Fargo Rock City

by Chuck Klosterman

  That video is kind of a microcosm for the ’80s metal mantra—everything was about sex, even when it wasn’t. It was certainly the genre’s most pervasive cliché and its most maligned Achilles’ heel. The element of sexuality was what set the glam aesthetic apart from other forms of loud rock ’n’ roll. Rolling Stone writer Kim Neely had a firsthand look at two styles of hard rock (she first broke both Guns N’ Roses and Pearl Jam to mainstream readers), and when I asked her what really separated ’87 metal from ’93 grunge, she said it was basically fashion—but she wasn’t referring to clothes. She meant a sort of intellectual fashion: “Every style of music has its own philosophy and ethics. Heavy metal’s philosophy was about getting as wasted as possible and walking into a room with a bimbo on both of your arms. All the bands that came out of the Seattle scene wanted the exact opposite of that. But the audience for both kinds of music was basically the same.”

  Hair metal’s relationship with sex is pretty overt (at least on the surface). It continues to this day, at least in certain subcultures. There’s still at least one place where ’80s metal is thriving—strip clubs. “Girls Girls Girls” will always be in heavy rotation at any nudie bar, just like “Monster Mash” will find its way onto AM radio every Halloween. Both lyrically and sonically, glam metal is the sensible accompaniment for removing one’s pants for money.

  One of the many negative synonyms for ’80s metal was “cock rock,” and the term is still thrown around whenever someone wants to attack any masculine genre of music. A few especially impolite artists, like Gene Simmons of KISS, actually embrace that moniker (he claims a good rock guitar player “plays [the instrument] with his dick”). That kind of attitude is mostly unleashed for effect; it basically stares musicologists in the face and says, “Okay, Poindexter—tell me what you think that means.” It’s really more of a sociopolitical argument (albeit a pretty primitive one).

  Whenever people try to explain the role of sex in heavy metal, they usually offer the easiest answer; that is to say, they usually conclude that metal caters to teenage boys, and teenage boys like sex. And there probably is a lot of logic to that explanation. I don’t know if it actually explains much, though.

  If this relationship was the only explanation, the sexual adulation of women would always be part of rock music. But it’s not. Lots of popular music does not stress animalistic sexuality, and it’s still readily consumed by adolescent males. Electronica, the youth music of late 1996/early ’97 (at least according to the media at the time) didn’t seem to have any sexual elements, beyond that fact that you could dance to it. I realize divas and Mormons love to claim that dancing is the closest thing there is to having sex, but I’ve never agreed with that assertion; if these two practices are so damn similar, why can’t girls ever get their boyfriends to dance (and why can’t boys ever get their dance-loving girlfriends to fuck)?

  Even though Prodigy’s brilliant video “Smack My Bitch Up” had an insane amount of sexual content, there really wasn’t anything sexy about it. It was more disturbing than arousing. Meanwhile, the Chemical Brothers look like two guys who have never even talked to girls, much less slept with them. Electronica is about thumping, not humping.

  And electronica is not alone. The whole “straight-edge” movement doesn’t seem to approve of anything the rock stars might consider fun—straight-edge kids don’t drink, smoke, eat meat, or (presumably) fuck one another. Obviously, the “riot grrl” phenomenon was another genre wholly absent of any kind of debased sensual pleasure, and—truth be told—there were still probably more males buying Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Sleater-Kinney records than there were females (boys are simply more willing to spend money on rock music than girls are, even when the songs are specifically intended for a female audience).

  The clearest example, of course, is the one that Neely already pointed out: Seattle-based grunge bands went to elaborate lengths to separate themselves from rock sluts. It was a return to the whole punk ethic, reinvented through the burgeoning PC ideology. And it’s nothing new. There is an undeniable connection in music circles that will always associate the concept of “sex” with the concept of “dumb.”

  Oddly, this rule only seems to be applied to loud music. The operative word here is “loud,” not “hard” or “heavy.” Disco, for example, is considered totally dumb, and that’s because it’s loud and sexy. Conversely, Marvin Gaye would never be seen as dumb, because he’s soft and sexy. Soft and sexy is cool. Fugazi is not dumb, even though they’re loud and vocally inaudible. This is because Fugazi doesn’t sing about sex. Sex is the one subject that automatically erodes a hard rock artist’s public IQ.

  When critics first attacked Zeppelin, it was for their “dumb” material, like the loud and sexy “Whole Lotta Love.” Now that cultural revisionists have declared that Zep was a bunch of geniuses, they point to tunes like “Achilles Last Stand” and “The Song Remains the Same,” partially because of the layered song structure but mostly because they don’t want to be accused of lionizing cock rock. “The Rain Song” makes for a stronger argument than “Livin’ Loving Maid,” even though the latter is a better tune.

  Heavy metal had no qualms about being shackled with the dumb label, especially in the 1980s. In fact, it actively pursued it. Glam rock carries the mildly unsettling aura of “the lowest common denominator,” sort of like the first few questions in any game of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Without really saying it, metal works under the impression that the world is stupid, and its people are much less complicated than they’d like to admit. It’s a philosophy that superseded language and defies deconstruction. Basically, it deconstructs itself.

  Here’s an easy example: Skid Row was a very good metal outfit. They were a prototypical metal success story: Their eponymous debut record went multiplatinum, their follow-up LP debuted at No. 1, the group made the cover of Rolling Stone, and then they fell off the face of the planet (only to be rescued by KISS in the Y2K, who asked them to partially reform and open the KISS Farewell tour). They have two power ballads, “18 and Life” and “I Remember You,” that will probably slip into the growing rotations of classic rock radio outlets. Skid Row doesn’t define its genre, but they were paradigmatic of what decent metal bands were like. And what that means is that there’s not a whole lot to analyze, at least in terms of what their music was “about.”

  Skid Row’s catalog is an example of how metal deconstructs itself: During the height of hard rock’s popularity, metal magazines were faced with a unique predicament—kids wanted to hear about the biggest bands on a monthly basis, even if those bands weren’t doing anything newsworthy. Skid Row propelled themselves into this class, so Hit Parader, Circus, and Metal Edge were always on the lookout for new ways to feature them. One easy technique was to ask a band member to comment on every song on a record; the article would list the ten or twelve tracks on the given LP, and the artist (usually the singer) would provide insight on what each song “meant.”

  Even at its greatest depth, this rarely taught the reader much of anything. The quotes were usually vague and could often be applied interchangeably; I recall the most popular description was something along the lines of, “This song is just directed to the people who keep you down and try to tell you how you live your life.” Skid Row’s vocalist Sebastian Bach was asked to do this kind of blow-by-blow analysis for the band’s first record (for multiple publications, if I recall), and he generally played along with the idea and gave all the predictable answers. However, when asked about the song “Big Guns,” he didn’t try to make up anything clever or unorthodox. He would just say something that essentially translated as, “Well, you know, we like big tits.”

  Are we to take this analysis at face value? Well, it’s pretty hard not to. One assumes this kind of commentary is supposed to be funny (I suppose today we might call it irony), but it has a strange sort of philosophical effectiveness. You have not been given a lack of information (in fact, the question has been answered in its absolute
entirety), but there’s still no information to process. The question is the same as the answer.

  That’s kind of the role sex played in metal.

  Have you ever wondered what happened to all the beautiful girls who used to be in rock videos? They disappeared about 1993, and I used to wonder where they went. In a strange way, I felt sorry for them; I imagined all these bombshells in the unemployment line, bemoaning the fact that the Bulletboys never call anymore.

  However, it turns out that these buxom hip-grinders are, in fact, thriving. They have become part of the “new metal” movement—CMT. Forget about the Deftones and Orgy; the glam metal torch is actually being carried by Alan Jackson and Shania Twain. Flip your TV to the Country Music Television station, turn down the volume, and throw a Trixter cassette into your stereo. Suddenly, it’s the summer of 1991.

  Back when Ice-T was still relevant (again, the summer of 1991), he used to compare rap with country music. Ice felt both genres shared a common principle: It was guys telling stories about life and love. Granted, Garth Brooks never threatened to pull a Glock on Reba, but his argument did make some sense. I think a similar comparison can be drawn between ’90s country and ’80s metal—but this particular analogy is more conceptual.

  The connection seems to be in attitude. Country songs (and especially the videos) mimic the good times and fast whores of hard rock; many seem to follow the same plotline from Poison’s “Nothin’ But a Good Time.” For those who don’t remember the video (and for those who never saw it in the first place), “Nothin’ But a Good Time” is basically a performance clip framed by two scenes of a kid washing dishes in a restaurant. He has long hair and a bad job, and his boss screams at him for being such a lazy jackass. But when the fat manager finally gets off his case and leaves the kid alone, our hero kicks open a door. It opens into an empty concert hall, and Poison is rocking inside. Musicologist Robert Walser compares this sequence to Dorothy’s arrival in the Land of Oz, and the similarity is indisputable (and probably conscious). The idea is that Poison is a fantasy, and they offer a bridge to a fantasy life. You see this theory in country videos all the time, although (a) the blue-collar labor is usually farm-related, and (b) the bands inevitably own monster trucks.

  The ironic thing about “Nothin’ But a Good Time” is that its fantasy does not involve even one woman, a real rarity for that group’s lifestyle. Poison was one of the era’s most pussy-gorged bands, and that sexual appetite was integral to their success. Bret Michaels had the same “male tart” appeal as Rod Stewart, and Poison used his pretty boy looks to make unabashed attempts at wooing a female following.

  In This Is Spinal Tap, Nigel Tufnel momentarily confuses the words “sexy” and “sexist,” oblivious to the fact that the two words so similar in spelling could have totally different meanings. Amazingly, Poison seemed to perceive those words in the same way—but it worked! It’s not just that rock chicks weren’t offended by the sexist nature of Poison’s music; they were actually turned on by it. Compared to bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Armored Saint, the guys in Poison seemed harmless and cuddly. In the eyes of hard-rockin’ female teens, Bret Michaels was the kind of guy who would take you to a keg party on the back of his motorcycle and act real macho around his friends—but you knew he wasn’t going to get drunk and punch anybody. Bret was a lover, not a fighter. And young women were really drawn to that (especially those who had small-town, pseudo-rocker boyfriends who inevitably proved to be the opposite).

  Sadly, this persona would ultimately doom Poison to the depths of social disregard. It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn. There are a few exceptions to that rule, but it’s true more often than it’s false. When I interviewed Gene Simmons in 1995, he was shockingly (or perhaps predictably) frank about this: “You don’t want a large female audience. If you depend on women to buy your records, you end up going the way of New Kids on the Block. Female audiences tend to be unfaithful.”

  This phenomenon creates a baffling headache for record companies. It’s a confusing situation, because female audiences are usually more intense about how much they like a particular artist (this is especially true for the teenage demographic). Girls who love the Backstreet Boys (or Rick Springfield, or Bon Jovi) love them in a way that made my teenage adoration for Mötley Crüe seem pale. I mean, I certainly would never have screamed at Vince Neil. But here I am—ten years later—and I’ll still be buying every Mötley Crüe album that gets released, fully knowing I will probably only listen to it once. Males have a weird sense of loyalty toward the bands they like; they sometimes view record buying as a responsibility.

  As I try to analyze this incongruity, I feel myself swaying between “overthinking” the answer and “underthinking” the answer. One moment, the difference seems complicated; the next, it seems completely obvious. The complexity comes from the assertion that men and women think about the world in a fundamentally different way. The simplicity comes from the fact that just about everyone accepts this premise and always has. But the complexity returns when this assertion is applied to music, and—for whatever the reason—the male ideology somehow comes across as superior (even though it isn’t).

  Donna Gaines is currently teaching sociology at Barnard College, the all-female branch of Columbia University. She once told me that few of her female students think about culture as a concept, and they’re rarely interested in debating the significance of social iconology. Conversely, Patrick Springer is a news reporter in his late thirties who won a Bush Fellowship in 1996. I used to sit next to Pat when we worked in the same newsroom, and he once told me that whenever he talked to college-age males, pop culture was the only thing they seem to know anything about. (An interesting side note to this comparison is that both of these individual commentaries were expressed as negative social trends.) And generally, I suspect Gaines and Springer are both right in their respective analyses.

  If I had to bust this down into one sentence, I’d probably say the ultimate difference is that guys like pop culture even when it’s not there; more specifically, they like music even when they’re not listening to it. Young males like rock music—and culture as a whole—both tangibly and intangibly. Young females are more vehement about the former and virtually indifferent about the latter.

  I am a little uncomfortable making these statements, because—as I said before—it seems to indicate that guys somehow like music “better” than women. It suggests that a male listener can appreciate the visceral sound of a Van Halen record, but he can also hold a high-minded discussion about why it’s aesthetically superior to Aerosmith; meanwhile, a female can only sustain some kind of mindless, fleeting obsession with Celine Dion that has no regard for intellect or taste. It preys upon the classic stereotype that men are fundamentally more analytical and women are fundamentally more emotional.

  All of which is true.

  So let’s just assume I’m right about this. Let’s assume that men and women think about music differently, and if they do like a common artist, they like the performer for different reasons. What does this tell us about the role of sexuality and gender in heavy metal?

  First of all, the relationship between sex and hard rock is an idea, not a tactile reality. Heavy metal is clearly not a conduit for actual intercourse. Though no studies were conducted at the time, it’s safe to say that most guys listening to Iron Maiden in the 1980s were not getting laid all that often. It’s not like metal was the soundtrack of rampant teenage sex. It was actually the soundtrack from rampant teenage abstinence. If parents really wanted to keep their sons from getting the neighbor girl pregnant, the best thing they could have done was buy them several Dio albums and the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide.

  Still, society inevitably makes a connection between sex and hard rock: As I stated earlier, metal will always have a home in strip clubs, and that’s for two reasons. The first is sonic; glam rock is sleazy and
trashy, and the tempo suits the action. But the second reason is a metaphor for how this music illustrates sex. Strippers are fantasy women; I don’t think any man who goes to a strip club views the dancers as real people—at least not when the girls are onstage. Personally, I’ve only been to six strip joints in my entire life (and four of them were in Canada), but I completely understand why some men love them. When I explained this to a former girlfriend, she was very hurt when I told her that guys look at strippers as fantastical objects. “I should be your fantasy woman,” she insisted. And I was forced to explain that she could never be my fantasy woman, despite the fact that she was doe-eyed and voluptuous and once made me pass out (literally) during a period of physical ecstasy. She could never be my “fantasy woman” because I couldn’t avoid the fact that she was real. I had seen this woman vomit. I had seen this woman gorge herself on pancakes. I had been with her when she purchased tampons. Regardless of her unspeakable midwestern sexiness, I would always recognize her as a genuine person. My feelings toward her would be based on fact, not visual fiction. With strippers, the opposite is true.

  And that’s how it is with the women who were aligned with heavy metal. They were inevitably described in one-dimensional terms. It was once pointed out to me that most of the planets in the Star Wars trilogy were described as having only one climate (the “ice world” Hoth, the “desert planet” Tatooine, etc.). I have come to notice a similar trend in hard rock. Women are often described as having a singular characteristic. The aforementioned “Big Guns” from Skid Row is an easy example. “She Goes Down” by Mötley Crüe talks about a girl who (apparently) does nothing but give blow jobs. Winger’s “Seventeen” talks about a girl who is seventeen, and that’s her whole life story. Love/Hate’s “Rock Queen” worships a highly desirable women, but we know virtually nothing else—except that she has “cookies” (the lyrics keeping pleading, “Let me touch your cookies / Let me eat your cookies”). Maybe Love/Hate’s “rock queen” is Betty Crocker.