January 17, 2007

Hair Metal review in The Eye Weekly!

http://www.eyeweekly.com/eye/issue/issue_01.11.07/arts/books.php

Books
Battle of the bulges

BY BRIAN JOSEPH DAVIS

Do the words Ratt, Stryper, Tuff and Enuff Z'Nuff strike you as misspelled or do they, you know, like, rock you? With two-devil-horns-in-the-air-earnestness, music historian Steven Blush announces his non-ironic love for the most popularly reviled music ever: American Hair Metal (Feral House, 180 pages, $26.75).

Resolutely, this is not a critical history. To thoroughly untangle hair metal would be to get at the insecure heart of pop identity. What, after all, brought the radical gestures of androgynous '70s glam rock (teased hair, eyeliner, indifference to mismatched animal prints - all heisted from Charles Ludham's avant-drag theatre) to every hopeless town, not as something that disrupted masculinity but reinforced its most misogynist traits?

Providing a simple timeline, definitions and reproducing bust-a-gut-funny photographs and dozens of disturbing period quotes, Blush's hands-off approach may actually be more informative in the end. It allows us to edge safely to the back of the heavy-metal parking lot and observe what happens when drunk idiots with a fragile zeitgeist are let loose. "Someday we'll be known as one of the biggest bands in the world," said Tony Harnell of TNT in a moment of wonderfully misfired prophecy. Perhaps he was competing with the equally psychic Kip Winger who declared, "I can see us over a long period of time being like Queen." And Sebastian Bach brings it all home with the quote of the book, "Puking is the second best release to orgasm. I dig it. When I puke, it's totally righteous."

Hair metal arrived and left quickly, leaving no immediate heirs - though nü -metal is a contender, and those emo kids are using way too much moulding mud - and was ahistorical in its forced stupidity and swagger. Rock had already grown up (Bob Dylan) and died (Sex Pistols) long before. Any attempt to reconstruct rock's mirror stage was bound to be as hollow and as untenable as hair metal, the all-pervading sonic wallpaper of North America circa 1987-1989, turned out to be.

Blush's slim accompanying words aren't as uncritical as his introduction hints. A chart illustrating Nikki Sixx's heroin addiction denials versus admissions, letters and drawings from fans and the author's own description of the music as pure conservatism (borne out by the common hair farmer post-fame fate of adult contemporary and new country) reveal a dollop of schadenfreude at the heart of Blush's power ballad. Every rose does have its thorn.

EMAIL LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM

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