Seventies glam played the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals (the Nietzsche who celebrated aristocracy, nobility and mastery) against the young Dionysian Nietzsche… Glam’s tendency (through its shifting of emphasis toward the visual rather than sonic, spectacle rather than the swarm-logic of noise and crowds) toward the Classical as opposed to Romantic. Glam as anti-Dionysian. The Dionysian being essentially democratic, vulgar, levelling, abolishing rank; about creating crowds, turbulence, a rude commotion, a rowdy communion. Glam being about monumentalism, turning yourself into a statue, a stone idol… But [Bryan] Ferry’s sensibility is definitely Masochistic. (As opposed to that of the Sixties, which, as Nuttall, for one, suggests, was Sadean. Compare the Sixties-sired Lennon’s “Jealous Guy”—the Sadist apologizes—to Ferry’s reading of the song—the masochist sumptuously enjoying his own pain—for a snapshot of a contrast between the two sensibilities.) The Masochist’s perversity consists in the refusal of an exclusive or even primary focus on genitality or sexuality even in its Sadean polymorphous sense, which is perverse only in a very degraded sense. The Sadean imagination quickly reaches its limits when confronted with the limited number of orifices the organism has available for penetration. But the Masochist—and Newton is in this respect, as in so many others, a Masochist through and through, as is Ballard—distributes libido across the whole scene. The erotic is to be located in all the components of the machine, whether liveware—the soft pressure of flesh—or dead animal pelt—the fur coat—or technical
Mackay played oboe and saxophone in Roxy Music, becoming known for his Chuck Berry-inspired duckwalk during saxophone solos, notably on the raucous track "Editions of You". With his pronounced quiff, Star Trek sideburns and outlandish Motown-inspired stage costumes, Mackay made a vital contribution to the unique Roxy Music "look"—much of which functioned as a retro-futurist throwback to 1950s rock and roll performers.[5]
Yes good correction fixed. I always forget people actually marry each other, crazy shit!Dated Jagger and Murdoch? She married them both didn't she?
Science fiction images came up a lot when Roxy Music arrived on the scene. But so did images of bygone glamour. Roxy, it was observed in reviews, smashed together past and future, old and new, in a way that itself felt new... 'Late Fifties rockers who'd got mixed up with Star Trek' is how one journalist described [their] image... Their early logo... featured an old-fashioned airplane skywriting the word 'Roxy' against a stylised Manhattan skyline: the whole image evoked art deco, a style that in its own era was modernist, an early-twentieth-century celebration of streamlined technology and chrome sheen.
(from Shock & Awe)It wasn't just future and past that Roxy played havoc with. They were also a crush-collision of progressive "head" music and danceable pop, experimentalism and showbiz, abstraction and cliche, Europe and America, anti-commercial and commercial, irony and passion, effeminacy and misogyny, virtuosity and non-musician-ship.
Ferry attended the Fine Art department of Newcastle University (this was a deliberate choice to avoid the unserious slackness of art colleges, a more common destination for working-class aesthetes. Dedicating himself to elegance and taste, Ferry distanced himself from his humble background, erasing almost all traces of his Geordie accent, which would resurface only in rare moments of rage.
Raised in the rural quiet of Essex, on England's eastern coast, postman's son Brian Eno had gone to the kind of free-form art school that Ferry sniffed at
They are great. I think girlfriend has every album on vinyl here. Somewhere.....if I were forced to name an all-time favorite band, it would probably be Roxy. you've done an impressive job of mapping things out here, Gus, kudos.