Putting the 'pop' in populism: Glam Rock and Trump

Is politics the new glam rock?

The Guardian, 14 Oct 2016


by Simon Reynolds

Look back at the history of glam rock, and you keep running into things that seem like premonitions – previews of the scary and dangerous man running for the American presidency right now. In his mid-1970s interviews, David Bowie talked about “a strong leader” destined to “sweep through” the western world: a charismatic superhero who might emerge not from conventional politics but from entertainment. Sometimes Bowie’s tone was ominous. At others, he’d make it seem like a necessary corrective to a Weimar-style state of decadence, talking with seemingly approving anticipation of “a rightwing, totally dictatorial tyranny” that would clean up all the mess made by the permissive society.

At his most extreme, unguarded and cocaine-addled, Bowie proposed himself as a candidate for the job, whether as British PM, as the “first English president of the United States”, or maybe even as ruler of the world.

Another future-spectre of Trump was Alice Cooper’s pretend run for the presidency in 1972. It took the form of the single “Elected” and its hilarious, delirious video, but nonetheless had a curiously convincing tone of megalomaniacal demagoguery about it, as Cooper boasted that he and his “young and strong” followers would take “the country by storm”.

On the surface, Trump and the glam era’s stars couldn’t be further apart. What does Trump have in common with Ziggy Stardust, apart from orange hair? The Donald is a bigot, a macho bully, a philistine, a proud ignoramus. Bowie and the brightest of his peers were androgynous aesthetes, intellectually hungry and sexually experimental.

And yet there are some unlikely affinities, as I discovered while researching Shock and Awe, my history of glam. As signaled by his gilded tower on Fifth Avenue, Trump surrounds himself with glitz. Trump and the glam rockers share an obsession with fame and a ruthless drive to conquer and devour the world’s attention. Trump actually plays “We Are the Champions” by Queen (a band aligned with glam in its early days) at his rallies, because its triumphalist refrain – “no time for losers” – crystallises his economic Darwinist worldview.

A mirror of oligopoly capitalism, pop is a ferociously competitive game that sorts the contestants into a handful of winners and a great mass of losers. Propelled by a stardom-at-all-costs drive, many of glam rock’s principal characters nimbly reinvented themselves and in some cases trampled others on their way up. They willed their fantasy selves into existence. This same ethos of “Don’t dream it, be it” (as articulated by The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Dr Frank N Furter) could be seen in the type of fandom that glam inspired. It had an imitative quality never really seen before in pop: audiences dressing up, copying the hair and makeup. Roxy Music’s fans, responding to the sophistication of the group’s image and artwork, to audience flattering lyrical winks such as “sure to make the cognoscenti think” – costumed themselves as members of a make-believe aristocracy. Bryan Ferry recalled how some would turn up to the shows in full black tie, as if attending an Oscars ceremony.

Trump’s appeal is generally seen in terms of his doom-laden imagery of a weakened, rudderless America. But there is something else going on too: an admiring projection towards a swaggering figure who revels in his wealth, free to do and say whatever he wants. Trump is an aspirational figure as much as a mouthpiece for resentment and rancour.

“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal, explaining the role of bravado in his business dealings. “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” He and co-writer Tony Schwarz coined the concept “truthful hyperbole”. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it cuts to the essence of how hype works: by making people believe in something that doesn’t exist yet, it magically turns a lie into a reality. As the saying goes, fake it till you make it. Bowie’s manager Tony Defries used this technique to break the singer in the US: travelling everywhere by limo, surrounded by bodyguards he didn’t need, Bowie looked like the star he wasn’t, until the public and the media started to take the illusion for reality.

Early in his career, Trump grasped that – like a pop star – he was selling an image, a brand. Licensed out, the Trump name gets affixed to buildings and businesses that he doesn’t own, let alone run. He’s an extreme version of what people on Wall Street call a “glamour stock”: an investment that outperforms the market based on an inflated belief in its growth potential or on even more intangible qualities of cool and buzz. Twitter has been described as the ultimate glamour stock, its attractive image vastly out of whack with its ability to make money. A glamour stock will keep on winning right up until it loses – when the gulf between its perceived value and actual wealth-generative potential gets too huge, when reality finally disrupts the reality distortion field surrounding it.

Self-reinvention was the strategy used by glam stars such as Bowie and Marc Bolan. You can see the same chameleon-like flexibility at work in Trump’s career. Once upon a time he was a Democrat, on genial terms with the Clintons. Years ago he used birtherism as the launch pad for a political career; now he’s dropped it, as a political liability. It’s the same with his recent rabble-rousing rhetoric about “building a wall”. Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer analyses the agility with which Trump evades attacks by discarding ideas: “He merely creates new Trumps.” Bowie conjured up new personas to stay one step ahead of pop’s fickle fluctuations and keep himself creatively stimulated. With no fixed political principles, Trump’s only consistency is salesmanship and showmanship: the ability to stage his public life as a drama.

And it’s the drama that holds the public’s attention – the edgy promise of a less boring politics. The New York Times recently quoted a voter who confessed to flirting with the idea of voting for Trump because “a dark side of me wants to see what happens… There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen.”

Emerging after the earnest, authenticity-obsessed late 60s, glam was a period in which rock rediscovered a sense of showbiz and spectacle. Pop history has repeatedly cycled through such phases of glam and anti-glam: Bowie/Roxy razzle-dazzle was supplanted by scruffy pub rock and street-credible punk, which in turn was eclipsed by the neo-glam of the new romantics. A similar shift occurred in America when glitzy hair metal was displaced by grunge’s mud-slide sound and earth-toned clothes.

You can see similar dynamics at play in today’s politics. Hillary Clinton sits squarely in the unglam corner: a worthy but dull public servant, supremely accomplished at everything required of a leader except what the public perversely craves – being an entertainer. She’s a “value stock” – one of those companies that over time doggedly outperform the glamour stocks, but simply don’t inspire spasms of irrational exuberance.

The real anti-glam leader of our age, though, is Jeremy Corbyn. Bearded and low-key, he’s the UK political equivalent of Whispering Bob Harris, the presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test, who couldn’t hide his distaste when visually flashy, image-over-substance bands such as Roxy Music, Sparks and New York Dolls appeared on the TV program.

Corbyn is viscerally opposed to – and fundamentally incapable of – political theatre, the very thing that has carried Trump so close to the White House. Corbyn tried to change the format and feel of prime minister’s questions, saying he wished to “remove the theatre from politics”. In one particular PMQs, he responded to Cameron’s slick pre-scripted gags with the schoolmasterly reprimand: “I invite the prime minister to leave the theatre and return to reality.”

As for oratory, Corbyn seems instinctively averse to all those elements of spoken language – cadence, musicality, metaphor – that sway the listener irrationally. But as Gary Younge argued recently, his plain-spoken delivery is taken as a token of sincerity by his followers, who “have not come to be entertained; they have come … to have a basic sense of decency reflected back to them through their politics”. This is how a personality cult has built up around him, despite his honest and accurate admission: “I’m not a personality.” It’s very indie, very alternative rock, the way that the absence of charisma has become the source of a curious magnetism.

Once in a blue moon, a politician comes along who combines pop star allure and all the less glamorous qualifications such as temperament, competence and knowledge. Barack Obama has both kinds of cool going for him: perfect comic timing at the White House correspondents’ dinner, calmness and clarity during moments of Oval Office crisis.

Politics without any element of charisma is certainly a dry affair. But the cult of personality can be dangerous outside the realm of showbiz, its proper domain.

“I could see how easy it was to get a whole rally thing going,” Bowie said in 1974, recalling the height of Ziggymania in Britain a few years earlier. “There were times when I could have told the audience to do anything.” In another interview of that era, Bowie spoke of the way Hitler “staged a country”, combining “politics and theatrics” to create the ultimate spectacle. “Boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience … [Hitler] created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years. The world will never see his like.”

Let’s hope the Trump show will be cancelled next month.