February 16, 2004
In which hair-metal is pronounced 'rather good, actually'…
plus! the weekly references to death and how to fight it with a guitar:
"We built a whole stage out of PAs at this festival in London, 117 000 watts. In fact, a guy called up from four miles away while we were soundchecking and said he couldn't hear his TV—four miles away! I ain't deaf. I've just always liked it loud—you know, the live sound. I think there is something wrong with you if you like quiet rock and roll."
— MOTORHEAD’s Lemmy Kilmeister
Indeed. Furthermore, there must be something wrong with you if you claim to like rock'n'roll at all, and yet fail to recognise the Dionysian when you hear it. More and more, lately, I have become convinced that rock is not about unlaced Chuck Taylors, bedhead, Rilke references and the importance of a well-placed augmented-seventh chord. To that effect, the track which has been doing it for me with more feverish intensity than any other of late is, dear reader:
POISON – Nothin' But A Good Time (Open Up And Say… Ahh!, 1988)
I am at a loss to explain just why people might chuckle at this, or fail to appreciate that every element essential to rock'n'roll is present in these three minutes and forty-two seconds. And yet I am not an old-school metalhead. I discovered Appetite For Destruction just last year, and recalled this POISON gem only in sonic silhouette, sleazing from loudspeakers at a bumper-car venue when I was 10. I knew I liked it back then—I knew the riff made me want to push furniture over and lurch around until I was sick; I knew the lyrics were vaguely dangerous, about running away to a neon-strafed desert full of those kohl-eyed older girls with bleached hair and KISS and IRON MAIDEN logos stencilled onto their highschool backpacks—and after 14 years of senso-philo-whining 'art' rock, I have returned to the glittering source.
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This is like my beloved LED ZEPPELIN—supposed purveyors of a primal, Satan-come-down-to-earth blues aesthetic—stripped of all that is inessential. No runic symbols, no appeals to Tolkien or Shiva or whoever-the-fuck, no 'mysterious' breakdown crammed with mandolins and silence and bowed guitars. Just the Wildean platitude of useless things being beautiful—hair, make-up, spectacle, songs about fucking in make-up, songs about doing your hair, songs about taking your credit card to the liquor store (thanks, Axl) because you might be—will be—dead tomorrow, purely due to overindulgence in candy, sex, money, ambrosial liquids, blooze runs, the foisting of a gratuitously lurid fluorescence upon the unplugged amp that is death. In short: an ephemeral burst of noise, kissing, colour, laughing, light (raging against the dying of), violet liqueurs drunk from shivering goblets of skin scrawled with blasphemous names, other girls' phone numbers, new things to do with the 12-bar blues, and cosmetic retailers. Lo, and Lucifer saw that it was good.
WARRANT – Cherry Pie (Cherry Pie, 1990)
This begins like JOAN JETT's 'I Love Rock'N'Roll', turns into QUEEN at 0'37", and becomes its own beast at 1'10" – that enormous chorus which, as I lovingly but palely recall, hit me at around the age of 10 or 11 from a ghetto-blaster somewhere in a last-day-of-school classroom—all encroaching summer, the beauty of pigtails and the feeling of being on the edge of something—and, in the fashion of POISON before it, punched me in the stomach and forced me to admit that I liked the sensation. I was all half-sharpened pencils, blue-lined paper, somersaulting in fresh-cut grass and ruffling of bowl-cut hair, appealing to pre-summer twilights against girls named Becky nailing their coal-blue eyes through mine—and yet I knew of something greater, fraught with the dangerous pleasure of loud noises and flashing lights, something which meant running blinded in rain shot with artificial pinks and greens, being surrounded by impossibly long legs and carsmash confection—all the sweet sordid things you could eat, all the sneering pompous dirty syrupy riffs you could spit back out.
I'm still clueless as to what the Strip sounded like at the turn of that decade, but I'll always have this.
MOTLEY CRUE – Live Wire (Too Fast For Love, 1981)
Wild Side; Girls, Girls, Girls (Girls, Girls, Girls, 1987)
Kickstart My Heart (Dr. Feelgood, 1989)
There was a time when rockstars were having more fun than you, and admitted it. There physically just wasn’t time to whine or mourn or fast or clean-up; there was simply too much blow to get through. Hear that, Fred Durst? Thom Yorke? Remember how you used to have a fifth or two of Jack Daniel's and just enjoy watching pretty girls? And then sing about it? Without bitterness or irony? Because you were the Kings of Arcadia and no-one could touch you, and fuck them if you want to wear pink ribbons and leather pants?
This is music of the eternal yes—yes to everything: self-destruction (METHODS OF MAYHEM, anyone?), self-implosion, death in quicksand with a hairspray can held high like some fat cylindrical middle finger caked in glitter and cream.
SKID ROW – Youth Gone Wild (Skid Row, 1989)
This riff has such flailing momentum that, like the creations of frontman Sebastian Bach's namesake, it's a melodic sausage-machine—if the track concluded with a fadeout, it would be entirely conceivable that, 15 years later, the recording session had never come to an end, and was, in fact, continuing in some LA warehouse (after 4 years' sabbatical for a guitar solo). Listen to this, then ask yourself whether you would've preferred to shake your leather-gloved fist and bandana-clad mop to this as a kid in 1989, or whether you'd rather frost your metrosexual tips, pull your white socks up to your knees and recruit band-members into an 'American History S: Who Were THE STOOGES?' class at a GOOD CHARLOTTE performance of 'The Anthem' in 2004. Yes, I know SKID ROW were popular. Popular music was better in 1989. Were kids in 1989 saying, 'Popular music was better in 1969'? Maybe. Even more were saying, 'Fuck that, I'm gonna listen to 'Youth Gone Wild'.' And they actually weren't ass-hats for doing so, as opposed to everyone who bought GOOD CHARLOTTE's record. Oh, for rockstars to seem dangerous again… Even a little. Please? [The first twat to e-mail me about EMPEROR or SATYRICON gets a free Bible.]
Y KANT TORI READ – Fayth (Y Kant Tori Read, 1988)
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Yes, I am a (now somewhat detached; previously rabid) fan of Tori's later, 'serious' work. And, yes—I think this is better than most of it. Maybe it's because I don't care what she is singing about, or what she is trying to 'do' artistically; I'm too busy playing air-guitar, thrusting my lighter aloft, ensconced in that unnameable effect that eighties production so often seems to elicit—it's in the reverb or something, the way that the drums sound positively cavernous, guitars and keys seeming to echo away into infinity—toward some desert highway's vanishing point on a doomed road-trip of dust and neon and flesh. The 'unnameable' effect, is, I suppose, wistfulness. It's not just that I'm nostalgic for my youth, but the overlaying of those feelings onto instruments that were, through some feat of electronics, apparently engineered to sound wistful—as if 1988's decadents knew that all would be over in three or four years, and entered into their day-glo bacchanalia with the downturned eyes of Christ heading to Gethsemane. 'Load up on guns…'
© Reuben Ham
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