Music has always summoned what Irvine and Gal discuss as an iconization process. Artists iconize the past by assigning the past a continuity and currency. Part of this continuity and currency within the iconization process is glamor (glam). David Bowie was doing 60s rock, yet with face paint and platform shoes, as were the New York Dolls and the Ramones, but adding to this, intensified sexualities. Later disco was a development of early disco yet with a glam element. Current artists such as Miley Cyrus, The Weeknd, draw on elements of Jazz, Rock, Funk, Pop, Country (Deborah Harry, Fleetwood Mac, Kool and the Gang, George Benson), but a much more ‘sparkly’ version. And who’d forget James Brown performing in Rocky, as a sparkly re-invention of the old him …
 
The questions I ask thus, are why this movement to glam …  why does music largely move through certain underground forms and progress to glam … Several suggestions can contribute to this.
  • Music and its industry create a parallel social economy, which reward the sacrifices of musicians (and at times punish the musicians). Here, musicians may feel at liberty to define their own rules as musicians within their own ‘mini’ parallel social economies, as owners of their parallel social economies. This is certainly what happened with the inner city Bronx and rap in 1979-1982.
  • Secondly, affluence and earning big money and mercantilism is wonderful!!
  • Thirdly, pressures of success lead to commercializing and hence reduced affordances to experiment musically (at times). Though this is not always the case, the experimenting then must move towards the visual.
  • The development of technology, and competing against a commercial market, is such that an increasingly greater emphasis on the visual, sexual, and other identities is central to success.
  • Following Margaret Mead’s work, the widespread liberty to accept the use of sexuality has itself liberated society, a society that has reflexively framed sexuality as connected to certain forms of music. In the Balkans, for decades, during lent, disco, rock, jazz, funk, and any genre other than religious or classical music was forbidden on the radio, as these forbidden genres drew listeners away from the ascetic intentions of Easter.
  • The pushes and pulls of the record labels.
  • Through identifying with history, and assigning that form of music stagnancy as a root musical and cultural form, musicians authorize themselves as performers of that music, to become rooted in the archeology of music. Finding a hybrid of musical roots and a glam form of those roots, assigns the msuican a certain authority over tradition, over its glamorization, and over the now pervasive boundaries of the parallel social economy created through the glamorizing of music.
One marked example is the Paul Weller. A punk-pop musician for years, suddenly appeared on TV with a suit and tie strumming traditional jazz chords, alongside a gospel keyboardist (Mick Talbot), and forever altering the direction of the music industry through a glam approach. He then of course married Dianne Sealy (D. C. Lee), probably through love, but nonetheless a sign of transgression, iconizing his style of music in multiple ways.