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April 10, 2026
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"Glam sent enough mixed messages to make a semiologist go cross-eyed. In its brash riffs and blunt beats, it revived the punch of ’50s rock ’n’ roll. It also fashioned a snide rebuke to the arty excesses of late-period psychedelia. At the same time, glam’s vocals had a fruity theatricality, supporting lyrics that presented as a boast: “Your [[mother can’t tell if you’re a boy or a girl.” Glam was butch and femme at once: bisexuality in sound."
"Even as a teenager, I sensed this was sissy minstrelsy. But that served my semi-closeted agenda just as surely as did the stars out for a headline. Better, its trendiness made my 27-inch waist, haystack shag and soft features the height of hip. In a world later made hypermasculine by hip-hop, it’s hard to fully appreciate the social power wielded by rock-star-thin pretty things in the ’70s."
"Glam fashion was an almost literal scream, an embrace of the grotesque that somehow made men dressed as space aliens the new sex symbols. It used color as a weapon against hippie drabness. At the same time, its artificiality sneered at ’60s rock sincerity. “A good lie is better than a dull truth,” Alice Cooper said at the time."
"In the UK, between the Beatles and punk, pop went totally gay. In a straight way. "Brickies in drag" and all that. , Slade, Mud,the Rubettes, , Sweet, – a true gilded age of amphetamine bubblegum. And the Americans had Kiss. Who were fun. But they weren't glam."
"… in the US charts you have to scroll down to see Sweet's not-really-all-that-glam Little Willy at No 23 to realise this is the decade hetero-pop went totally testostero-tranny (with Elton and the Bowie in supporting roles). Which is kind of odd because a lot of the Brit glam-pop classics are now piped-muzak staples at US sporting events. Not the originals, mind, but covers by an anaemic yank hair-metal band called Quite Riot. This is a huge gap in the American cultural psyche. It's like a culture not having any knowledge of Shakespeare, surrealism or post-modernism. And who knows how damaging this lack of glam has been? It probably explains why US hardcore punk was so macho, straight and boring. And why the US turned its back on gay metal (as we now know the Judas Priest S&M version to have been) and stripped the genre of all its pomp, glamour and self-mocking silliness to give us the visually dull likes of Metallica."
"Americans only got glam second hand via the posh Bowie version."
Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- Gopal Mukund Huddar
Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.