hair metal
- Thread starter maxi
- Start date
mixed_biscuits
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germaphobian
Well-known member
I read Mark Langean's Sing Backwards and Weep while ago which made me realise that the fuckedupness of the grunge people went well beyond ordinary rock'n'roll excess, it wasn't even rock'n'roll excess gone out of contol - like Elvis eating chocolate cake with mayo and shitting himself to death or something like that. No, it was multi-millionaires injecting heroin in their ballsacks with rusty needles, hanging out with diseased street people, stealing propane tanks for scrap metal. Just a really bizzare, over-the-top mode of self-destruction. Irrational!
germaphobian
Well-known member
Yeah, he shows up in that book quite a bit. But there was different episode where Mark Lanegan moves in with this crackhead lady who has chemical burns on her face and becomes her pimp, but the she disappears and is later found dead - chopped to bits by some local serial killer. And then he gets depressed and has to steal scrap metal to buy heroin to inject in his balls, because rest of his body is all messed up. The whole book is basically collage of those kind of stories. Those people were insane, truly ill.
maxi
Well-known member
sounds like the people in dante's inferno who are punished by having wild dogs chase them through the wood of suicides and tear them limb from limb - the 'squanderers' who don't quite kill themselves but destroy their own property and environment just for the hell of it
version
Well-known member
A band like Poison being wildly successful in the '80s seems bizarre when you consider how homophobic that era was. Obviously they're a straight band, "cock rock" and all that, but you'd have thought the look alone would draw a lot of flack from mainstream America - maybe it did and I'm unaware.
I think of GnR as one of the bands that moved music away from hair metal.
The first time I heard The Cult was when Fire Woman was being heavily played on the radio. I hated it, and I couldn't understand why so many people I thought that were into otherwise interesting music were going to see them play.
edit: I also wouldn't consider them hair metal, but probably more like another one of the bands that helped kill hair metal when they became popular here.
I don't remember any of those bands drawing any real flack for their look.
There was also a popular overtly Christian band that adopted that whole glam hair metal look - Stryper.
edit: there was school trip that one of my classes took where we somehow ended up in the same hotel lobby as Poison, and I remember all of the girls being really excited about getting their autographs
other_life
bioconfused
it's kind of like they castrated the Arcadian Swag of the 70s precisely by jacking it and playing an inverse palette-swapped version of the music (to clarify: making homo aesthetics sexless to signal homophobia)
other_life
bioconfused
grunge is the hair metal massive paying karmic debt for What they did to Glam
not really - there is the glam side, and there are all sorts of pop metal/hard rock bands during that time.