November 19, 2006

Hair Metal Crowned "Hair Apparent" in the Boston Globe

CULTURAL STUDIES

Hair Apparent

By James Parker | November 19, 2006

Let there be no more confusion: It's not Poodle Metal, it's not Glam Metal, and it certainly isn't Bubblegum Metal. The commercial hard rock sound that pealed across the wasteland between punk and grunge ('85 to '91, more or less), and the look that went with it, are now entering history under their proper name: Hair Metal. With the recent publication of Steven Blush's "American Hair Metal" (Feral House) we have, at last, the definitive biography of the genre -- pitch-perfect, from its trashy design (huge pictures, a spray of quotes, bite-size chunks of text) to the sardonic affection it displays for the music and its practitioners. Ten minutes to read, a lifetime to ponder.

When the Hair Metal bands materialized en masse in the mid-'80s, pouting and strangely garbed and yelling for beer, it was as if the American psyche had made an abrupt break with reality. Suddenly everyone was strutting around in skintight synthetic undergarments and singing about girls and partying: "Girls, girls, girls/ Long legs and burgundy lips/ Girls, girls, girls/ Dancin' down on the Sunset Strip/ Girls, girls, girls/ Red lips, fingertips . . ." ("Girls, Girls, Girls" by Motley Crue). Originality and authenticity were very far from the point. The posed group promo shots, of which there are plenty in Blush's book, are tableaux of fabrication: Unhandsome men, strokes of blush at their cheekbones, making sensual grimaces beneath backlit puffs of teased hair. Within the characteristic look there were, of course, sub-looks: Blush distinguishes between the "Glam" bands (Poison, Tuff) who favored women's clothing and makeup, the "Frilly" bands (Cinderella, Britny Fox) who dressed like 17th-century libertines, the "Heartthrob" bands (Winger, Bon Jovi) sporting mall fashion, and the leather-clad "Biker" bands like LA Guns. The imagery was made to be sold: Coinciding happily with the golden age of MTV, Hair Metal took over.

Like the hair, amplified and made brittle by snorts of Aquanet hairspray, the sound had a sheen and smell of artificiality: Electronically frosted vocal harmonies, a hugely fattened snare drum, guitars that chugged complacently through the verses and then reared up, for the solo, into what the critic Joe Carducci has called "frictionless whiffery." The bass lines plodded or bobbed in a genial supporting role, and the lead singer usually held forth in a thin, defiant rasp. Eschewing completely the traditional imagery of heavy metal, with its monsters and warlocks and probings of inner reality, Hair Metal bands were equally uninterested in the politics of punk rock. As Blush writes, "All discussions of previous rock/pop forms . . . posit brash young rebels against a staid musical establishment, followed by the evolution of something new in their wake. Such revolution was not the case with Hair Metal. Here was a form that was all about NOT doing something new." And yet there was something confrontational about the music: Its mixture of bombastic triviality and erotic hysteria was too heady and unstable to be wholly conservative.

Commercially, it was the genius of Hair Metal to satisfy an enormous unisex fanbase. The hard-livin' lyrics hit the mainline of American manliness, while the makeup and the vulnerably bared flesh (there were very few muscle-men in Hair Metal) made their appeal to teenage girls. And in the slobbering, brokenhearted grandeur of the power ballad -- as exemplified by, say, Cinderella's "Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone)" -- there was a total gender amnesty: Men and women could sway and sob along as one. But economically Hair Metal was always a top-down affair: Via MTV and a battery of glossy fan-mags like Rip, Hit Parader, and Circus the music industry packaged the bands and served them to their audience, who responded with the kind of fervor and shrillness that can be revoked in an instant. Hair Metal's collapse in the wake of Nirvana's 1991 breakthrough album "Nevermind" offers a sort of morality tale.

The grunge bands came up through the autonomous underground that had been built by the hardcore scene of the early '80s, and their roots in the culture were deep; Hair Metal, having bet everything on the mood swings of a fickle, insatiable demographic, evaporated. Those Hair Metallers not already incapacitated by the lifestyle were left to carve out post-fame careers in an afterworld of novelty club dates and reunion tours; where once they had ruled MTV, in garish five-minute bursts, their rise-and-fall stories now became the staple of sepia-toned VH1 biography.

The remarkable thing, listening back to the power ballads and party anthems and yodels of phallic prowess, is that so much energy and exhilaration could have been wrung out of this most limited and cynical of musical forms. The secret was, of course, that despite all the booze and the brandished gauntlets, the Hair Metal bands were not rock 'n' roll at all. They came, they exploded, they disappeared -- pure pop.

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