Varda the Message

Bowie's saying that the film came from a distinctly American perspective is shite. It came from a uniquely Todd Haynes perspective, that being one of queer-based retrospective glam fandom, regardless of country of origin.

However, I'd tend to agree with his saying of Britain that "glam happenned here".
OF COURSE, we had Kiss and Alice and the Dolls - preceded by the Velvet Underground period, if you will - but as you've mentioned, American glam was a whole different animal than British glam.

British glam - and here I'm talking more of Bowie and Roxy Music than I am of groups like Slade and suchlike, who were only visually derivative and stylistically derivative on specific levels - works on a much deeper level, comes from an entirely different set of sociological circumstances, and had a much clearer idea (being the brain-spawn of the 60s British art-school set) of what it was doing.

Style over subtance, and meaninglessness over meaning to the point where it became its own meaning. (I'd venture to say that British glam - in addition to borrowing more from vaudevillian tradition, androgyny, futurism, and various decadent periods of the past - was more Warholian in its underpinnings than American (mostly NYC, bien sur!) glam could ever have hoped to be.)

American glam, I think, followed a similar letter of the glam law, but not really a similar spirit. Yes, it existed, but it never caught on here in the states the way it caught on in England. To use your words again, one cannot compare a small island to a huge continental land mass, but this is true in culture as much as in size. For O! so many reasons (from the most esoteric to the most mundane) glam never had a real chance here.

If I had more time, I'd do a WAY deeper analysis here. But I don't, ah well.