Fargo Rock City (9 page)

Most people (or—more accurately—
all
people except me) do not consider Rush a Christian rock band. However, this fact is virtually indisputable. Aren't pretty much all their songs about Jesus? It certainly seems like it. At the very least, Rush albums promote some sort of bass-heavy Christian value system. “He's trying to save the day for the Old World man,” proclaim the soaring vocals of Canadian spiritualist Geddy Lee. “He's trying to pave the way for the Third World man.” Isn't that the entire New Testament encapsulated in two lines? Didn't Jesus teach us to bid “A Farewell to Kings” and to watch the humble “Working Man” inherit the earth? And I'm sure God likes “Trees” and hates racism at least as much as Neil Peart does.

Nobody ever believes me when I start talking about Rush's hard-line Christian stance, but every time I hear their music it
becomes more and more clear. Listen to the song “Freewill”: I have a hard time understanding
exactly
what Lee is talking about here, but I can tell it has something to do with being a good person (or with being an honest person, or a stoic person, or holding some vague personality trait that God would probably support). “Freewill” also implies something about agnostics going to hell, but that's just par for the course when it comes to Rush. I even have some suspicions about the metaphorical significance of “The Spirit of Radio,” and that goes double for the cover art on
Grace Under Pressure, Fly by Night
(a fucking owl?), and—most notably—the homoerotic purgatory imagery on the sleeve for
Hemispheres.
Who is in the Temple of Syrinx? Perhaps it's Jesus.

The reason I bring this up is because I think it says a lot about perception, which is the tool we all use to build the context for our lives. Even if my thinking is flawed (and I assume it is), it does indicate that—somehow—Rush has purposefully or accidentally put themselves in a position where virtually anybody can make an oblique argument about what they represent. This is a common problem for hard rock bands, and especially for Rush; everyone wants to categorize them, but no one wants to claim them. As bassist Lee once said, “It's funny. When you talk to metal people about Rush, eight out of ten will tell you we're not a metal band. But if you talk to anyone outside of metal, eight out of ten will tell you we are a metal band.” And Geddy's totally right. In high school, I would never have classified Rush as a metal band. I barely thought they were a hard rock group; now I'm mentioning Rush in this book

So what does that mean? Well, on one level it simply proves that attempts to categorize anything (rock groups and otherwise) have more to do with personal perception than with reality. Of course—as anyone who has spent too many hours studying communication theory will tell you—perception is reality. And it's within that construct of perception-driven reality where we start to see the relationship between heavy metal and the people who listened to it (and maybe even the people who use metal as a soundtrack for suicide).

Here again, I feel forced to use self-destructive drug abuse as the clearest metaphor for life. Regardless of how someone describes their drug use—as a “habit,” as a “problem,” as a “recreation,” whatever—they are really just trying to find a euphemism for their
lifestyle.
Even if the actual ingestion of narcotics consumes only a fraction of their free time, it's never a minor personality quirk. For one thing, it's illegal; for another, it freaks out a good chunk of the population. Drug use is really a lifestyle choice. Though drugs do not necessarily change your life, taking drugs will change the way people look at you (and the way you will look at yourself). Those who have no personal experience with drugs will assume that you're throwing your life away; certain people will not date you. Employers will be more willing to accept a DUI conviction than the mere rumor that you have a drug problem. Consequently, drug users will absorb these perceptions and recognize that they are now in a different societal class: They have a secret that makes them both vulnerable and dangerous—and it probably makes their lives a lot more interesting (at least for a while).

Talk to people who do a lot of drugs (or regularly drink to excess), and they will tell you they love it for at least two reasons. One is the physical effect of getting fucked up. The other is the actual process. It's not just fun to be high; it's fun
to smoke pot.
It's fun to score dope and put ice cubes in the bong and put on boring reggae records and talk with other stoners about idiotic stoner topics. It's fun to browse through liquor stores and mix drinks on the coffee table and tell memorable puke stories. There is an appeal to the Abuse Lifestyle that exists outside of the product.

Glam metal had the same kind of appeal: It was all about an unspoken lifestyle. It's a feeling that can't be quantified or easily explained, but it absolutely exists.

One of the interesting things about '80s metal is that it was the first dominant pop genre to exist in a readily available multimedia context. What that means is that you could copiously consume heavy metal without listening to heavy metal albums. Pop metal was a mainstay of album-oriented FM outlets, so metal
could be heard over the populist medium of radio; unlike punk or late '60s psychedelia, it was not trapped underground. There were also the wide array of tours and concerts, so you might be able to see a few big acts every summer (assuming you lived near a big enough community and your parents felt you were old enough to go to rock concerts).

But just as importantly, the 1980s saw the dawn of what I call the Golden Age of Periodicals. Suddenly, young metal fans could choose from a glut of easy-to-find metal magazines. There was a time when reading about rock 'n' roll was limited to reading
Rolling Stone
or maybe
Creem,
and its distribution was sketchy (unless you lived in New York, or San Francisco, or some kind of a collegiate culture). By 1985, that problem no longer existed. In fact, you did not even need to purchase rock literature; I can fondly remember loitering at the magazine racks in supermarkets while my mom shopped for groceries, paging through
Hit Parader
and
Circus
and
Kerrang!
and
Metal Edge.
And by this point,
Rolling Stone
was so mainstream that it was in my high school library.

And this new explosion in rock journalism wasn't teen idol coverage either.
Hit Parader
and
Circus
were driven by interviews and considered to be “news” publications (at least to its readership). The interviews were always horrible and the information was often fabricated, but these updates were still the main objects of interest. I always felt magazines that primarily delivered posters or pinups were rip-offs.

A third component came in 1981 with the introduction of MTV. Its significance was obvious (especially in retrospect), but people tend to forget that it came with an undercurrent. It would take several years before MTV became a cultural universal. A well-known irony about the network is that it was not broadcast in the city limits of New York until 1983—even though that's where it was produced. Moreover, few rural communities had access to any cable channels. I did not watch two consecutive hours of MTV until August of 1990.

However, videos still had a massive effect, especially on people
born after 1970. For (ahem) “Generation X” kids, videos were not seen as promotional gimmicks or special treats: Videos were expected. Since I was a farm kid, I couldn't spend six hours a night staring at Martha Quinn and MTV—but I
could
spend ninety minutes a week watching
Friday Night Videos,
NBC's attempt at a knockoff. Meanwhile, my friends who lived in town could watch
Night Tracks
on one of the seven cable networks that serviced Wyndmere proper (and by 1985, the richer kids could even capture these clips on VHS tape!). Moreover, we knew that people in Fargo were seeing this stuff 24/7. That was the magic of Music Television: You did not have to see MTV to be affected by it:
You only had to know it was out there.
One way or another, the images would all slip into everyone's collective consciousness. Case in point: I never saw the full video for Mötley Crüe's
Looks That Kill
until college—but I already knew what it looked like in 1986. I saw a clip of it on an episode of ABC's
20/20
that examined the rising fear of teen satanism (I suppose the argument could be made that this kind of sensationalistic media coverage provided still another tier for metal appreciation: public discourse).

What this all means is that glam metal was a layered construction. This phenomenon is completely common today—in fact, it's virtually the
only
way rock exists in contemporary terms, and now it includes the especially elastic medium of cyberspace. But it was new in the 1980s. In fact, it was so new that its first consumers never even realized it.

As I mentioned earlier, I never watched MTV until 1990, when I had already graduated from high school and happened to be visiting my eldest sister in Atlanta. However, I hated MTV when I was in junior high; I completely and totally despised everything it represented. I even wrote an essay about it in tenth grade, and I got an A.

The obvious question here is, “Why?” Or, perhaps more accurately, “How?” I had no exposure to MTV, so how could I hate it? The answer came from those “news” magazines I mentioned several paragraphs ago. In
Hit Parader,
all the bands expressed one
unifying opinion: MTV sucked. MTV didn't play metal videos. MTV was afraid of heavy rock bands. And most importantly, MTV made metal groups compromise what they truly wanted to do: “Give the kids the fucking rock they fucking deserve!”

My friends and I hated MTV for these very reasons. In and of itself, that's crazy. But what's even crazier is that we would have
loved
MTV if we had ever actually seen it. During all the years I despised MTV, metal was pretty much all they played. Watching my sister's TV that summer made this incredibly clear; I saw Mötley Crüe's “Girl Don't Go Away Mad,” Poison's “Unskinny Bop,” and Faith No More's “Epic” almost constantly; the only other artists who shared a fraction of the air time were the rap group Bel Biv Devoe and Billy Idol (who almost could have passed for a metal guy himself). The metal world's contempt for MTV was an utter lie; it was unabashed underdog posturing that further illustrates the hypocrisy of corporate shock rock.

But it also makes total sense, considering the state of the world.

I'm hesitant to draw too close a connection between heavy metal and socio-economic policy, and I'm almost as hesitant to say one even reflected the other. It's too easy to do, and it seems like the kind of clever intellectual connection that's almost always irrelevant. But consider this: What were the fundamental messages of Reagan-era politics? It was driven by capitalism (i.e., “the greedy '80s”), saber-rattling (i.e., “the Evil Empire”), and a vaguely hypocritical emphasis on gritty, commonsense values (remember those campaign commercials where Reagan chopped wood?). And what were the fundamental ideals of glam rock? Philosophical capitalism (everyone was a superstar), philosophical saber-rattling (like Nikki Sixx declaring that metal was at war with commercial forces trying to shackle his “identity”), and omnipresent reminders that all these bands came from the lowest tier of society (in song, Axl Rose described himself as “just a small-town white boy” who moved to L.A. and became “just an urchin livin' under the street”—and the operative watchword in both statements is the inclusion of the modifier “just”).

There are a few parallels here that belie sarcasm. It's a weird paradox; while rock in the late 1960s and early '70s seemed to exist as a political reaction to Richard Nixon's administration, glam metal latently adopted the Republican persona of the 1980s. And that was a wise move: This was an incredibly popular way of thinking, especially (and surprisingly) among young males. One of the most popular sitcoms of the era was
Family Ties,
and the character that everyone loved was Alex P. Keaton, the savvy young Republican portrayed by Michael J. Fox. Alex was a “cool” conservative—in other words, he wasn't some unlikeable guy who whined about social morality. He was all about making money and out-flanking naive idealists; it seemed that Alex didn't so much hate liberals as he hated
hippies.
And it has always been fun to hate hippies. By the mid-1980s, flower children had inherited the establishment; that alone would have been enough to make teens bristle, but ex-hippies added an even more repulsive element: They constantly insisted that they were the most important generation that ever existed.
They
stopped the war;
they
had things they believed in;
they
changed the world. There is nothing more repulsive or condescending than a nostalgic Baby Boomer. The fact that Alex P. Keaton ridiculed their impractical, antiquated value system was reason enough to support the GOP. Sometimes I think people want to forget how cool it was to cop a conservative persona in 1988. I mean, that's pretty much what being “preppie” was all about: It was supposed to show that you were smart—or at least smart enough not to look stupid.

As this point, one can start to see (or maybe project) the cultural impact of the metal years. Something was going on here: People were using culture as a way to view themselves, just as they always had—but we were dealing with a new kind of iconography.

If you ask someone what's the first thing they remember about (or associate with) '80s metal bands, the answer is almost always “hair.” As I've mentioned, “hair metal” quickly became a pejorative term for heavy metal. The derivation of that trend mirrors the derivation of the music: A heavy rock god like Robert Plant had long hair, while a poofy glitter-pop guy like Marc Bolan
worried about how his hair looked. Fused together, you had the pop metal persona: Loud glam bands with miles of follicles and a desire to do something with it. And there's only so much you can do with long hair, assuming you're not a Rastafarian—you can braid it, or you can poof it up. Willie Nelson went one way, and Cinderella went the other.