Interlude: Pomp Rock (Glam's Legitimate Child)

By the mid-seventies, the world was becoming a more difficult place economically, and as the promise of the Age of Aquarius seemed to slip away, young people back then dealt with worsening hopes principally in one of two possible ways: with rugged optimism or with angry disgust. These attitudes fed two different emergent forms in rock music: punk and pomp. Punk rebuked the jam-oriented rock of the hippie culture and pissed on the Romanticism of glam rock. Punk could express itself with righteous frustration (e.g., The Clash), or with gratuitous nihilism (e.g., The Sex Pistols). Punk was also anti-any-form-of-musical-sophistication-or-skilled-performance (i.e, "keep it simple stupid"). Pomp Rock was an altogether different animal. Pomp married traditions of glam with the more intense forms of hard rock as it had evolved in the seventies from blues-inflected-jam-rock to muscular testosterone-fueled riffing, sometimes disparagingly called "cock rock." An extreme form of hard rock included ghastly-dramatic stage performances (e.g., Alice Cooper). A pomp group that partook of this blood-thirsty side of hard rock and merged it with glam was Kiss, which had science-fictional glam-styled costumes and painted on clown-fashion various forms of demonic or animal-like make-up, but the group otherwise made music in a recognizably intensified glam style rather than being heavy metal, as one might have mistakenly expected from their fearsome look. Overall these factors made Kiss somewhat of hybrid in terms of the attitudes it fed. But of the many pomp groups of the late seventies (most of whom thrived particularly in America, whatever their country of origin), there is one that took a happier side of the glam tradition for its inspirations and did it excellently well. This was Queen. The proof of their quality over others of their kind was their durability. While other pomp rock groups hit destructive reefs on the shores of the '80s with the onset of the New Wave movement, Queen carried the banner of pumped-up glam with honor and vigor well into the middle of that decade. Queen was a group with so much talent, inventiveness, beauty of song, excitement of the senses and unflagging energy to match, that one is struck with wonder at the heights of musical experience they so singularly achieved and created. They were operatic, rock-and-rolling, richly melodious, vocally harmonic, instrumentally dynamic and Freddie Mercury's vocals commanded your passion. They were so extraordinary in the enthusiasm they could create that they seemed sprung from the forehead of Dionysus! Glam did not go out with a whimper but with a bang!