When I was in high school, back in the postpunk Silver Age, there was an unspoken hierarchy of stoners expressed in their hard-rock allegiances. The Alpha Heshers had their holy trinity of Zeppelin, Van Halen, and Hendrix; those who fancied themselves intellectuals added Pink Floyd to the mix, while your would-be mystics opted for the Doors, but mostly it was those three. The second-tier burnouts gravitated towards Blue Oyster Cult, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest — bands that rocked hard, but with strong iconography and an element of wit. The real bottom feeders, though, listened to Dio.
(I should note that in high school, I was listening to Big Country, Billy, Idol, and the Police; and there’s only one of those that I regret today.)
You can see why teenagers are so attracted to heavy metal. There’s a huge cultural pressure on adolescents to engage with pop music at a time when they still lack confidence in their own aesthetic judgments. Absent an effective critical toolset for evaluating the art, teenagers (often unconsciously) latch instead onto extramusical factors when choosing music to consume, music that will effectively present their identities. Album art and videos assume an exaggerated importance; chart positions, perceived popularity (or lack thereof) among one’s peers, perceived acceptability (or lack thereof) among authority figures — all come into play. (more…)
I never watched a full episode of The Osbournes, one of the first reality programs to focus on famous people and their everyday lives, but it was hard to escape its net: Ozzy’s daughter Kelly recorded an album for Epic despite limited musical skills; his son, Jack, appeared in a few episodes of Dawson’s Creek despite nonexistent acting skills; his wife, Sharon, got her own daytime talk show despite having trouble completing a sentence without the F word; and Ozzy himself, a heavy-metal icon who once fronted the legendary Black Sabbath, found a new career as a mumbling, shuffling punchline who was (mostly) in on the joke. The entire family even had a cameo in the third Austin Powers movie. It was too much too soon, so when The Osbournes finally stopped production in 2005, it felt like it’d been on the air much longer.
Hey, Popsters! You’re back for more weekly mixing fun, eh? Good. I’m glad you’re here, and I hope this week’s mix starts to spark some discussion about when a particular genre of music surfaced from the underground and became mainstreamed. You’ll probably quibble with my choices, but that’s okay, because it’s tough to find one song that basically says, “This is the definitive point where, say, hard rock, grunge, ’90s bubblegum pop, new wave, or disco started.”