Simon Reynolds book on Glam Rock my take, advice

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"Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century"

The book is not for everybody but for those who it is for it will be really for.

Reynolds books are all about the social political context of the music as much as they are about the artists so if you just want to know about the technical aspects of the music or how the bands got together and broke up you will read about those topics in the book that but a lot of stuff will bore you and if you are like me some parts I just did not get.

Like Disco later in the '70's Glam was uber extrovert/NT phenomenon, all about showing off so that will put off a lot here I think.

Reynolds has extremely broad definitions of genres that may turn some off.

If you are an Anglophile you will love it because glam was a major phenomenon in the the UK and a minor one limited to a few cities in America. The book delves deeply into British cultural precedents of glam.

If you are into the history of "gender bending" the book is for you.

As other reviewers have mentioned the book will have you going to youtube often to see bands you have not heard of in a long time or if you are American might never have heard of such as Wizzard, Mud and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

Things I learned I did not know.
Slade and T-Rex sold a lot more than Bowie in the UK in the early '70's. "T-Rextasy" was considered an equal phenomenon to Beatlemania at the time.

Now Bowie is an icon in America but in the early 70's outside of a few cities Bowie played to half full arenas and received no radio airplay.

What is called "The Counterculture" in America was called "The Underground" in the UK. The book goes heavily in that because glam was reacting against it even though most glam acts were all out hippies in the late 1960's.

Another popular term for Glam Rock in the UK at the time was "Disco Dance Music"