1.

IN THE BEGINNING, there was the drum. The Original Skin. A love heard beyond the serpent Garden. A togetherness

covering impossible distance. A hundred-mile heartbeat. A hand striking up against the hide of something recently alive. A hand talking or singing some life-or-death message. With a drum. “Meet us at this place and here is what we’ll do.”

“Food is here.” “Water is there.” “God is here.” “The enemy is there.” “Tonight we go to the other world.” “Tomorrow we

come home.”

But there were closer distances, too. Way closer. Distances inside. Neighbors crowding shoulder to shoulder with their hands pushing words and music from skins stretched over

carved shells: “Move this way.” “Sing this, then jerk yourself like lightning, then sing that.” “Close your eyes and climb this

beat.” “Play this one of the 12 parts and be in harmony.”

The Gospel According to

GlitterHow glitter helped bring about

music as we know it by Bruce A. Jacobs

2.BUT IT CAME TO PASS THAT THE SLAVERS ARRIVED and joined with others in treach-ery. They dragged the drummers and singers and sayers in floating slime boxes through the ocean. The survivors of the ships and the chains hid the drum, guarded it. The drum was officially illegal. Punishable by lashes or death. To the slavers it was dangerous: the voice of too many memories, the telegraph of too many revolts that awoke slaves to march plantation to plantation and to kill white peo-ple as the drums barked orders. And so it was the drum was illegal but it hid and it lived. In holiness churches and in juke joints, in fire-lit clearings in the woods, on hand-hewn porch-es on delta nights too hot for any kind of lie.

3.AND THEN THERE CAME the drum-and-bone march of the truthsingers: Robert Johnson with his crossroads devil deal and his death from poisoned liquor; Son House riding his guitar strings like a freight train and calling out towns by name; Bessie Smith shaking the landscape with her Blues That Ate St. Louis; El-more James and Little Walter and Muddy Wa-ters and Riley B.B. King and Etta James; Dinah Washington singing “Send Me to the Electric Chair;” Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker and Bobby Blue Bland and Ruth Brown and Koko Taylor; Albert Collins plucking ice with a Fend-er Telecaster; Buddy Guy setting a match to a blue city stacked with guitars; Chuck Berry walking his oiled duck like a pied piper with trouble in mind.

4.AND THEN THERE CAME LITTLE RICHARD. Singing Good Golly with his headband and his sweeping cape and his orgasmic keyboard staccato like Stravinsky with a bulge in his pants. And there was Jerry Lee Lewis mar-rying his cousin all over the pounded white and black keys, and Bill Haley and the Comets shooting off about Rocking Around the Clock. And then there was Elvis. And there was El-vis. And there was Elvis. And then there was James Brown in a cold sweat, singing “I don’t care/about your thoughts/I just want/to sat-isfy your wants,” James Brown on his knees onstage like a butcher-shop saint as he sliced his way through the fatback moves of invent-ing funk. And then the arena broke wide open with the flood: The Rolling Stones naming themselves after a Muddy Waters song, Stevie Winwood giving the phrase “blue-eyed soul” a reason to exist, The Young Rascals, Led Zep-pelin taking Robert Johnson up two octaves and keeping the royalties; Sun Ra; Jimi Hen-drix; the Beatles; Jefferson Airplane; Sly & the Family Stone; Grand Funk Railroad; Cher; Ro-tary Connection; Dr. John the Night Tripper; Liberace; Deep Purple; Elton John; T. Rex; The Pointer Sisters; ZZ Top; Kool and the Gang; Black Sabbath; Mandrill; Blue Oyster Cult; Ru-fus; Earth, Wind and Fire; Ohio Players; Parlia-ment Funkadelic; Rush; Yes; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Rick James, Lou Reed; Foreigner; Isaac Hayes; David Bowie; Tina Turner; Styx; Ozzie Osbourne; Boston; Kiss; Be-Bop Deluxe; Ma-donna; Michael Jackson; Prince; Culture Club; Genesis; Sade; Motley Crue; Journey; Whitney Houston; Jill Scott; and on and on, a sizzling fuse winding its way to Mariah Carey and Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings and a trail of upcoming voices growing nearer that we cannot yet hear.

5.AND THE MUSIC SAID, “THERE MUST BE GLIT-TER TO FILL THE BLINDINGLY BLUE SPACES BE-TWEEN THESE MAGICS.” AND SO THERE WAS.

Glitter is the wonder rain. Glitter is the cosmic shininess of everything that burns brighter than life. Glitter is the shimmering promise that there is something more. Glitter is the flecky fragments of heaven that whirl down around our earthbound bodies in stadiums and music halls where we come to be taken.

Glitter is Lou Reed dolled up like some Junkie Barbie as he and his band wailed “Heroin” at those of us who lacked the will to surrender.

Glitter is Little Richard wearing raw sex onstage as if it were mere body makeup, and tossing his coiffed hair with a “WHOOOooooOOOOoooo!” as if he were surprised at how 1950s white kids raised in picket-fence jails were so ready for the addiction.

Glitter is Elvis. Elvis, the man whom Mark Crispin Miller wrote “was the first person in America to get a hysterical white mob to ap-proach a black phenomenon without violating the Bill of Rights.” Elvis taking the stage as a shining apparition, a glowing ghost thrusting himself pelvis-first through what had been the wall between black music made for black peo-ple and white music made for white people.

Glitter is ex-paratrooper James Marshall Hen-drix becoming, like his jazz predecessor Sun Ra, a messenger from Saturn.

Glitter is David Bowie re-igniting his career as

a sci-fi traveler who made the fiery line be-tween manhood and womanhood invisible.

Glitter is Liberace wearing a thousand sequins and flashing ten rings on his fingers through a neon-dream rendering of Rachmaninov.

Glitter is Whitney Houston appearing as a dis-tant 3-octave flaming goddess to fans a 200 rows back in a rock arena.

Glitter is James Brown shrugging off the shin-ing cape again and again after each collapse onstage, rising from Death By Funk to scream it one last time and then one last time again, while his trembling minions shake their heads in pantomime as if to say, “No, James, no, you cannot do any more of this tonight, the uni-verse will not allow it.”

6.THE HISTORICAL RECORD ON GLITTER, we are told, is that it has been with us since the use of mica flakes in cave paintings in 40,000 B.C., and that, more recently, glitter was industri-ally invented in 1934 by a New Jersey machin-ist named Henry Ruschmann, who found a way to create mass quantities of glitter from ground-up plastics.

But this we know in our gut: Glitter is the glue that holds us to the unreal. Glitter is the atmo-sphere that showers us with the impossible. Without it, The Show could never, ever be The Show.

Without glitter, Little Richard would have stood in the spotlight in a dark suit looking like something

less than a god. Which is not possible.

Without glitter, Little Richard would have stood in the spot-light in a dark suit or some improvised drapecloth and sung in falsetto looking like something less than a god. Which is not possible.

Without glitter, Etta James would have, yes, still strutted on-stage and shaken it and shouted it — but without blinding you with her glare. How could you possibly watch Etta sing “I’d Rather Go Blind” while still being able to see your hand in front of your face? It could not be done.

Without glitter, Bette Midler’s mirror-scaled mermaid sheath would have left her tubed like a dull sausage.

Without glitter, James Brown would still have been the Hard-est-Working Man in Show Business, Mr. Dynamite, Soul Broth-er Number One, The Godfather. But he would have LOOKED LIKE A MERE MORTAL. And this could not be.

Without glitter, you could stand and booty-boogie to Bootsy Collins or George Clinton — but not feel any need to wear out-rageous sunglasses. And what is the point in that?

Without glitter, an entire generation, maybe two or three gen-erations, of musical spectacle — from Little Richard to Elvis to the Isley Brothers to Sly and the Family Stone to Santana to Joan Jett to Patti Labelle to Cyndi Lauper to the B-52s to Usher to Kanye West to Queen Latifah — would be stranded without its angel dust, stripped of its magical display, a dream ship run aground in a golden river.

7.BUT LUCKILY, it did not go that way. The music came, and the music said, “Let there be glitter.” And there was glitter.

And it was good.