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.

Heimat

In an article from the 1990s, the sociologist Roland Robertson coined the term "glocalization."  There are massive forces in the world making us the same, he argued -- consumerism is high on the chart -- and the worlds of international organizations, "third way" politics and intense levels of electrified, postmodern communications brings us together.  However, they (at least can) help us lose senses of who we are; "alienation," as so many German philosophers described it, is a common modern experience.  Sometimes we react.  Sometimes, in reaction to globalization, we create nationalisms.  We refer to ancient customs; we seek to make ourselves different from others.  We react to globalization by invoking our small scale provincial mentalities and primitive subconsciences.  Sometimes we bring those mentalities into national and international politics; those can be scary moments -- moments when societies rip themselves into two along lines of left and right.  In any case, the local makes the global more complex.  Bringing the local into the picture means globalizaton concerns heterogenization as much as homogenization.  We pull away from each other as much as we pull together.  That's because globalization's "together" sometimes doesn't feel like our together -- one we own.

Underneath the local and provincial, Robertson argues, is nonetheless an impulse not just representing backwater reactionary mentalities.  The local concerns, he argues, a sense of home -- the attempt to find a place where you belong.  Feelings about that are tough to account for as they are intuitive and learned.  They are real, though, and help give us that last 5% of who we are.  That's as we fight against the anomie, washes of anonymity and senses of disorientation modern life can often provide.  An interesting thought is how to join home and  cosmos; the global metropole and the tribe from which one comes -- to find a love that can flow through both, drawing from the countryside's quiet while using the vibrancy of the global city to spread love's essence and break down the boundary lines between its locales.  As The Circumstance; goes home today, those thoughts are very much in the air.

Ban-zai?

A former kamikaze pilot -- yeah, there are a few left (some guys missed) -- turns out to be in possession of quite a  number of letters written by fellow World War II suicide pilots just before they got in their planes and did their thing.  Their "thing," of course, was a one way trip to oblivion.  Funny; hidden behind the grainy textures of black and white, given enough distance between now and then (seventy years or so) and made part of the mystical experience of a "great generation" (Second World War twenty-somethings), kamikazes don't seem so dangerous.  What's funny about it is that we get the pants scared off of us today when a generation of young men wraps headbands around their foreheads and dictates their last testaments.  Jihad; glory to the Emperor -- where does the difference lie?

Tadamasa Itatsu is in possession of some extremely unique documents:  the writings of young men who knew they were about to die in a fruitless, last ditch attempt to defend Japan from a country (the U.S) to whom it knew it was going to lose (kamikaze flights started in 1944 -- the last year or so of the War).  The letters are remarkable; they are to families, friends and loved ones, expressing last thoughts.  They tell why one chose to do what one was going to do.  They made manifestations of personal philosophy.  Some letters jar -- strident defenses of empire and glory.  Other letters are remarkable in their acknowledgement of the Japanese system as corrupt and outdated.  Some ask for more universal, democratic principles.  The power of the state and culture, though, was such that the few guys taking the last positions got into planes and flew themselves into the sides of boats anyway (well, decks, mostly).

The Japanese city of Minami Kyushu is asking UNESCO -- the UN's educational and cultural organization -- to grant the letters world heritage status.  World heritage status grants a kind of canonized status to cultural, and sometimes natural, artifacts.  World heritage sites and artifacts are protected by the Geneva convention.  No bombing that stuff.  The Chinese don't like the smell of it.  As with almost anything concerning Japan in the Second World War, China feels Japan should keep away from self-celebratory gestures, if not adopt positions of virtually eternal apology.  Westerners can do well to remember that from Chinese perspectives, the Second World War started in 1937 -- not 1939.  What would eventually happen in Poland had been well underway in China for a couple of years before Hitler swung into action, if not before.

Questions of historical memory are sticky.  The Chinese regularly get annoyed with the Japanese in that department -- over school textbooks, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visiting the Yasukuni Shrine; the one that memorializes Japan's war dead, including some ugly characters from the 1930s and '40s.  In relation to the Crimea situation, the Russians are throwing around the word "fascist" like it's summer 1941.  The Simon Wiesenthal Center is still hunting Nazis.  Morally valid actions?  No doubt.  I don't know if there should be a statute of limitations on human rights violations.  Occasionally, however, it can be worth remembering the power of being the ones who won -- you won.  No quarter should be given to the Slobodan Milosevices or Ratko Mladices of the world; they should be tried and jailed (though not put to death; that violates the same principles for which they should be brought to trial -- questions of the right to life).  There is, though, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years later an invisible line one crosses where the cause of world peace and the best possible conditions for human rights are served by forgetting.  Forgetting not what happened, but the anger that causes one to condemn.  Condemning happens in the present.  As time goes by, historical pictures gets blurred; things become more complicated than they appear.  The letters Mr. Itatsu wants to bring to the world's attention are like that -- the stories of men, some brainwashed by an over-zealous empire, some trembling in fear at what they were about to do, some knowing it was wrong.  I don't know about world heritage artifact.  It seems, though, there is undoubtedly an artifact there to be preserved, and one that could perhaps even be utilized as a site of forgiveness.  Sometimes you have to say "Banzai!" and jump into the letting go.

Look Out, Toronto

The Russians have showed up in the Ukraine.  Well, we think.  No one seems to want to take off their balaclava long enough to answer any questions and let us know for sure.  Yanukovych is broadcasting from inside Russia.  He'll be back, he says.  No he won't; not unless the Russian army brings him back -- and while they were happy enough to take a few extra steps into Georgia in the South Ossetia War (2008), they do risk someone responding if anyone drives a tank the 900 kilometers from Moscow to Kiev.  Kiev is, says Yanukovych, where "bandits" are in charge.

Enough about a leader about whom we'll soon hear no more.  True, it is dangerous for Russia to extend its sabre rattling too far beyond its borders; though a resurgent nationalism seems to be empowering Putin to take distinctly controversial stances on a wide range of domestic and international issues -- controversial from European and North American perspectives anyway (though some issues might not be so controversial in Arizona) -- there still seems to be an expectation that no one will transgress too far over the post-Cold War norm that, in fact, the Cold War is over (in other words, the nuclear guns are put away, and the U.S. and Russia will both show up and shake hands at G8 summits).  Barak Obama is "deeply concerned" about the men in balaclavas.  Not exactly DEFCON 1 -- or even the DEFCON 2 America's Air Force sat at for a few moments during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Putin might win this one.  A few troops in Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea?  Even more than a few, yet in places many in the West can't quite make sense of?  No problem; the borderlands ("Ukraine" literally means "borderland") are a site of impunity; only regional actors themselves might do something.  Even more disorientingly, it might only be paramilitaries of some kind or another that show up for the fray -- scruffy men in beards doing things in names of ancient blood fueds connected to pasts modern political ideologies try to get rid of.  About to run into a serious financial crisis in the midst of a national unity meltdown, Kiev won't be able to do much either.  The EU is like the UN; it's great at wagging fingers.  Maybe it will sanction someone.

There was a time when, if one superpower grabbed a piece of turf somewhere, the other was ready to ride in somewhere else.  Had the U.S. invaded Cuba when Castro and Khrushchev decided Havana had just the right number of palm trees and sugar cane for nuclear missile launches, there was a good chance the Soviets and their allies would have moved on Berlin.  Putin's going to take the Crimea?  I say America, take Toronto.  The borderlands are, after all, a site of impunity.

Insane in the Ukraine, or When History Crosses its Wires

Well, Yanukovych is definitely out.  No one, it seems, can find the man.  They can find a menagerie of animals intended to make a strange brand of foie gras apparently only to be eaten by foreign dignitaries and the wealthiest of the wealthy in that immense and deadly flat land.*  But no Yanukovych.  And the Crimea is in the news in ways it hasn't been since the 1850s.

Samuel Huntington, the guy who said that the reality of the post-Cold War world was a "clash of civilizations" (and come the War on Terror, boy did he seem right), would love what's going on there now.  In Simferopol, Crimea's regional capital, ethnic Russians wrestled with Tartar Muslims who would now like to be part of Europe (not exactly known for welcoming Muslims with open arms).  The Russians would like to return to Russia; a state from which they seceded not thirty years ago.**  The Russians who would like to join Vladimir Putin's semi-authoritarian patriotocracy see the half democratic coalition in Kiev as "fascists" -- which some of them are as they embrace a hyper-nationalistic "Ukraine for the Ukrainians" idea (and of course, the Russians in the Ukraine should be Ukrainians, think the fascists [who are now apparently multiculturalists]).  The cosmopolitan democrats, of course, look down on all of them.  "Our first goal," said one high modernistic enlightened soul on the BBC today, "is to unite the country."  No it's not.  It's to make it into the just-like-every-other-liberal democratic fantasyland you imagine represents progress.  It's really just more shopping.  Putin, meanwhile, is doing naval exercises in the Black Sea.  Which is a lake.  I think it's a lake, anyway.

The ideological wires are so simultaneously interlaced and dispersed in the Ukraine it's very hard to make heads or tails of anything except that vague historical memories have taken their revenge on contemporary politics.  In American presidential elections in 2008 and 2012, a weird right -- I won't call it an extreme right; "weird" will do -- sometimes liked to refer to Obama as a "fascist" and "communist" simultaneously.  That amounted largely to a "something I've heard about from the past I think I know about but I'm not sure but I have a feeling so I say it out loud" kind of thing.  Things run a little differently in the Ukraine.  In all of the former Soviet Union, but very much the Ukraine because of how much of the Second World War's eastern European theater was fought there (and how brutal the fighting was), "fascism" means serious things.  Rather than random historical imagination, it means destroyed families.  It means questions of collaboration.  It means scorched earth retreat policies.  It means holocaust and violent, underground resistance. However, with the forces of history which produced an ideological collapse where we don't have fascists and communists anymore -- and to even say "liberal" or "democratic" rings a bit hollow as those ideas don't have anything to oppose (we kind of just are) -- the cauldron of jumbled historical imagination is being stirred even in the Ukraine.  In the Crimea specifically, where Lord Cardigan, as immortalized by Lord Tennyson (lordy, lordy), encouraged his hosts to charge "half a league, half a league, half a league onward."  Political contest becomes like your college buddy encouraging you to get over your hangover by having another beer; we try to straighten out our political direction by reaching for all the old categories (the ones that kind of put us there in the first place).  It's history's fault; global change made us this way.  At least we know, unlike 1853, that the Sardinians are unlikely to invade.

* The Circumstance; is unsure if foie gras is the intended dish of certain of the domesticated animals intended to be eaten on the Yanukovych estate.  Could be, though, if some are geese.
** Well, twenty-three or twenty-four years ago, depending on whether or not one counts from the independence declaration or the referendum on independence, which was won by a count of roughly 90%-10%.  The Crimea initially declared its own independence; then decided to in fact partner up with the newly independent Ukraine.

Cante, chico...

One of the figures from the flamenco world interviewed today about the death of Paco de Lucia -- one of the truly international stars in flamenco, in part because he crossed over into jazz -- said "you know, flamenco is like the wine; it gets better as you get older."  Undoubtedly.  Flamenco is a unique and dramatic art form.  It demands massive technique.  However, a single note, or held pose, can cut through the flurry of scales and, because that note or pose counterposes the massive set of sounds and gestures the music sets up in your head, it can capture all of them, and make them fall like a single leaf from a bare tree.  Delicate.

I know very little about de Lucia as a traditional flamenco player.  I got to know de Lucia's work through fusion; his records with Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell and others exploring the waters between rock and jazz -- but keeping it jazz -- after Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (1970).  If you know flamenco, you know such work wasn't well-received; it was a betrayal of flamenco, the traditionalists claimed.  Somehow all the wowing of wealthy European and American audiences seemed to divert attention from the full breadth of flamenco; the dance, the costumes -- an art form where clapping is a deeply expressive gesture, as important as any guitar pyrotechnics.

In crossing into jazz and pioneering "new flamenco" with tunes like "Entre dos Aguas," de Lucia nonetheless did for flamenco what Leonard Bernstein would do, around the same time, for classical music:  bring in massive new audiences. A movement in which flamenco became a determined part of world music was birthed; flamenco's vocabularies became necessary learning for any serious guitarist.  As Paco leaves us, we can say, sing, friend; a new generation of music lovers knows this music largely because of you.