Hair Metal…....

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This is actually something that I find myself contemplating, not knowing exactly what the problem is.  I think older gothic/industrial music is actually really good, I think it works.  Punk works in small doses, but because it is relatively simplistic I can’t listen to too much of it at once.

            The question mark really for me is metal, in particular hair metal.  If you want to experience some truly heinous music, back track into the lesser-known LA hair bands.  If you think, well what’s the point, I must say this- it is an interesting bad.  Gothic/industrial music of the eighties and the nineties has aged fairly well, as has punk from the late 70’s and early eighties.  Hair metal- hair metal is problematic.  I can’t stress that enough times. 

            This is actually something I’ve been writing about a lot.  My favorite label is easily Cleopatra Records, easily. Cleopatra founder Brian Perara started in the hair metal scene, and then when those bands were all broke after the Seattle craze and Nine Inch Nails, he went back to give a whole lot of them contracts, and put out the boxed set.  This is the same man who put out out-of-print Psychic TV albums in 1994.

            A similar problem comes up with Village Voice music critic Chuck Eddy- the list of his original Stairway To Heaven: 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums of All Time is available on-line, I’ve been downloading as mush of it as I can find. Metal probably is critically underrated, and he rates Voivod, one of my favorite bands, quite highly.  He digs up some truly heinous hair metal in that book, and some possibly even worse music from the seventies that was forerunner to it. As others have pointed out, Chuck Eddy defines metal very oddly, including a large number of albums that no one except him would consider metal albums, Miles Davis or Funkadelic for example, but I think actually the albums that you might consider to be metal or early metal.  Its really unfortunate because he’s big on Voivod and Blue Cheer which are bands that don’t get nearly enough attention ....

            Dokken is painful.  Some of those bands are so low on the totem pole of musical expression that they are high on it.  There is such a black hole of meaning.  Hair metal is hard to play, there is no doubt about that, but the basic rifts would seem to be reused over and over again in slight variance by an endless stream of identical bands, a lot of them would be almost impossible to tell apart.  Lyrical themes circle around sexuality and drugs maybe sometimes, a lot of the time not even, a lot of the time it really is just about having sex, and uses the word “baby” a whole lot.  A bunch of the bands have either there love ballad that is every bit as sappy as anything on an easy listening station. If you check out the band Circle from Finland label Ektro records, you’ll see any area in which metal and more “experimental” music overlaps strongly, Ektro records release both and Circle play both.  Its not hair metal that Circle play or release on their label, though its much more abrasive metal. Much of the music on the label is European or associated with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal as it was called in the eighties. Hair Metal is just not at all like that.  It doesn’t lend itself to musical exploration. ....

            There is a lot less in terms of musical properties that could be used for artistic properties then what Circle do with aspects of New Wave of British Heavy Metal influences.  LA hair metal would melt any art it touches for the most part. ....

            Still there is a perverse joy in discovering the endless depth of this black hole, which obscures the careers of the otherwise respect worthy Perrara and Eddy.  Eddy in particular has a big thing for Kix, I must say “Don’t Close Your Eyes” by Kix about a women overdosing on sleeping pills is beyond amazing, because it utterly trivializes a woman dying of a sleeping pill overdose.  Another great moment in hair metal- I remember Don Dokken on MTV explaining that his song “Mirror, Mirror” was actually about leaving his band Dokken.  Its striking because if you didn’t know that you might think it was another romantic break up song, but if you listen carefully it references the seven years he was in Dokken, and has the lyric “if this is love, then love is hate” which is not about a woman, but rather his own band members, which in this context, if you listen to enough hair metal, sounds radical. There’s a few song that reference ditching school, most of it is either the song about sex or the love ballad, with the guitar solo, which is usually about 30 seconds in length, and demonstrates truly unreal finger speed and some climax high notes.  The problem is not musical skills these people had unreal technical abilities, mostly in the direction of finger speed.  Guns N’ Roses do a few things that are a little different, The Cult started as a gothic band and went through a hair band phase without completely abandoning that essence, but they are atypical of the genre. Great White never broke form. White Lion never broke form. Most of those bands never broke form at all.  It was as tightly studio musicians reproducing a narrow songwriting format as I’m aware of. ....

            “Seventeen” by Warrant, about having sex with a seventeen-year-old, was a major hit despite sex with seventeen year olds being illegal in the United States.  But to ignore the lyrical content, and examine the sonic composition, it gives you sense of the general feel of hair metal musically. There’s a strong emphasis on guitar, pop song structure, no improvisation, the guitar sound is either left more raw or processed through a few effects.....

Generally its less ambitious then what it real evolved out of which is the guitar oriented rock of the seventies that is know played on classic rock stations. A lot of those bands did a lot of very long songs with a lot of soloing, “Talk Dirty to Me” by Poison is pretty standard, song about sex with a woman, pop song structure over a straight guitar chord progression, until the solo comes.  The distortion on the guitars relative to other music made at the time was actually pretty tame, the LA hair bands were amazingly tame compared to other forms of metal (Voivod’s War and Pain is a wall of noise) and even guitar sounds on albums of what was called college music at the time like Sonic Youth and Pixies. ....

Its abrasion is rooted in something else then pure guitar noise.  Plenty of music from the 80’s now sounds very dated or of its period, that’s not the problem with hair metal. Hair metal was that infantile at the time.  The artist Mike Kelley rights about Baby Huey cartoons as being successful as art because of how uncomfortable it will make you if you watch it as an adult.  If you listen to a lot of it at one time it will bother you, it will even give you a headache.   They operated within such a strict set of genre formula elements lyrically and in terms of guitar sounds that nothing operates out of a limit of total predictability at any point.  It would be very easy to just dismiss it as adolescent boys sexual fantasies, but the love ballads could have taken their lyrics from hallmark cards, which introduces the problem that it also has an overwrought sentimental side. There’s no indication that any of it was at all ironic either.   Some of these bands made huge amounts of money, but many of them remained relatively obscure and did not score major hits, playing mostly rock clubs on the Sunset Strip of Los Angeles, so it can’t be reduced to mere capitalist interest, because a lot of these people made little money at it.  There could be the draw of sex and drugs but some hair bands such as Stryper were actually evangelical Christians, so it most likely wasn’t a universal draw. ....

Its hard to imagine why Brian Perrara who released experimental noise albums by Rozz Williams and Genesis P. Orridge (who is know a fixture on the New York art gallery circuit) or Chuck Eddy, who writes about noise jazz, can stomach all this.  If you imagine the intensity of guitar sounds on either some of the live Psychic TV recordings or a Voivod album you’ll see how odd it really is that Eddy or Perrara would have ever been drawn to this material.    ....