Children of the Revolution: Bolan, Bowie and the Carnivalesque

David Bowie;Marc Bolan;glam rock;rock music;popular music;carnivalesque;Bakhtin;1970s

Blair, Alison ; Overell, Rosemary ; Nicholls, Brett

University of Otago

关键词: David Bowie;    Marc Bolan;    glam rock;    rock music;    popular music;    carnivalesque;    Bakhtin;    1970s;   

Others  :  https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/bitstream/10523/7067/1/BlairAlison2016MA.pdf

美国|英语

来源: Otago University Research Archive

【 摘 要 】

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-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.