I first posted this as a Note on my Facebook page on November 16, 2009.
I'd probably do a lot more writing if I could just dictate my thoughts out onto a text document from anywhere in the world, and edit them into something cohesive later on. This is especially true while I'm at work. With my current job, I'm able to do my job while thinking about lots of other crap. The worst is when I get a bad song stuck in my head. One of these songs has been “Cheap an' Nasty” by Whitesnake, from their 1989 album “Slip Of The Tongue”. The chorus goes:
“You're cheap an' nasty,
All you want to do is give it up, give it up,
Cheap an' nasty,
Come on and do the dirty with me.”
As you can probably tell just from reading the chorus, it's just one of many Hair Metal songs about some uber-slut who is going to rock your world. You know, some girl who probably had her hair teased out to high Heaven, wore a tight mini-skirt and high heels, and probably had every STD known to man by the time she was 21. And she was probably so loose by the time she had her first kid that childbirth didn't even hurt.
When I think back about how my taste in music has evolved over the years, I try to sort things out so that I'm as honest as possible, trying not to seem “cooler” than I actually was, because somebody who knew me back then would probably try to call me out on it. Believe it or not, there was a time when I wasn't all that into music. Before middle school, I did enjoy listening to music, but didn't go out of my way to learn much about it or even collect it. We, in this case meaning my brother and sister and I, basically just listened to whatever was popular during most of the '80s, whether it was Pop, Butt Rock, or New Wave. My brother started to branch off when they got U2's “The Joshua Tree” in the mail from Columbia House. If I remember correctly, the story goes that my sister wanted to send the tape back because she didn't want it in the first place, but my brother convinced her to keep it. Before then, we had a tendency to just listen to the hits and skip the deeper cuts because we saw them as filler. “The Joshua Tree” was the first album my brother could enjoy all the way through.
I entered middle school in 1988. Sometime that Fall, WLRS 102.3 became “The new Rock 102”. Hair bands were the big thing going on in Rock around that time, so there was a heavy emphasis on them. I dug some of them, but my brother and I, through friends of his at school, were also getting into Classic Rock and Alternative. We really got into reading Rolling Stone, which is where I started learning about a lot of bands and history. And since we lived out in the sticks, we would have people tape hours of MTV for us, which sometimes included episodes of 120 Minutes. By the end of 1989, my taste was probably to the left of most of the kids I went to school with, but I was also listening to Winger. The tapes we got for Christmas in '89 probably tells you where we were heading.
My sister:
Whitesnake - “Slip Of The Tongue”
Great White - “Twice Shy”
Skid Row – (self titled)
Aerosmith - “Pump” (Can't remember if that was technically my brother's or sister's.)
My brother:
Lou Reed - “New York”
The Cult - “Sonic Temple”
The Who - “Who's Better, Who's Best”
Me:
Guns n' Roses - “Gn'R Lies”
De La Soul - “3 Feet High and Rising”
I also wanted to get Public Image Ltd.'s “9” and Red Hot Chili Peppers' “Mother's Milk”, but Santa's search seemed to be limited to Wal-Mart and Target.
Anyway, I was listening to Whitesnake's self titled album a lot in the Fall of '89, so I eventually got into “Slip Of The Tongue”. At that time, the future looked bright, and I thought there was someone for everyone, so I enjoyed listening to songs about uber-sluts who were going to rock my world. But in the Fall of 1990, there were a series of events that caused me to turn cynical, and it seemed to coincide with my brother and I's discovery of The Smiths that year. I'm definitely not blaming The Smiths for my downward spiral into teen angst, I'm just saying that they reflected my reality more than the songs about, as Henry Rollins once put it, “chicks” and “rocking”. I still enjoyed some hair bands, but couldn't listen to LRS a lot because there were so many of them, most of whom were nothing special. I was a QMF man, and was listening to a lot of Classic Rock because it was new to me, and most of the “kids” weren't listening to it yet, so it was still an “alternative” to hair bands. While I did get into my brother's Smiths and Pixies tapes, the tapes I got for Christmas '90 were:
The Black Crowes - “Shake Your Moneymaker”
Eric Clapton - “Journeyman”
Don Henley - “The End Of The Innocence”
Rush - “Presto”
Winger - “Winger II: In The Heart Of The Young”
Before 2008/2009, I considered 8th Grade to be my “Worst Year Ever”. I know lots of people, even some R.E.M. fans, really hate “Shiny Happy People”, but I love it because to me it represents the death of my first “Worst Year Ever”.
In 1991, the whole Madchester dance rock thing was at it's most publicly visible in the U.S., and Funk-Metal/Punk-Funk was also going on. Summer of '91 brought the first Lollapalooza tour and The Clash Of The Titans tour. A friend taped an episode of 120 Minutes that was done at the very first Lollapalooza show, and heard lots of bands for the first time that I had only been reading about before (Nine Inch Nails, Charlatans UK, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, Butthole Surfers, etc.). My taste in music was taking a pretty big left turn before Nirvana even became huge. Winger at Cardinal Stadium during the Kentucky State Fair was my first ever concert, but I listened to them less and less as I was buying more music. In fact, I didn't listen to them much at all until Election Night in November 1992. I remember that I couldn't get to sleep around my normal bed time because I was so anxious about the election results, so I decided to listen to some music. I popped in the first Winger tape since it had been a while since I had listened to it, and thought, “God, this is horrible!” I had the same reaction when I heard “Slip Of The Tongue” for the first time after years of not listening to it.
I still bust out some Winger or Whitesnake every once in a while, but it's a weird, icky sort of nostalgia. The best way I've found to describe it is that it's like an ex-con having fond memories of being raped in prison.
I was pretty happy when Grunge killed the hair bands. What Grunge was was a post-Punk/Hardcore take on early '70s Heavy Metal, namely Zeppelin and Sabbath. While they aren't known for “flashy” solos and shit, there was still quite a bit of musicianship involved, just more in the way of using odd
tunings or time signatures than “shredding” solos. A lot of today's Hard Rock bands* sound sort of like Grunge put through a Butt Rock filter. They were people who listened to Mainstream/Active Rock during the '90s instead of Modern Rock, so instead of hearing Grunge alongside bands like The Pixies, Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr, or The Replacements, they heard them alongside Foreigner, Bad Company, Journey, or (insert hair band here). They are to real Grunge what bands like Nelson and Firehouse were to Motley Crue or Hanoi Rocks. They have absolutely nothing that made the original Grunge bands interesting. The drummers play in half time, the guitarists just crank out a few chords, and they use that boring ass quiet verse/loud chorus thing that should have died with Kurt Cobain (R.I.P.). And the worst part? The singer sings about how much he hates his uber-slut girlfriend. Yes, the uber-sluts have returned. It's like these bands are what happened to the hair bands after they tried settling down with that uber-slut that they knocked up so many years ago, and picked up a guitar for the first time after years of not practicing.
(*BTW, what I'm referring to are bands such as Nickelback, Staind, Creed, Puddle Of Mudd, Shinedown, Seether, Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, Theory Of A Deadman, and most of those other newer bands you either hear or used to hear on The Fox.)
If I HAD to choose between listening to bad Hair Metal or bad post-Grunge, I would choose bad Hair Metal since the music is way more interesting, and it lacks most of the faux-negativity of post-Grunge. You wrote the “Sound Of Madness”? Please, get over yourself and listen to some Black Flag.
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