Once upon a time, rock & roll was thought of as a young man’s game, far too alive and dangerous for anyone older than, say, 30. And really, the early rock records make a convincing argument for this school of thought; the arrangements might seem a little timid compared to the stuff we’re used to hearing now, but they hum with the unique energy and excitement of youth. Elvis and Buddy Holly are superficially square by today’s standards, but their music speaks to a resistance against the status quo that leaked out of rock music sometime after John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song” and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” took the music’s rebellious shtick to its logical conclusion (and far beyond).
What we learned, though, is that the music was deeper and more absorbent than anyone could have guessed; rock eventually grew to include dozens of subgenres, and the artists who came up trying to tear down the old guard eventually joined it, finding their own music railed against (and ultimately canonized) by younger generations. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen happen countless times since rock’s beginnings, and it’s extended to R&B, hip-hop, and even electronica. The music, to everyone’s seeming surprise, always manages to expand and deepend along with the perspectives of its aging artists. It can be a little depressing sometimes — poor Pete Townshend and his public death wish — but it’s contributed to some of the best music of the last quarter century, late-period Rolling Stones albums notwithstanding.
The one genre that can’t seem to wrap its head around aging, though, is hair metal; despite the continued touring power/absurd, cockroach-like persistence of bands like Poison and Warrant, none of the bands that were abusing spandex, hairspray, and amps in the ’80s have been able to figure out how to make the transition into middle age. It’s understandable — more than any other genre, hair metal was, at its peak, preoccupied with cheap sex and substance abuse, not necessarily in that order, and as awesome as that stuff sounds when it’s being shouted about by twentysomethings, it’s sad and a little scary when folks in their 40s and 50s do it, particularly if they have the grizzled, slightly dazed look of people who have been there and done that an unhealthy number of times. Any new post-grunge album from an older hair metal act seems to deal with this problem in one of two ways: either by embracing the genre’s cornball underpinnings and trying to quasi-ironically recreate the old sound, or by trying to copy trendier, younger metal acts. Either strategy has been known to yield limited results, but more often than not, they just leave the artist in question with something to hold down the tablecloth at the merch table. (more…)
