ABSTRACT
This chapter presents four consecutive Snapshots highlighting four contemporary popular musics, each with its own history and development within the past few decades: country, rock and roll and rock; rap; and, most recently, world beat. Variously termed glamour rock, glimmer rock, or glitter rock, the music of Bowie and his contemporaries shared much of punk rock's minimalistic sound but contained relatively more harmonic variety, a polished musical production, and a manicured stage dress. The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, and other British groups spearheaded the punk rock movement of the late 1970s, which wasas were all previous rock movements-decidedly anti-establishment. The intentionally extreme dress and notorious behavior of punk rock groups, particularly The Sex Pistols, rendered them virtually unmarketable. Many punk rock groups viewed New Wave and hybrid styles as sanitized versions of punk, manufactured by artists who had "sold out".
