Fargo Rock City

by Chuck Klosterman

  As this point, one can start to see (or maybe project) the cultural impact of the metal years. Something was going on here: People were using culture as a way to view themselves, just as they always had—but we were dealing with a new kind of iconography.

  If you ask someone what’s the first thing they remember about (or associate with) ’80s metal bands, the answer is almost always “hair.” As I’ve mentioned, “hair metal” quickly became a pejorative term for heavy metal. The derivation of that trend mirrors the derivation of the music: A heavy rock god like Robert Plant had long hair, while a poofy glitter-pop guy like Marc Bolan worried about how his hair looked. Fused together, you had the pop metal persona: Loud glam bands with miles of follicles and a desire to do something with it. And there’s only so much you can do with long hair, assuming you’re not a Rastafarian—you can braid it, or you can poof it up. Willie Nelson went one way, and Cinderella went the other.

  In fact, as I type this very sentence, I am looking at the cover of Cinderella’s Night Songs LP. Vocalist Tom Keifer is pointing at me with both his index fingers, and his outfit features somewhere between three and five scarves. It’s all pretty groovy, but I am nonetheless drawn to his head. It appears perfectly spherical; his hair is a uniform length, and it is standing at attention. It’s like a lion’s mane. Grrr.

  In an old MTV interview, Keifer once bemoaned the fact that he kept seeing reviews of Night Songs where writers talked exclusively about the group’s hair (guitarist Jeff LaBar had an even more obnoxious coif than Keifer). Truth be told, it was a semivalid complaint; Cinderella consistently wrote better pop metal than their peers (now that I’ve had a decade to think it over, I would still place Night Songs among the ten best albums of 1986, metal or otherwise). But I can totally understand why journalists had a hard time getting over the band’s appearance. Though Cindy’s music did stretch beyond the glam metal formula (albeit only slightly), their look defined it. I’m sure the group regrets the Night Songs album cover. From a cultural perspective, it’s a wonderfully telling period piece, but it makes the band seem idiotic. It’s like watching episodes of American Bandstand from the early 1960s and realizing these people are not actors. You’ve got to force yourself to remember that Night Songs is not satire. In fact, you could not do satire this effectively on purpose.

  But—at the same time—I’m also taking an all-too-easy cheap shot. This sardonic commentary comes long after the point of impact, and it didn’t seem so stupid at the time. Cinderella’s hair may have been a bit outlandish (or at least outlandish enough to be noticed by record reviewers), but that was the style of the day. Conventional pop artists accentuated that even more; a band like A Flock of Seagulls is only remembered for its hair (and one catchy single). And there was a reason for all this.

  Whenever you hear Gene Simmons or Alice Cooper refer to the early ’70s New York glam scene, they always talk about “getting noticed.” They use that phrase in the context of live performance; if someone like the New York Dolls had played a club on Friday, Saturday’s audience would have a certain expectation, and it often had nothing to do with the music.

  A new paradigm for musical success had been created. For someone like Brian Wilson, success had meant writing songs that were competitive with the Beatles. For someone like Jimmy Page, success would always be associated by record sales that dwarfed the commercial performance of other artists, including the Rolling Stones. But this generation of glam groups had a different set of priorities. Their two descriptions of success were (a) creating a buzz, and (b) getting paid. The musical product was secondary to being able to get gigs where you would be seen (and hopefully seen again). Style was beating substance, and this time it was on purpose.

  “The New York Dolls were media darlings,” Cooper told me in 1998, “but—at the time—they were purely a joke to everybody who saw them. They were like Sha Na Na. They certainly didn’t sell records. It was only after they broke up that they somehow became important.”

  Max’s Kansas City in 1972 was a microcosm of the whole world in 1985. With the proliferation of pop bands and—more importantly—the proliferation of media, the need for attention became paramount. All of America was now a singular club scene. You could see a band perform through videos, and you could effectively “hang out” with the guys in the group by reading magazine articles. The only key for the artist was entering the public consciousness. You needed to be able to stop people—to stop them from flipping channels, and to stop them from turning the page. The means for earning this attention couldn’t be too high concept either; accelerated culture does not respond well to the nonobvious. Consequently, bands took the most blatant avenue: Make everything larger. Including your head.

  So here we have the first metaphorical example of metal’s influence on the teen mind-set of the 1980s—the hunger for what can probably be called “obvious success.” Around this same period, African-Americans began proliferating the phrase “living large,” the modern incarnation of an old jazz term. This is probably just coincidental—but it still seems strange how fervently the idea of size (both literal and figurative) reemerged as a key indicator of how good something was. As always, it goes back to the idea of a cultural pendulum. The late 1970s had felt the crunch of the oil shortage; our too-nice-to-be-effective president Jimmy Carter even urged Americans to wear sweaters instead of burning dinosaur bones. By 1985, those days were over. America was back, and so was the sweet pleasure of gluttony. The explosion in hair (and fashion, and volume) was the other side of consumerism.

  Tom Keifer didn’t wake up one morning with that hairdo (although at times it may have looked like he did). That doesn’t prove he was necessarily making a conscious statement, either. But within all that Aqua Net, there was a message—maybe not his, but someone’s. I’m certain no one ever killed themselves listening to Long Cold Winter, but Tom was still talking about life and death. Judas Priest supposedly made kids point guns at their heads; Cinderella made me do the same thing with a hair dryer.

  It’s all too easy to get attention by making yourself dead. I was trying to get attention by being alive in a really obvious way.

  Summer, 1986

  Poison.

  The concept of rock music being tied to glamour is incredibly predictable and—in some respects—essential. Except for those Sarah McLachlan-esque idiots who insist they “need” to make music, it’s really the only reason anyone gets into rock ’n’ roll.

  However, there’s an important difference between “altruistic glamour” and “constructed glamour.” Some people are going to be perceived as glamorous even if they don’t try. Look at some of those old shots of Jane Fonda when she’s in the jungles of Vietnam: It was impossible for her not to be sexy, even when she was covered in swamp shit. The same goes for gun-toting Patty Hearst and tennis superfox Monica Seles—it’s not just that they manage to look good in unflattering circumstances, they look famous in unflattering circumstances. They sweat like they’re in Nike commercials. Young Jim Morrison had this quality, as does his modern-day doppelgänger Eddie Vedder. So does Michael Jordan. Altruistic glamour is something that goes beyond the temporary schemata of society and rests squarely on the truth that some people have an undeniable visual charisma.

  Like just about everyone else, I am attracted to altruistic glamour. But I’m not interested in it at all.

  Constructed glamour is far more intriguing. It’s almost as attractive, but not in a visceral sense. Constructed glamour requires an intellectual element. Take heroin chic, the “look” that dominated modeling runways in the mid 1990s. Heroin chic was a weird middle ground between altruistic and constructed glamour; it was constructed to make females seem altruistically glamorous under the construction of a situation that should have been altruistically damaging (i.e., seventeen-year-old girls with hollow eyes who shoot smack all day and stay alive by eating unsalted popcorn). To find these models sexy, you have to know they were trying to look like they were dying. As always, that
’s the singular key to appearing ridiculous; as long as everyone knows you’re doing it, it’s completely cool.

  That brings us to the early days of glam rock, which cultural revisionists have started to call glitter rock, mainly to downplay its evolution into glam metal (I’ve never heard anyone use the term “glitter metal”). Glam rock is the ultimate personification of constructed glamour. It takes an idea and turns it into fashion, and the fashion evolves into a philosophy. The idea is that in order to be a rock star you have to be a rock star. You are not a normal person. Even if you don’t possess altruistic glamour, you can be glamorous. Quite honestly, it’s the same kind of thinking that drives drag queen culture (this will come as no surprise to people who remember Dee Snider).

  I no longer think there’s any question about whether or not pop culture swings on a pendulum between style and substance—it does. The late ’60s had freedom rock, so the reaction was ’70s art rock. Since no one could relate to ELP and Jethro Tull, the world was subjected to punk by ’77, which burned itself out before anyone got rich. Punk was perfect for lazy people, because anyone could do it—you didn’t even need to know how to play your instrument, assuming you knew how to plug it in. There was really no difference between Sid Vicious and anyone in London who owned a bass. But people still wanted to act famous (don’t they always?), so that opened the door to glam metal in ’83. And as we all know, glam was shattered by ’92 grunge, a musical genre that seemed to exist for the sole purpose of making metal commercially unpopular.

  Anyone who’s taken an entry-level sociology class (in fact, pretty much anyone who has ever used the word “sociology” in its proper context) can explain why Seattle power pop was so effective. The unspoken statement made by ’90s alternative music was “We’re all the same, man. I play this guitar and you know who I am, and I will never know who you are, but I am still a normal person. I am not a rock star. In fact, I am going to make records for a label called Kill Rock Stars. If you recognize me in public, I will hate you. That will prove that I love you, because we are all the same.” But there was never anything real about those sentiments. It’s an illusion that lasts as long as its audience is willing to believe it. The ultimate goal for Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Foghat, Uriah Heep, the Clash, Bon Jovi, and Sonic Youth was all ultimately the same: They wanted to make music that other people wanted to hear. That’s really the only reason for going into a recording studio. What music “means” is almost completely dependent on the people who sell it and the people who buy it, not the people who make it. Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations.

  What happened to music in the 1990s was not bad; it was extremely important for at least three reasons. One was that it better reflected the era; another was that we got a handful of truly great personalities and a few dozen wonderful songs. But the third (and perhaps more disturbing) quality was that the “imageless” Seattle music scene finally achieved what constructed glamour had always intended: It made everybody into a rock star, because it no longer mattered what you looked like or how you acted. And eventually, all these superstars were completely interchangeable (which proved to be a painful downside for everybody). This wasn’t so much the work of the artists as the spin of the modern media—had the original class of ’77 punks existed in the accelerated culture of 1992, I’m sure they would have become just as homogenized. I have no doubt whatsoever that we would have heard Muzak versions of “God Save the Queen.”

  I was twenty when the grunginess of Nirvana exploded, and—looking back—it was a pretty amazing period to be a rock fan in a collegiate setting. Everything about popular music was being analyzed as it happened; everything was so clear. There was never a “vague undercurrent” that the pop world was changing, because all those social changes were being publicly dissected the moment they occurred. I was told why Exile in Guyville was “groundbreaking” the very same day I discovered the record existed. In fact, the first time it hit me that all the Seattle bands wore flannel shirts was when I read a news story about how this fashion trend was “changing the self-image of Generation X.” Prior to seeing that article, I had barely noticed what the fuck those guys were wearing.

  Obviously, the goal (and the effect) of glam rock had been precisely the opposite—you couldn’t not notice the visual side to the music, even if it supposedly meant nothing and the media didn’t give a damn. The metal bands I liked were an extension of an altogether different aesthetic: They created characters, and they did so consciously. If dressing like a lumberjack speaks to an entire demographic of young people, dressing like a transvestite speaks only to the dude who’s wearing the heels. Glam is a struggle against normalcy.

  Ground zero for the glam movement can be traced back to one singular guy—David Bowie. Yet Bowie does not play a role in this discussion, and here’s why: He did not directly influence metal (at least not ’80s metal). At best, he’s at least one full cultural generation removed. Over the past five years, it’s become very chic for hard rockers to credit Bowie as a major influence, and it would be cool if he had been—but most of these bands are lying. All that adoration is coming retrospectively. When hairspray bands were developing in 1983, Bowie was putting out records like “Let’s Dance” and dressing like a waiter from the Olive Garden. At the time, it was certainly not cool for any self-respecting metal dude to emulate David Bowie (even the old Bowie).

  The paradox is that metal bands ended up taking their cues from all the guys who had been able to make a living by ripping off Bowie. Even though a third of T. Rex’s catalog is folkie unicorn shit and another third is shamelessly gorgeous pop, Marc Bolan was a major influence for countless metal bands. The New York Dolls were also a factor, although not as much as rock critics tend to imply. Music critics consistently make the mistake of thinking that the “dissonant” (read: “tuneless”) albums they appreciate are somehow influencing culture. No normal listener gives a hoot about any goddamn song the New York Dolls ever made. The only people who have even listened to their material are (a) rock journalists, and (b) the people who read books written by rock journalists (and half of those people are lying). But those shoes! The album cover from the Dolls’ debut record is more important than any song they ever wrote. It’s the purest, sexiest example of constructed glamour in the history of the world.

  And—more importantly—the Dolls were outlandish enough to influence KISS. Time is slowly proving that KISS is the second-most influential rock band of all time. The Beatles will always be number one, because they were the first, the greatest, the smartest, and the origin for everything that would come next. The Rolling Stones introduced the attitude rock guys were supposed to have (no one will ever be cooler), and Led Zeppelin acted the way rock bands were supposed to act (there will never be a group as archetypal as Zep). But KISS were rock stars. The guys in KISS were walking metaphors for most of what had come before them and everything that would come after.

  Gene Simmons has said that KISS selected its look by accident; since they were big macho guys (or at least he was) playing big macho songs, KISS couldn’t be glammy the way the Dolls or Bolan or Bowie were glammy. Instead, they went with the colors black and white, and the attire bordered on the sadomasochistic.

  This straightforward template did not last long. By 1975, Paul Stanley had the hair, lips, and stage moves of the hairiest supermodel in pop history. Ace Frehley was trying to look “futuristic” (or at least making his best drunken guess as to how the future would appear—I suppose he did predict the advent of moon boots). As for Peter “Cat Man” Criss … well, Peter didn’t try too hard. When he left the band, Eric Carr replaced him as “The Fox,” which—for all practical purposes—is just a meaner type of cat. (Reader’s note: The author is not a zoologist.) Gene Simmons’s appearance and behavior also evolved over time; between Rock and Roll Over and Dynasty, he went through a long phase where he tried to look and act like a robot. This era officially ended with (Musi
c from) The Elder, when the band decided it would be cool to wear capes and headbands. Of course, the crowning moment in KISStory was Vinnie Vincent’s “Egyptian Warrior” regalia he donned as the replacement for Frehley. This was a stunningly original character. It paid homage to all the famous Egyptian soldiers renowned for their military prowess … of which there are exactly zero. Sometimes Vinnie’s persona is referred to as “The Pharaoh,” which would seem to indicate that he was a rock ’n’ roll slave owner. Oh well.

  ANYWAY, it’s difficult to overestimate the significance of the KISS makeup. Without the greasepaint, they would have probably made only three albums that would have all sold horribly (although I have the sinking suspicion that if that had been the case all the rock critics who currently hate them would now call them a “raw, seminal influence that predates New York punk”). As it is, KISS made a few million kids want to pick up guitars and pretend to be someone they’re not. And that is rock ’n’ roll, 99 percent of the time.