043 SMITH JOURNALdynamic restraint and release; W.A.S.P.’s
‘I Wanna Be Somebody’ could have been
given the big-band treatment and slotted
into West Side Story.
Hair metal was boosted by the newly
emergent MTV, and with its strange
combination of knucklehead confidence and
grimy autobiography, became the perfect
embodiment of a decade in which the culture
moved from the paranoid introspection of
the ’70s to the tryhard, steroidal show of
action heroes, W WF and supersized artworks.
While hair metal may have frequently been
caught up in the moral panics that consumed
America throughout the ’80s, it functioned as
the musical wing of an entertainment complex
that celebrated strength, victory, the surface
and consumption.
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Flash forward to the present, and the world is
not entirely free of the genre. A small revival
circuit exists for the original players, while
new outfits sporadically emerge in their wake.
However, these contemporary acts, like Steel
Panther and The Darkness, which consciously
ape the look and sound of the genre, are
largely played for laughs. An earnest embrace
of hair metal still feels impossibly distant.What really dates hair metal is that it
represents the last time guitar music took
itself not so much seriously as non-ironically.
From grunge onwards, rock entered into
a self-referential phase, where everything
knowingly sounded or looked like something
that had gone before. “Nobody looks exciting
nowadays,” Luke Turner points out. “There’s a
sort of politeness in music now which I find
a bit distressing. In a way, hair metal feels like
the last great age of dressing up.”This is our loss, and it cuts us off from a
genuinely interesting body of work that could
speak to the times – Ozzy Osbourne’s video
for ‘The Ultimate Sin’ feels like a day in the life
of the current occupant of the White House.
But things will change eventually. There was
a long period when disco was written off as an
embarrassing relic of the past, consigned to
dreadful nightclubs full of white people in Afro
wigs and fancy dress. Now its influence can beheard in modern acts from LCD Soundsystem
to Warpaint. This year alone saw Barry Gibb
headlining the Glastonbury Festival, with the
helium-voiced Bee Gee seeming in equal parts
touched and warily amazed at the response
given to his back catalogue by people only
born this millennium. The Guardian’s Petridis
sees this as a possible model for hair metal’s
rehabilitation. “When I was a kid in the post-
punk ’80s, there were huge swathes of music
that were critically considered beyond the pale
that are now lauded – everything from ELO
and Queen to folk rock, prog and disco. It
seems almost inevitable that the same thing
will happen with hair metal.”Before long, a generation may go back to
these records, look at them without our
cultural prejudice and preconceptions,
and Def Leppard will be acknowledged as
the cultural titans they are. If it’s a choice
between a festival singalong of ‘Armageddon
It’ or yet another deathless retread of ‘Hey
Jude’, let’s hope we opt for the former. After
all – especially in the current climate – there
really is nothing wrong with just wanting to
have a good time. •