Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and It’s Legacy from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century

Simon Reynolds. 2016. Dey St. New York.

Central to mime is the idea of the mask: the feature-flattening white greasepaint serves to depersonalise, creating a blank canvas on which stylised expressions are depicted, according to a universal and timeless grammar of emotion. Descending from medieval dumbshow, mummers and masques, paralleling Japanese forms like Noh and Kabuki, and seeping into twentieth-century popular culture with tragicomic silent-movie stars like Buster Keaton, mime is all about escaping one’s actual self and donning the costume of a persona. Mime is theatre in its most pure and distilled form. The Germans have a words for it: ‘Maskenfreiheit’, ‘freedom in wearing masks’. This release - from the burden and challenge of having to represent his true self onstage - would be crucial for Bowie going forward. (89-90)