise through dissonant
guitars and drumming, with lyrics shouted almost in spite of the
musical accompaniment.
The social agenda was physically
represented through the 'style' of the punks. As Dick Hebdige
describes, this style of confrontational dressing matched items which
normally would not be combined, with the items losing their
conventional meaning in the process: lavatory chains, safety pins,
dog collars, razor blades, and clothes pegs forming an ensemble based
on ripping the items from their 'natural' context.^ If the glam rockers,
such as Bowie, were interested in creating a unified personal style in
opposition to the dominant norms of sexuality, the punks' style was
defined by its disunity, its incoherence, by the utter irreconcilability
of the elements of their style.
These two spheres of the music world in Britain clearly operated
in mutual exclusion. Indeed, the punk movement could be interpreted
as decidedly against the artifice inherent in the glam rock world.