Here goes:
A Short History of Metal, Part Two (for real this time)
Consider General Ambrose Burnside: general, inventor, gun nut. Well liked in his day, Burnside is remembered as a somewhat inept Civil War General, known most for his bumbling failure at Fredericksburg and his frothingly patriotic "General Order Number 38," which made it a criminal act to express any opposition to the war. His postbellum life is marked by his invention and patent of the Burnside carbine, a device that prevented hot gas from leaking from a rifle (presumably a really good idea), and was tapped to be the first president of the N.R.A. And yet, despite a military career that can be best described as "goobery" and a postbellum career that positioned him as the Original Gangsta Charlton Heston, Burnside is largely forgotten by all but a handful of bespectacled scholars and hyper-sensitive re-creationist nutjobs.
Or so you think.
Because, for all he accomplished in life, and there's plenty not included above, mind you, Burnside is known to every living American because of his hair.
See, Burnside had sideburns. Or, rather, sideburns had Burnside. The man had muttonchops so massive, so resplendent, so utterly sasquatchian that an entire facial hairstyle was named after him.* If sideburns were people, Burnside's would have been the love-child of Goliath and Edward Gorey. While lesser men got morsels of soup stuck to their beard, entire sub-species of rodentia evolved in Burnside's muttonchops. And, though the magnificence of Burnside's sideburns can hardly be undersold, there's a certain sadness to the reason for his fame: here was a man who improved the rifle, who presided over a massively important American society, who fought valiantly (though poorly) for his country, and he's remembered for what?
Looking like a dumbass.
Which brings us to Glam Metal. See, like Burnside, Glam Metal had definable successes: taking metal mainstream, for example, originating the bizarre, ironic, and incredibly lucrative Christian metal subgenre for another. Glam Metal launched the careers of iconic groups like Motley Crue, Poison, and Europe, whose signature single "The Final Countdown," reached number one in a staggering 26 countries before being religated to "the song to which European footballers run onto the field" and "the song to which G.O.B. Bluth embarrasses himself." But, like Burnside, Glam Metal is looked upon with suspicion, with a certain head-shaking resignation. And, even more like Burnside, Glam Metal bands are remembered most vividly for one solitary, simple thing:
Looking like dumbasses.
See, Glam Metal is most commonly referred to as "Hair Metal." As Burnside The Man became Sideburns The Hair, Glam Metal The Genre became Hair Metal The Joke. The genre was typified by grown men with angular guitars mincing about, coifed in hair that even a Houston matriarch would find ostentatious, men in spandex and headbands taking an already excessive genre to levels of excess hitherto unimagined. Also: power ballads. Lots of power ballads.
Musically, Glam Metal was smoother, more refined than its progenitors. The lyrics migrated away from Tolkien and Satan and killing tons of suckas and stuck to that old metal mainstay of screwing broads like it's going out of style. But this genre was metal's crowning "triumph of style over substance" moment. Sabbath, Zeppelin, and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands remain influential to not only current metal bands, but certain punk and post-punk acts as well; many still enjoy radio play. Hair Metal remains influential only to a select group of ironic hipsters and women from Jersey. And though metal has never been renowned for its sober, celibate intelligence, Hair Metal seemed to drag the genre into a morass of libidinous, hubristic idiocy unknown since Caligula. Typical is this quote from David Coverdale, singer for the mostly forgettable band Whitesnake: "This is the sexiest music my guys have ever been involved in, and they are the sexiest fucking musicians. When they play, it's sex." Which, really: undeniable.
Perhaps most associated with the glib Hair Metal revolution that briefly curdled the American brain was Mötley Crüe. In addition to pioneering the use of unnecessary umlauts, the Crüe took the debauchery to levels that can best be described as "you should probably be dead." Musically, really, they are largely unremarkable, a band that, by any other name, would be forgotten in the $3.99 bin at your local record store, but Mötley Crüe were impressive self-promoters and legitimate menaces to society. A few lowlights (with bonus Ozzy coverage):
- Whilst strung out heroin, Nikki Six (bassist), pulled a gun on a radio because he thought it was talking to him.
- Vince Neil, singer, wrecked his car in 1984, killed his passenger, served eighteen days of a monthlong sentence. The band then released "Music to Crash Your Car To," which is the third definition of "classy" in the New American Heritage Dictionary.
- Tommy Lee has a big wang.
- And then there's this, which, really, sums up both Mötley Crüe's debauchery and the fact that Ozzy Osbourne probably looked at them as harmless, fey kindygarteners: on tour (Mötley Crüe's first major tour, by the by), Sixx showed off by snorting some ungodly amount of cocaine. Ozzy, unwilling to be outdone, snorted a line of ants off the street, peed on the ground and licked it up, then dared Sixx to do the same. Sixx peed and, before he could commence his own personal homage to "Waterworld," Ozzy was already on all fours DRINKING MOTLEY CRUE'S URINE. Moral of the story: you never never never try to out-filth a man who's bit the head off a bat. Game. Set. Match: Osbourne.
Basically, they drank, they did oodles of drugs, they redefined promiscuous, they cleaned up, they broke up, they reunited, they unreunited, they re-reunited. They even wrote a book about it, so long as one of the definitions of "wrote" is "dictated it to some dude they were probably throwing mixed nuts at." But the thing is: their songs are largely forgotten. They're remembered not as a band but more as a traveling circus of death-defying excess.
One point that should be made is that Hair Metal allowed the entire metal genre to become something other than the province of sallow loners, table top RPG players, and occult aficionados.
It was, in a word, popular. Hair Metal was metal at it's most successful. Though the late '90s would see a resurgence in mainstream headbangerness with the wholly execrable "Nu Metal" movement, Hair Metal remains the most lucrative subset of the usually marginalized metal genre. Hair Metal was to metal what the Nintendo Wii was to videogaming: the moment that finally convinced the fairer sex that they should join the party. Beyond that, Hair Metal allowed for lyrics that didn't sound like the poetry of that kid with the trench coat at the back of Biology class. They were fun. They were boisterous. They had a sense of humor, which is understandable, considering they were sung by men in painted-on pants and hair more closely associated with victims of electrocution. Van Halen is sometimes lumped in with the Hair Metal movement and, while I don't think that's fair, it does show the ethos of this Glam Metal style: while traditional metal seemed overly worried about appearing bad ass, Hair Metal realized it was ridiculous. And really, if you're sulking around stage in a Halloween costume, grunt-singing songs about dragons, who's actually ridiculous?
(There's some other stuff here about Van Halen, but it's only because Van Halen is killer. You get the idea.)
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