Exploring the History of Glam Rock
Collaboratively Investigate Theatrical Music Bands of the Seventies
The Biased History of Glam Rock, will provide structured scaffolding for your class to use when researching this once popular theatrical music genre. When Steve Pond from the band Inner City Unit , set out his website presentation about the musical genre "Glam Rock," he created a chronological table as an overview of the history of the glittery seventies rock music era.
Rise and Fall of a Musical Movement
Steve has arranged the material in a chronology of the years from 1970 to 1975. He then shows contemporary trends since this time. He has called this contemporary section 2000+. This scaffolding structure provides students with a preliminary sketch of the history of the rise and fall of the musical movement. From this overview, they can develop, contextualise and/or illustrate aspects of the phenomenon. This nicely set out material gives a flavour of how the movement started. It traces a timeline which indicates how the movement grew and shows the natural progression to a time when the movement died down.
By following the website dynamics in the way the author intended, web surfers can progressively work through the build up and decline of the movement. This creates a logical process through which students can gain an impression of what happened. Together as a class, teacher and students can locate the evolution of the genre in place, space and time. This is can be set up like a journalistic exercise that will embody their theatre course work and assessment.
Springboard For Further Investigation
Because Steve has called his web presentation “My Biased History of Glam Rock,” there is an automatic lead in for you to ask the students, "Was the presentation biased?"
If they think so, ask them to rework the material with a view to correcting the bias. If not, ask them to justify their stand.
Glam Rock Study Class Project
A suggestion about how to divide the class into groups might be to have students self select into 7 groups. Because there are 7 divisions described by Pond as important to the history of Glam Rock (one being the contemporary years), this means that in a class of 28 there could be student groups as small as 4.
Because there are three students per year, have a specific task for each student such as
- elect to investigate which groups and which music was popular that year
- study the characteristics and events that occurred within the movement at the same time
- locate resources such as music, film clips or artwork like advertisements and posters, comics or make up and costuming that accompanied them
- some students may want to create a fake time capsule
Ask each small group to present a Power Point presentation to the class flamboyantly glorifying the year studied. When students present their work, make sure that the presentations are run in chronological sequence. A comprehensive "unbiased" (pun intended) history of the era should naturally emerge.
Ensuring the Material is Relevant
To make sure that this material is relevant to the lives of the students, teachers could
- Have one group investigate what is happening in their own country with regards Glam Rock now. An example of contemporary Glam Rock is the Australian band Lord Byron. This year, (2008) Lord Byron is touring London and South East United Kingdom.
- Ask other groups to research what is happening worldwide.
- If you have a multi cultural class, perhaps students could investigate what is happening in the country of their own origin.
- Have the students evaluate Glam Rock in comparison to music from their own current favourite music genre such as Rap. They could elaborate on the differences, similarities and points of contention.
Because the original resource material is set out so well, the students should find this assignment easy to manage. The Power Point Presentation each group creates will remain a treasured resource for teaching about the investigation of a genre in your teacher's tool kit.
