Image, Presentation and Masculinity in Rock

If you were in middle or high school in the 1980s, or if like me your father raised you on all the overplayed sissy metal standards of the MTV age, then you probably grew up assuming that rock and roll had a very specific image to go along with the sounds blaring from the speakers.

It was probably something to do with groups like Bon Jovi, Whitesnake or Europe: men in leather and denim singing roughly into a microphone, feathered hair falling so far over their faces you wondered how they could even see. If you were subjected to hearing “The Final Countdown” over and over again like I was, then maybe you would get a little creative in it and throw some science fiction imagery into the scenario you were imagining to go along with the song when the video wasn’t available so you wouldn’t die of boredom. 

The 1980s radio standards are particularly slim pickings when it comes to representation of image in rock and roll, especially when you don’t get exposed to pictures of groups like Motley Crue or Twisted Sister until later in life. But even then, that image is still extremely restricted. Sure, Twisted Sister are in makeup, but it’s like seeing your grandmother get dolled up to go out for the night instead of a modern drag performance.

And sure, Motley Crue like spending their time looking like they were born and raised in a BDSM shop, spending half their lives shirtless and in eyeliner with pierced ears, and somehow came out inexplicably heterosexual, but there’s a reason you don’t get exposed to that stuff until you’re old enough to make deductions about it on your own. (Personally my family just doesn’t like Motley Crue, though I’m sure some people’s parents thought it was too inappropriate for their kids. And I don’t blame them). 

The idea of presentation, and more specifically the varieties of masculine presentation in rock and roll, is about as long-running a topic as the genre is itself once you get to the late sixties, when people–especially those pesky psychedelic groups–started experimenting more. The real meat and bones of that story still doesn’t fully pick up until the seventies, and even then the American groups were always much more hesitant to show hints of being “in touch with their feminine side” (as I’ve heard people put it). The English groups were always more open to the idea, though. And for once you can’t blame the Beatles for something.

To backtrack a little so we can gather up a better idea of what the “middle” is on this spectrum, let's take a look at some sixties mod groups. 

The masculinity in mod groups is almost entirely performance. For the early careers of groups like The Small Faces, The Who or The Kinks, they spent most of their days in sweaters or suits with short-cropped hair (which was actually considered long by some, if you can believe it!) to try and build up a respectable and modern image so they could attract the attention of the ever-important target audience: teenangers. More specifically, mods who liked R&B enough to see a group who had the gall to tag themselves with the moniker “Maximum R&B”. You can thank Kit Lambert for that one. 

As you can imagine, nowadays this image isn’t very appealing to most people. A bunch of awkward eighteen and nineteen year olds wearing blue suede suits and who looked like they cut their hair themselves in their mom’s bathroom? No thank you! But back in the sixties, the kids wanted to see themselves represented in the music they were listening to, which already had the appeal of reflecting the problems they faced, and the best way to do that was to manage to also look the part if you can’t look any cooler. And if you were a mod and the kids going to your shows were mods, then why bother to try and look different? Nevermind the fact that if you came into their pub dressed as a rocker you’d probably get your teeth kicked in. 

Like all fashion subcultures not based in anything overtly political, the mod thing worked out for a good few years until the psychedelic image emerged and the groups had to do something about it, another slightly less awkward phase, making sure the youth still saw you as someone to relate to, yada yada. What’s more interesting is what the former mod groups did in the seventies once they were left to their own devices. 

The Kinks were always the outcasts of the British invasion–it’s no wonder their choices in fashion reflected that. 

Photo by Jorgen Angel/Redferns

By the 70s, everyone’s hair had grown out and they’d moved on from the matching suits to the more typical manners of dress associated with men’s fashion of the time. They never really dressed like tried and true rockstars, though. They still always seemed to dress like they were trying to be a league above the rest, like they had to prove something–formal attire never leaving their wardrobes except for the occasional stints of costuming. Even once they’d fallen out of favor with the mainstream, there was always somebody to impress. An entirely ceremonial presentation of masculinity that would’ve made more sense anywhere else but on the live stage. They’re trying so hard to look dignified, to win the attention back, that it’s almost emasculating to witness. 

Ray Davies’ presentation in particular, especially during their concept album phase in the middle of the decade, was odd. He was obviously the most flamboyant member of the group (just take a look at any of their seventies shows), though there was always a bit of a dangerous edge around it. A very dedicated follower of fashion with upper-class operatic overtones and an honestly self-important, congratulating air. He doesn’t present himself as down to earth because he doesn’t want to be. He doesn’t present himself as down to earth because he does not want to relate to you, the viewer. He is the singer in a professional group of musicians with full brass and vocal backing, and you are just a voyeur who happened to snag themselves a ticket. 

The Kinks as a group could no longer relate to the young adult male audience they had cultivated, so they no longer tried looking like them. They had to look above them, presenting themselves as serious men with serious careers. They’ve tried to build up the masculine image of the fifties singers in suits so much to the point it circles back to being feminine (not to mention the vaudevillian costuming–we all know our stereotypes about men in theatre). The frontmen of The Who were almost the complete opposite. 

I wouldn’t call The Who butch. I would hesitate to even call them rugged. But there was definitely something there. 

Photo by Jim Summaria

If the kids going to their shows weren’t already looking up to Keith Moon, who on stage was the perfect embodiment of the hyperactive teenage boy, then Roger Daltrey was certainly filling the niche in their lives where a strong masculine presence was so desperately needed. He still dressed enough like his audience enough to relate to them but presented himself with enough bravado to still command respect out of them. However, unlike the deadbeat dads of the ‘70s, Roger Daltrey wasn’t going to up and disappear or shun you for not being tuff enough. How could he, when he was up on that stage singing teenage laments penned by Pete Townshend every night? 

Half the songs on Quadrophenia alone have something to do with the experience of dealing with teenage masculinity and what was expected of young men of the time, whether it be not seeing why you should keep with fashions, be a fighter and not a lover, or complaints about being misunderstood by your parents. Of the members of The Who, Roger Daltrey was the perfect older brother for the audience to project onto while still seeing him as larger than life. 

The Who are the epitome of a perfect teenage band. Easily relatable songs that you never could have dreamed of writing, sung to you by a man with hair as long as yours clad in dirty denims and t-shirts as opposed to some of the more out-there fashion choices in rock that were being made at the time.

Daltrey, and by extension the rest of the band, were down to earth and real. Townshend wasn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve in his writing, on occasion even getting downright dysphoric (see “I’m A Boy” or, in a slightly more abstract sense, “The Punk and The Godfather”) and Daltrey was there to carry those lyrics of discomfort and longing home. The patron saint of the disillusioned teenage male, I think it would be hard not to see yourself in any of their songs.

Finally (for the mods), we have The Small Faces. More specifically we will be focusing on Steve Marriott for this one, as when the leftovers of the band transformed into The Faces after he left, they primarily just adopted Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood’s styles. 

Steve Marriott was the closest thing to a redneck that England had, seconded only by Status Quo. The moment he finally freed himself from the restrictions the reputation of being in The Small Faces, a pretty straightforward pop group, brought him, he did a complete 180 in the direction of every guitarist’s favorite genre, the blues. 

Photo by Michael Ochs

Humble Pie was the first step in that direction, and they only got heavier as their albums went on, even throwing in some dashes of soul music for good measure once Peter Frampton was out of the band. All the hallmarks of good ol’ down ‘n dirty blues music materialized now that all the suits and pressed shirts could finally be thrown in the gutter, and that continued into his solo career (not that Marriott wasn’t making an effort to change his image before this).

Double denim (of course), t-shirts, tank tops, overalls and flannel, the occasional necklace, and alternations between having long hair or a buzz cut. Keeping your hair short for any length of time as a rock and roller, especially as such a blues purist in the 70s, was probably the closest anybody was going to get to being butch. And I would say that Marriott was rather rugged–even fellow bluesers Status Quo never bothered to have short hair. 

This new image of playing up such a pure, traditional standard of masculinity feels like a knee-jerk, reactionary rejection to the emasculation that came with having to dress as a pretty-boy at times instead of genuine self-expression. I guess you can only play it so straight for so long before it gets so constrictive that even the push-back feels over the top.

Even the light blues artists of the time, like Alexis Korner and John Mayall, weren’t dressing themselves so seriously. The blues of Korner and Mayall were slow and reflective, Marriott’s blues were high-speed and impulsive, and that is reflected in their manners of dress. While Korner and Mayall were dressed down like any self-respecting blues musician would be, Marriott looks like the overly aggressive country type who wouldn’t hesitate to punch you in the jaw if you even insinuated he was anything but 100% man, anything but real rough and tumble.

As the complete opposite of the heavily embraced austerity of the blues men, we have the heavily embraced effete dressings of the 70s glam groups. Finally, we can talk about some Americans. 

Glam rock did start in England, and the English perfected it. The images associated with that of glam rock–glitter, makeup, satin and heels–never kicked off in America, because androgyny in presentation has never been nearly as accepted here as it has been in England.

In America, androgyny had to implicate homosexuality, and homosexuality had to implicate sin and the unknown, and sin and the unknown had to implicate fear in the American public. American culture, especially down south, has had such a tight set of rules in relation to what kinds of presentation are acceptable for which gender, and glam rock broke down those barriers in such a way that was it’s own worst enemy, cause some damn good bands never got the chance to break through the mainstream until long after their demise. 

The glam scene in America was primarily concentrated in New York. The most well-known example of American glam rock has to be Lou Reed, who had a history of hanging around the rejects and outcasts of the city, which definitely absorbed into his lyrics and his image.

Aviator sunglasses, short, occasionally bleach-blonde hair, painted nails, leather and denim and t-shirts, oh my! And, of course, to top it all off, an incorrigible and intolerable personality and heroin addiction (Lou Reed and the reasons for his behavior are obviously much more complicated than this, but for that I would recommend looking into actual books about the man as I cannot cover all of it here). 

What about any of this specifically is glam, I cannot explain to you. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that Reed dresses himself like an amateur leather queen with too stuck-up an attitude to suck it up and actually go down to the bar for once, at least. His image, like Steve Marriott’s, also feels like a rejection of sorts, normality forced so well that it actually makes Reed stand out more. He looks more like Hunter S. Thompson than any of his contemporaries–such as, say, The New York Dolls. 

Photo by Chris Walter

The New York Dolls are the prime example of why America was never going to get used to the idea of glam rock. The way they presented and costumed themselves was on par with drag, and if their outrageous fashion statements weren’t off-putting enough, then David Johansen’s dog-bite of a voice would certainly do the trick.

This is camp to the nth degree, from the posturing, to the runny makeup, to the skin-tight cut-off clothes, to the leather and the jewelry and the frontmanship comparable to female hysteria. As far as I’m aware none of the members of The New York Dolls ended up being gay, which has to be one of the biggest surprises of the century. 

It’s a wonder this group ever attracted a crowd at all, in my opinion. Especially considering that none of the members are particularly good looking. They’re a damn good band, but their niche is so specific and their fashion choices so garish and gauche that, if I was a self-respecting New York citizen in the 70s and I walked into Max’s Kansas City just to see that, I would probably walk right back out.

It’s an acquired taste, The New York Dolls. They constantly look exhausted, like walking two more feet in those heels will cause them to keel over and die, and though they are certainly entertaining to watch, they seem like they’re perpetually balancing on the edge of Blanche DuBois-type insanity and neuroticism–if you get too close, you just might catch it. (A good example of that would be their live performance of Personality Crisis on The Midnight Special, which is on Youtube. What is particularly funny is how terrified some members of the audience look).

Plenty of glam bands from the New York area have similar images. What better way was there to convey to people that what you were doing was different then to dress like a 1920s starlette on crack?

The Dolls influence can be seen on a good few other glam groups who are also considered proto-punk, such as The Hollywood Brats (most famous for doing a cover of The Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” without gender-swapping the lyrics), The Harlots of 42nd Street, whose most popular song is about s&m (because of course it is), and off-shoot bands such as The Brats, among others. Of course though, the most prime example of glam rock fashions (besides Marc Bolan, who was a bit more casual) is David Bowie. 

Photo by Getty Images

How does one even explain David Bowie’s presentation of himself in the early seventies? I’m tempted to use the term “out-of-this-world”, despite the fact it’s incredibly cliche. Of course, many of the varieties of masculinity Bowie presented himself in were just put-ons for the characters he was playing at the time, and god knows how many of those he went through, so for this we’ll be sticking to Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane (especially since The Thin White Duke is a whole other mess). 

Of course, David Bowie never got anything first. The glam images were, at least originally, lifted from Marc Bolan, just as the ‘80s suit and tie thing was probably lifted from Bryan Ferry. But unlike with suit and tie clean cut classiness, there is much more you can do with glam. Bowie took what Bolan had started and ran to the hills with it, with his stage costumes going far beyond the limits of vaudeville and pantomime, instead becoming some sort of bisexual exhibitionism burlesque/cabaret thing to immerse the viewer. I’m sure some of that was the cocaine, though.

Either way, Bowie’s entire stage image was built up around being a genderless alien among humans, androgyny pushed to its furthest reaches before it circled back into drag like it did with the American groups. Bowie’s characters, though with all their own distinct songs and histories, were something for the viewer to project whatever you wanted onto them. If you wanted Bowie to be a woman, you could imagine that. If you want Bowie to be nothing at all, he could be that, too. You can be anything with enough makeup. 

The afterglow of this stuck around for a long time afterwards, even in straight man garb in the late 70s and 80s, the residue of the etherealness and otherworldliness of the characters of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane was hard to ignore. At the end of the day for Bowie, rock and roll was a show to be put on, a three-act play to be wrapped up after a year or so. Even when the characters became so ingrained in the man behind them that you couldn’t tell the difference anymore, Bowie had the power to do something none of us can. He could move on. 

Taking a step even further to just how weird presentation can get in rock and roll when you simply don’t care what other people think about you (even in your own band), we have whatever the hell Peter Gabriel was doing in the mid 70s. 

Photo by Andre Csillag/REX

If, like me, your introduction to Peter Gabriel was your father forcing you to listen to “Sledgehammer”, “In Your Eyes” and “Solsbury Hill” every time the songs came on the radio, which always seemed to be more frequent the more you detested them, then Peter Gabriel probably didn’t seem to be anything special. A standard division of ‘80s power pop rock that wasn’t nearly as engaging or dangerous-sounding as the plethora of other songs that the disc jockeys could’ve been choosing from. Peter Gabriel wasn’t something to give any second thought to, and as someone who can stand neither his solo music nor the majority of his work with Genesis, I still stand by that opinion. 

Based on his album covers from the 80s, the assumption that there’s not much to this man’s music or presentation would carry over. The only ones I ever saw consistently were the car and the cover for So, which doesn’t leave much room for imagination when trying to predict what the rest of his songs must sound like. He just looks…boring. If you tried to get me to point 80s Peter Gabriel out in a crowd, I probably couldn’t do it. Only once I was trying to figure out which songs from that same decade were Phil Collins solo or actual Genesis songs did I find out there used to be something under that yuppie veneer. 

Peter Gabriel was a show man, to put it simply. An eccentric, in an off putting way. I don’t know if I would go so far as to call him a visionary, as I do not know enough about Genesis’ history to determine if that is an accurate statement and I’m not curious enough about it to find out. There are relatively few pictures of Peter Gabriel where he looks normal, and those are primarily restricted to the first couple of years of the decade. His stage presence is relegated off to the side, extremely self-consciously for a rock performer, though for a prog rock performer it isn’t entirely out of the ordinary. But then you get to the costumes. 

Most of the most iconic songs Genesis made in the 70s were epics over ten minutes long–typical prog stuff. And, for whatever reason, Gabriel got it in his head that dressing up as the characters from his songs and prancing about on the stage like some kind of fae was a good idea. And for some reason, that worked. For some goddamn reason, that seems to have given him much more confidence on the stage than just standing off to the side hiding behind long hair and a flute ever did. It’s almost menacing how much more confident he seems. 

The most entertaining thing about this is how painfully normal the other members of Genesis are next to this man who spent most of his time in a partially shaved head and a full face of makeup. Imagine trying to take your job seriously performing twenty minute long songs to an adoring audience, and your lead singer walks out on stage dressed up as a flower, or as a fox in a red dress! It’s absolutely absurd the dichotomy between Gabriel and the rest of the band for the time he was in it, seeing as they’re all dressed up like self-respecting regular citizens, and it’s even more absurd that he seemed to have just dropped all of this the moment he left the band.

Photo by Michael Putland

Unfortunately, us Americans don’t have anything to offer in terms of pushing weirdness to its limits. The closest we can get to that is Sparks, and most of their idiosyncrasies are in their music as opposed to their presentations of their masculinity, which is mostly a put-on. Andy Warhol pop art dressings contrasted against a man in middle aged accountant drag. Pretty simplistic and much more effective if you’re familiar with what any of their songs sound like. Most of what takes up the American music industry are a bunch of normal people, like The Band or The Eagles. 

Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

The Band are drab, dreary and look to take themselves entirely too seriously for their music to be worth listening to. Squares. They are so ruggedly masculine that it’s a repellent–they are unwelcoming, dirty Americana boys who dress like they want to be homeless or blue collar workers on their last legs the moment this music thing starts working out. This explains why I never appreciated them for what they were until I finally watched Easy Rider and started listening to “The Weight” religiously, and until after Robbie Robertson died. 

Photo by Henry Diltz

The Eagles aren’t that much different. Fully grown men perpetually stuck in the glory of their highschool football days who still view women as more of a commodity then actual people, men who look like if you went to college with them they’d never go to class, spend all their time at frat parties, and would still think bullying people made them cool. The straightest edged band California ever had to offer, who missed out on the psychedelic era but probably wouldn’t’ve taken part in the fun anyways. Jocks who took PE class too seriously. One of the most stereotypical presentations of masculinity available, they wouldn’t try to have more style even if they knew how. They feel more like the late 80s early 90s ideal of a popular high schooler than real rock stars. 

Photo by Fin Costello

In the 80s, all the hallmarks of whatever the Eagles were doing was amplified and took a turn for the worse, which is how we ended up with bands such as the ones mentioned back at the beginning of this escape. Casual clothes switched out for flashiness, but not the effeminate kind demonstrated by the glam groups. Hair was long, but in a distinctly butch manner, and the centerpiece of every single song had to be a guitar, no exceptions. Simplistic lyrics where most of the stories being told were just about shameless sexualization and objectification of women instead of something with any substance. 

MTV certainly didn’t help in letting rock retain any of the variety it once had, as it pushed all these pseudo-expressive bands to the forefront and barely gave anybody else any room to breathe. MTV killed everything that didn’t fit into its neat little program box that was divided up between new wavers such as The Cars, glam metal phonies like Van Halen, or suburban-dad-still-trying-to-look-cool singers like post-Eagles Don Henley or John Mellencamp. MTV strangled rock and roll and ruined everything we loved about it, including the ability to see facets of ourselves represented in a variety of different ways as opposed to the three streamlined types of masculinity that were deemed acceptable and subsequently force-fed to the public. 

Rock and roll was my first introduction to the idea that gender was whatever you wanted it to be, and that the cards you were dealt weren’t always so bad. It opened the gateways for new modes of self-expression that we haven’t had the privilege of seeing in popular music since. Rock was a way for people to break barriers and opened up the idea of gender nonconformity for everday people; it was at its heart one of the most glorious forms of expression, it normalized the notion that presentation wasn’t fixed, that it could be fluid. Through all the good, the bad, the ugly and the questionable, rock was another step towards liberation until it was restricted and sterilized.