Acts historically categorised as glam rock include Roxy Music and Brian Eno, among others. However, for would-be contemporary music historians some difficulty lies in applying proper definitive terms to some of them, as many of the artists, thankfully, produced work that was difficult to pigeon-hole for the convenience of the historians. What their respective bodies of work did do was pave the way for a genre, namely punk, that would be dirtier, more stripped down and more critical of society than were the good-timers of the glam rock movement.
It was this collection of divergent-but-similar styles popular in the first half of the 70s that would come to be called protopunk. Primary among them were glam rock and progressive, or prog, rock.
As one source reports: '[Protopunk] was never a cohesive movement, nor was there a readily identifiable proto-punk sound that made its artists seem related at the time. What ties proto-punk together is a certain provocative sensibility that didn't fit the prevailing counterculture of the time ... It was consciously subversive and fully aware of its outsider status ...It also frequently dealt with taboo subject matter, depicting society's grimy underbelly in great detail, and venting alienation that was more intense and personal than ever before.'
In other words, the songs of rebellion and alienation written and performed by the likes of Marc Bolan and David Bowie represented a point on the time-line of rock and roll itself, a point that would naturally give way to more extreme and in your face expressions by up-and-coming singers and songwriters. Much as glam rock was the same-but-different from the earliest rockers, so would punk rock take the rebellion of glam rock that one step further.
It was this collection of divergent-but-similar styles popular in the first half of the 70s that would come to be called protopunk. Primary among them were glam rock and progressive, or prog, rock.
As one source reports: '[Protopunk] was never a cohesive movement, nor was there a readily identifiable proto-punk sound that made its artists seem related at the time. What ties proto-punk together is a certain provocative sensibility that didn't fit the prevailing counterculture of the time ... It was consciously subversive and fully aware of its outsider status ...It also frequently dealt with taboo subject matter, depicting society's grimy underbelly in great detail, and venting alienation that was more intense and personal than ever before.'
In other words, the songs of rebellion and alienation written and performed by the likes of Marc Bolan and David Bowie represented a point on the time-line of rock and roll itself, a point that would naturally give way to more extreme and in your face expressions by up-and-coming singers and songwriters. Much as glam rock was the same-but-different from the earliest rockers, so would punk rock take the rebellion of glam rock that one step further.