The true story of the gender-bending artists who changed rock and roll.

Simon Reynolds has been hailed as “the foremost popular music critic of this era” (Times Literary Supplement [UK]), “unassailable” (New York Times), and “the most provocative pop music writer of his generation” (Boston Globe). Now, the acclaimed author of Rip It Up and Start Again and Retromania delivers the definitive cultural history of glam and glitter rock, celebrating its outlandish fashion and outrageous stars and tracking its vibrant legacy in contemporary pop.

Reacting against the drab, denim-clad long-hair bands of the hippie era, glam rock was the first true teenage rampage of the Seventies. Pioneered by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, New York Dolls and Roxy Music, this new look and sound reveled in artifice and spectacle over earnestness and authenticity. In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds takes you on a deeply researched and wildly entertaining cultural tour through the glam explosion—a period defined by glitzy costumes and alien makeup, thrilling music, and larger-than-life personas.

Shock and Awe offers a fresh look at the glam phenomenon, placing it the context of the era’s social upheaval and political disillusion. Probing the genre’s major themes—fame, androgyny, decadence, apocalypse—Reynolds traces glam’s influence as it reverberates across subsequent decades, from art-pop aesthetes like Kate Bush, Prince and Morrissey in the Eighties to contemporary pop icons such as Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé. Shock and Awe reveals how the original glam artists’ obsessions and provocations continue to ripple through our culture today.