Some men lead blessed lives. They discover early on where their desires lie, and they’re able to pursue them. Look at me. I’ve been lucky enough to figure out that writing is the thing I love most — the only thing I’m really good at, in fact — and I get to do it all the time.
Blackie Lawless divined from a young age that what he really wanted to do was to rock and roll all nite and party ev-e-ry day. But alas! for Paul Stanley already had that position monopolized, and Blackie, luckless, was left to shift for himself. The career that has led to Babylon, the latest disc from Blackie’s band W.A.S.P., has been a history of drift and dabbling — a fate not uncommon among those cheated of their true calling.
And yet Blackie Lawless, through no fault of his own, has had a greater cultural impact than his more-famous peers. Whilst earning his spurs as a shock-rocker in the mode of his boyhood friend Ace Frehley and his later protégé Nikki Sixx, young Blackie recorded a little ditty entitled “Animal (Fuck Like A Beast).” This tender love ballad was a nine day’s wonder in the mid-80s when it was cited by the PMRC crowd as an exemplar of the coarsening of pop music. In retrospect, they were right — but not in the way they thought they were. Now, Blackie did not testify at the infamous Senate hearings on raunch-pop, but via the industry’s panicked response to the unwanted government attention he helped to midwife a new Golden Age of vulgarity. (more…)
