Rewind Find, or Why You're Gonna Love Eileen

It probably was time for hair metal to die.  The movement ("movement?" really?) started earlier than most think -- Van Halen was its progenital band, perhaps its best, and their first album came out in '78.  '78 -- just nine years removed from Woodstock.  Just a year after the Sex Pistol's Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977).  It's said, sometimes, that punk killed metal.  Not at all.  Punk was in fact a little metal itself, and the hair metal movement was just an extension of some of the moves Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and the Guess Who had been up to since the late '60s and early '70s anyway.

That said, what hair.  What mascara. (Mascara? Yup, mascara.)  (Oh yeah; Nirvana did it -- killed hair metal.  Soundgarden's Louder than Love [a masterpiece album] was out by '89, but it was Nirvana that killed hair metal with the überpopularity of Nevermind. Right; back to the mascara.)  Rock and roll bad-assness had always had its badass quality because it made you pause for a moment and think.  Elvis was badass in the '50s because, well, was it true?  Was frowning and shaking our heads at shaking teenage hips really a reflection of our own repression?  (It was.)  The Doors were badass because maybe society was so screwed that a long acid trip was just as valid as anything one might do with a "normal" life (the Vietnam War was on, after all).  The Sex Pistols were badass because maybe counterculture had become too predicable.  Counter-counterculture may have veered off into randomness.  However, at least it made you think about what counterculture was.

Brett Michaels.  Nikki Sixx.  The guys from Cinderella (a better band than you'd think, by the way).  Great White.  White Lion.  Winger.  Whitesnake.  Warrant.  (What was with all the "Ws"?)  When those dudes came out looking like ladies, as Steven Tyler and Co. so epically put it, it was tough to tell what was going on.  It was the '80s.  There was something of a Western hangover after Vietnam and malaise from the intensity of the politicization of everything.  It was, apparently, ok to be wealthy again.  Things should sell, and parties should be had.  Just to party.  Not to make a "statement."

Partying in the '80s involved a lot of barfing in swimming pools and tons of coke.  That itself wasn't wildly different.  However, the fact that it was just about swimming pools and coke was.  It was vapid through and through.  When Fredric Jameson wrote his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991, it was  this culture he had in mind.  It wasn't the networked, Internet, immediate simulation of everything culture we have today; the book was too early for that.  It was a vapid 1980s culture referring to nothing.  No social meaning, no sense of change and no solidarity. The nadir was Britny Fox.  If you're not blinded by the glint of the stage light off the top of their mega-perms in "Girls' School," you've got stronger eyes than I.

Still, what did come next?  Depression?  More drug habits -- just without the fun?  Power ballads where one just took the shine off the production values and asked for scratchy vocals instead of the operatics of the post-Plant generation? (Sorry; that's what Pearl Jam's "Daughter" is -- a power ballad.)  I'm not convinced.  If you're going to have a coke habit, have a COKE habit.  With some ladies (or dudes if you are a lady, or just swing that way if you're a dude).  Rockers have been depressed since John Lennon.  It's not new.

That leaves the music.  From the perspective of critics and musicians who wanted poetry with their music, hair metal stunk.  Endless weedling on guitars (though most songs clocked in around four minutes; hardly Yes-like marathons).  The words did stink ("A school bell rings off the day, brings in a stray, a few girls at play" [our friends from Britny Fox]).  At its best -- and the best all-around artifact from the era is Van Halen's 1984 -- hair metal could give a slightly dark insight into the culture of nothing; of hedonism and so-called virtuosity.  That was awfully rare, though.  Most of the time we were stuck with Warrant's "Cherry Pie" and Kip Winger's odes to "sparks" coming from the "corner of his eye" at a girl it turns out (surprise, surprise) who was "only seventeen."

Still, some of those dudes could play.  And not just the guys from VH.  When they balanced the production the right way -- and sometimes they did -- there could come some awfully crunchy hard-rockin' stuff that saved you from the darkness of thrash and death metal (indeed, hair metal was always extremely melodic) yet blew the doors off with an awfully rich tonal sound.  It was also ok to know how to play the guitar.  There wasn't much material for the bass players and drummers; it was mostly straight up rock beats with the occasional shuffle (and everything -- absolutely everything -- was in four).  Some of the guitar pyrotechnics were pretty pyroctechnical, though.  Guys from Ratt to Whitesnake to Tesla to even our brothers from Winger came up with some pretty inventive riffs.  It was a bit like getting in a Corvette.  Overdone?  Yes.  Potentially inelegant?  Yeah.  When done right, though, it was like jamming your foot to the bottom on one of those things and just feeling it explode under you.  Anybody had to smile.

That brings us to Steelheart.  It seems that Steelheart had a hit towards the end of all this:  1989's "Never Let You Go" from their eponymously titled debut album.  I don't remember it.  Apparently it climbed to #16 on the U.S. charts.  They released one more album, 1992's Tangled in Reins, before their lead singer got clocked in the head with a boom opening for Slaughter.  There's a very, very fine line before hair metal turns into a massive parody of itself (a very fine line).  That's a line not captured by the 1984 "rockumentary" This is Spinal Tap (with an umlaut placed over the "n") -- that parody was bit more on the '70s -- but this later Tap video, "The Majesty of Rock."   As a singer, Van Halen's David Lee Roth lived on that boundary line; he was almost a running joke about the genre.  However, Roth was backed by a pretty serious band that balanced out the whole affair.  As an entire group, though, Steelheart, totally unwittingly, ran the entire operation as absolutely right up to the border between parody and real music as possible.  Put the needle down on "Like Never Before" from Steelheart, and you'll begin by hearing the absolute prototype -- almost like it would be taught in hair metal school -- of the high tenor hard rock howl that was a prerequisite for every singer of that generation.  But it is prototypical; indeed, archetypical.  To a tee.  Like you have a hard rock coach in your living room teaching you how to go "Ooooooh" after being kicked in the nuts but still have it be singing.  That's before the band kicks in with absolutely textbook, perfectly distorted hard rock riffs with a ridiculously miked drum kit (there's no better example than "Everybody Loves Eileen," also from Steelheart).  It's a joke.  A total joke.  That is, if they didn't do it so well.

From a player's and riff perspective, there's some surprisingly good music to come from a handful of the bands from that era -- including bands not named Van Halen.  Ratt had a couple of rockin' tunes.  Tesla's "Edison's Medicine" has some pretty inventive stuff.  Lynch Mob has a forgotten couple of albums very much worth a listen from if you like electric guitar.  Even Winger's "Seventeen" starts with some absolutely killer chord changes.  Steelheart -- essentially forgotten (and in many ways justifiably so) -- comes with the whole package.  For every kid who ever sat in his bedroom in 1988 and thought "man, I'd love to have a ROCKIN' band and just, you know, totally ROCK," Steelheart actually made those albums.  Two of them.  Just as you'd imagine them.  They did it picture perfectly, and then the music died.

Steelheart's Steelheart and Tangled in Reins (7/10)

Vox Populi

Two exhibitions might have helped define the world of modern art:  the 1913 Armory Show, organized by the Association of American Painters at the Lexington Street National Guard Armory in New York -- introducing Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism to broad public audiences (it was advertised as the "new spirit" in art [figures like Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse and Picasso gained their first exposure to major North American publics]) -- and Hitler's 1937 exhibition of "degenerate art" in Munich, exhibiting the work of some of the exact same artists, or their inheritors, as examples of "dilettantism" and that ever-dangerous Jewish imagination.  You know -- the Jewish imagination that apparently ran the worldwide banking conspiracy and the Bolshevik revolution at the same time.  The American exhibition was relatively well-received.  Publics were shocked but interested; after New York, the show made its way to Chicago and Boston.  The Munich show was really well-received.  More than two million people went through its doors on its four  month run.  Down the street, Hitler put on another shindig with his favorite Nazi artists; happy farmers and Teutons with bulging muscles.  About a tenth as many people went to that.

The Neue Galerie, on New York's Upper East Side, has recently replicated Hitler's show based on what few pieces it was able to get its hands on -- some Klees, some Kirchners, some Kokoschkas (trouble makers, all of them).  The New Yorker reports in its March 24 issue that the exhibition also features a room with large empty frames formerly housing works by many of the same artists, probably destroyed during the War -- vanished into illicit black markets, or burned in that great symbolic gesture often used from inquisitions to anti-Semitic purges: tossing intellectually important artifacts onto a fire.  The "degenerate" show is a heck of a thing to try to reproduce.  Art in the first decades of the twentieth century was surrounded by torsion; how do you represent the human being on occasions when the West and the world were about to make themselves into a "slaughter bench," as philosopher G.W.F. Hegel once termed it -- and technology and politics were moving to extremes of space, time and logic which human minds were not used to comprehending?

Of course, looking back now, we can see the significance of daring strikes to remake representation; to tear the human being down to his or her psychological soul, as so many at the start of the twentieth century were prone to do, or simply contemplate the very nature (and possibility) of a straight line or whether the color blue (or any other color) made sense anymore (as more than a few were also prone to do in those years).  "Artists before their times," we might say; free spirits in search of publics, or because of their daring and "larger" society's lack of comprehension, figures doomed to be misunderstood and experience the pain of persecution before acceptance.  It's a funny thing with the popular mind or voice, though; that which can vote (sometimes hyper) nationalist parties into power, descend into the illogic of pogroms or bandy about anti-intellectualism over dinner tables.  It's the same people, at least in some cases, who can detect free expression when they see it and whose curiosity can be the beginning of acceptance even when acceptance is more curiosity than acceptance to begin with.  The art, and memorialization, at the Neue Galerie, is undoubtedly important and a historical monument worth noting.  The most significant monument, however, might be the faint echoes of the footsteps of the more than two million people who saw the show that one can still hear if one puts one's ear up to history.  Indeed, their footsteps echo especially loudly when compared with the very few footsteps echoing through the halls of the show Hitler and his cronies wanted us to see -- silence around art no one really wanted.  Seventy-seven years later, footsteps in an art gallery, of all places, ring like the sound of distant yet constant truth; the possibility of human insight subverting the worst attempts to deliver truths that, in the end, aren't really that.