Bolan, Bowie and the Carnivalesque

Children of the Revolution: Bolan, Bowie and the Carnivalesque Alison Blair A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts At the University of Otago 2016 i Abstract David Bowie and Marc Bolan were two glam rock stars who, in the 1970s, presented audiences with carnivalesque ‘alternatives’ to everyday reality. As a time of crisis and transformation, the 1970s in Britain has been characterised as a period of particularly difficult socio-economic turmoil, in a still relatively conservative society – particularly in relation to conventional norms of identity, ‘authenticity’, gender and sexuality. Bolan and Bowie, through their performance personae and narrative spaces, provided both a form of ‘escape’ from the lived experience of these socio-economic difficulties, and a counter-hegemonic alternative to these aforementioned norms. That is, their ‘alternate identities’ challenged conventional norms of authenticity and of identity itself, and their ‘alternate sexualities’ presented audiences with counter-hegemonic representations of gender and sexuality. Moreover, their ‘alternate realities’ were carnivalesque, Otherworldly narrative spaces that their alternate identities inhabited, providing an escape from the difficulties of life in 1970s Britain. In this thesis, I explore these various ‘alternatives’ through a Bakhtinian framework in order to discuss the ways that they represented, in Bakhtin’s terms, a carnivalesque ‘second life of the people’ – a social safety valve and escape from these increasingly difficult socio-economic conditions. In chapter one, I place Bolan and Bowie within the context of 1970s Britain, and within the context of the glam rock genre. I explore the ways that glam has been framed as either reactionary or radical, and I align my own research with the latter approach. In chapter two, I discuss the ways that Bolan and Bowie adopted the ‘carnival mask’, presenting their counter-hegemonic ‘identities’, and in chapter three I explore their non- ii normative representations of gender and sexuality in terms of Bakhtin’s ‘world upside down’ and the ‘lower bodily stratum’. In chapter four, I discuss the ‘Otherworlds’ that these ‘identities’ inhabited – carnivalesque spaces – which inverted conventional hierarchies and presented a radical, utopian critique of British contemporary life under capitalism. iii Acknowledgements Thank you to my supervisors Dr. Rosemary Overell and Dr. Brett Nicholls for their guidance and support, and to Dr. Paul Ramaeker for his valuable contribution in the early stages of my research. I am also thankful to the following people who supported and encouraged me, or contributed in some way to the completion of this thesis: Pat Cumming, Tony McSoriley, Anita Cumming, and Clive Cumming; my husband Matthew Blair and the extended Blair and Norton families; Dr. Lachy Paterson and Associate Professor Angela Wanhalla; Dr. Rochelle Simmons and Dr. Mark Maguire; Dr. Ian Chapman and all of the Bowie scholars who I met at the Stardom and Celebrity of David Bowie symposium; postgraduate students and staff of the Department of Media, Film and Communication; my former colleagues in the Department of English and Linguistics, and in the Development and Alumni Relations Office, as well as my friends in the Department of Music at the University of Otago. Special thanks to Dr. Garth Cartwright for the diligent proof-reading, and to Jonny Clifford and Matthew Scott for the open-ended book loans. Thank you also to Steve Harley and Rachel Cameron, and to the New Zealand Federation of Graduate Women. Finally, thank you to David Bowie and Marc Bolan, who this was all about in the first place. Marc Bolan 1947-1977 David Bowie 1947-2016 “There’s a starman waiting in the sky…” iv Table of contents PREFACE Abstract i Acknowledgements iii Chapter One Introduction: Glam and the 1970s 1 Cultural Context: Britain in the 1970s 3 ‘Children of the Revolution’: Introducing Glam 10 High Glam/Low Glam 12 Theoretical Responses to Glam 15 Glam as Reactionary 15 Glam as Radical 17 The Carnivalesque: Introduction and Approaches 27 The Carnivalesque as Reactionary 29 The Carnivalesque as Radical 29 Chapter Two ‘Alternate Personae’: Bolan, Bowie and the Carnival Mask 35 The Carnival Mask, Identity and ‘Authenticity’ 35 Challenging ‘Authenticity’: Ephemeral Identities 37 The ‘Fantastical Other’: Aliens, Magicians, and Transgressive Otherness 42 ‘Otherness’ as a Challenge to Authenticity and as ‘Social Safety Valve’ 43 Otherness as a Challenge to Heteronormativity 50 Chapter Three ‘Alternate Sexualities’: Bolan, Bowie and Gender and Sexuality 55 Glam, Gender and Sexuality 58 The ‘World Upside Down’ and the Lower Bodily Stratum 60 Bolan’s Gender Ambiguity and Heterosexual ‘Performance’ 64 Bowie’s Gender and Sexual Ambiguity 70 v Chapter Four ‘Alternate Realities’: Bolan and Bowie’s Carnivalesque Otherworlds 77 Otherworlds in 1970s Popular Media 80 Bolan’s Alternate Reality: ‘Mystic Sci Fi’ Utopia 81 Bowie’s Alternate Reality: Near-Future Sci Fi Dystopia 95 Chapter Five Conclusion 105 Bibliography 108 1 Chapter One Introduction: Glam and the 1970s Writing in 1998, film director Todd Haynes noted that during his research for the film Velvet Goldmine, there were no full-length books in print about glam rock. There was, at that stage, “nothing to single it out as a comprehensive cultural phenomenon”.1 This is no longer the case, as interest in the 1970s and in glam rock has steadily grown in recent years, both in academia and in the popular imagination. With its glitter, glamour and showmanship, it has been easy, and an oversimplification of the genre, to view the glam explosion of the 1970s as an anomaly of sorts, an unexpected diversion, and leave it at that. However, no text, no genre, exists in isolation, and is always the outcome or reflection of a specific set of circumstances, able to tell us more about its cultural context, more about its audience, and more about itself. I position my own research on Marc Bolan and David Bowie within a growing body of work on both the 1970s and on glam rock, as well as within the relatively new field of scholarly work on Bowie himself. I aim to discuss 1970s British glam as a response to its social and political context, and in doing so, I will discuss the body of work of Bolan and Bowie, the genre’s two most pivotal figures, as having a critical, counter-hegemonic function in terms of their presentation of alternate personae, alternate sexualities, and alternative realities. These ‘alternatives’ act as expressions of the carnivalesque as outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly the concept of the social ‘safety valve’, and the idea of mask as a form of resistance. I argue therefore, that glam emerged not merely as a new form of rock music, or as a new trend in fashion (although it was indeed both), but primarily as a response to British economic and political difficulty, and the effect of that difficulty upon an increasingly disenfranchised society. Rather than the explicit, visceral challenge that we would see towards the end of the 1970s in the form of punk rock, glam’s inherent response was a form of escapism, imagining futuristic scenarios and incorporating ‘characters’ drawn from science fiction (and in the case of Bolan, also hearkening back to an idyllic, if imaginary, past). 1 Barney Hoskyns, Glam!: Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), xi. 2 Furthermore, this form of escapism also coalesced around Bolan and Bowie’s respective personae as ‘otherworldly’ rock stars. In relation to this, I will discuss how Bolan and Bowie constructed these personae through their bodies of work, and further to this, the ways that these personae acted as expressions of the carnival mask – that is, the mask as a form of identity play in which participants wore masks representing various other persons or ‘characters’. For both of these artists, their alternate personae or ‘masks’ took the form of costuming, makeup, first- and third-person narration within their song lyrics, and within the titles of their albums - Bowie’s character of ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and Bolan’s short-lived persona as ‘Zinc Alloy’ being key examples. Moreover, Bolan’s primary form of identity play incorporated fantasy literature influences into the ‘Marc Bolan persona’ and exaggerated them to a fantastical degree. For both artists, these alternate personae, or masks, were not only counter-hegemonic alternatives to the present- day reality of 1970s Britain, but they also challenged conventional notions of ‘authentic identity’ and ‘authenticity’ itself – and I will return to this idea in the next chapter, particularly in terms of the ways that this aspect of Bolan and Bowie’s personae challenged the music scene’s own privileging of ‘authenticity’. Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World provides the conceptual framework of this thesis. Bakhtin delineates the functions of the medieval, pre-Lenten carnival, and one of these functions, aside from entertainment and festivity, was to overthrow social conventions, reversing power relations of class and gender, in what is known as ‘the world upside-down’. In this manner, Bolan and Bowie’s range of personae presented a counter-hegemonic challenge to conventional notions of gender and sexuality. Further to this, by drawing upon a diverse range of literary, musical and cultural sources in their stage performances, television appearances, sartorial choices, song lyrics, and music, Bolan and Bowie presented audiences with a cohesive fantasy image, providing, in

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