Covering four decades of music history, this engaging book explores a genre of pop music that has been overlooked, under-reported, and ineffectively characterized—but which nevertheless remains immensely popular. The very qualities that made glam unusual and undervalued are now being reintroduced into our culture through video, music, and cyber and computer mediums, while artists such as Lady Gaga have made glam popular once more. Carefully explaining this misunderstood genre, The Twisted Tale of Glam Rock explores glam's attraction and the reasons it has endured. With the help of copious examples, the book covers the style from the pre-glam British invasion of 1964-69 through the classical glam era (1970-75); the metamorphosis into glam goth, glam metal, and glam new-romanticism (1976-90); and the style's reemergence (1990-present). It provides a theoretical basis for musicians' attraction to this highly visual and theatrical form of pop music and sets glam in a historical context, following the format through MTV, videos, and vibrant stage and theatre presentations. Finally, the book explores the hybridization of glam with other styles, illustrating how the genre has progressively reemerged as a premier form of performance pop.

How do reality television programs shape our view of the world and what we perceive as real and normal? This book explores the bizarre and highly controversial world of reality television, including its early history, wide variety of subject matter, and social implications. In recent decades, reality television shows ranging from Keeping up with the Kardashians to Duck Dynasty have become increasingly popular. Why are these "unscripted" programs irresistible to millions of viewers? And what does the nearly universal success of reality shows say about American culture? This book covers more than 100 major and influential reality programs past and present, discussing the origins and past of reality programming, the contemporary social and economic conditions that led to the rise of reality shows, and the ways in which the most successful shows achieve popularity with both male and female demographics or appeal to specific, targeted niche audiences. The text addresses reality TV within five, easy-to-identify content categories: competition shows, relationship/love-interest shows, real people or alternative lifestyle and culture shows, transformation shows, and international programming. By examining modern reality television, a topic of great interest for a wide variety of readers, this book also discusses cultural and social norms in the United States, including materialism, unrealistic beauty ideals, gender roles and stereotypes in society, dynamics of personal relationships, teenage lifestyles and issues, and the branding of people for financial gain and wider viewership.

The Many Lives of Andy Warhol is more than a biography: it's a look into Warhol's greatest creation: himself. Warhol was known as the king of pop art, but the famous artist was secretly never satisfied with a single style and his journey took him from graphic designs of shoes, women's fashions and glamour magazines to owning and publishing his own film and gossip magazine, Interview. Stuart Lenig takes us behind the scenes to explore Warhol's many innovations in the art world. Warhol was a titanic technician, making art from new techniques. His designs for Glamour and Vogue used a innovative blotted line technique for drawing and blotting the illustrations to make them appear printed. He turned common shoe designs into whimsical graphics. Warhol liked to shock people with images of death. Warhol caused a stir by making prints of a recently deceased Marilyn Monroe. He startled spectators with a paintings of a headline: "129 die in Jet." Works that span Warhol's entire career are discussed here alongside the continuing influence of diverse styles and forms that inspired them. He bought and collected antiques, classic Americana, camp and kitsch, primitive objects, and Native textiles. He was highly eclectic and saw nothing wrong with mixing and merging different historical styles. He blended Dada, Minimalism, Rococo, and Surrealism with abandon and finess. An introduction and ten chapters take readers through studies of the many lives of the artist as a performer, director, writer, technologist, printmaker, caricaturist, and critic of the art scene. In Warhol's work we learn that the importance of the ancient and the contemporary form guided his renderings of the human form and his insights into contemporary society. He constantly reinvented and transformed his own language of signs. With lush descriptions and images,. The Many Lives of Andy Warhol reveals Warhol's life and art in new ways provides exceptional insights into the artist at work.