in History, Music | August 7th, 2026 Leave a Comment
Cast your mind back to the distant year 2021 and recall, if you will, its music, its fashions, the obsessions of its youth. This probably won’t be a difficult task, since in most respects — the dampening effects of the pandemic notwithstanding — none of those aspects of popular culture seem any different today. Yet roughly the same time span separated Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” and David Bowie’s “Starman.” 1967 was the year of the Summer of Love; by 1972, according to most reckonings, the cultural era known as the Sixties was, if not quite over, then at least clearly in its final days. The hippies were on their way down, and glam rockers had arisen to take their place with a vengeance.
In less than half an hour, the new video from Bandsplaining tells the whole story of glam rock, “the gender-bending proto-punk movement that was hated by the press and criminally underplayed in the U.S.” It begins in the 1970s, a time when the market for long-playing records was robust, but singles had fallen behind as a youth-oriented pop-cultural form.
