July 17: Ranking the top five inspirational lyrics from 80's hair metal acts
Well this will be a toughie. I want it known that my pontifications should not be taken as authoritative. I have a very limited knowledge of 80s hair metal. Growing up, I was a fan of Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister and Quiet Riot. I was a nominal fan of Motley Crue but their degenerate drug-fuelled lifestyle totally turned me off. I know next to nothing of KISS, RATT, Bon Jovi, Poison, or any of those spandex wearing dudes who helped keep the hairspray industry afloat while Reagan was president.
I share the same name as Aerosmith's frontman, Steven Tyler, but I can't say I'd look to him for life lessons. Pretty much all of the songs on their late 80s offerings, Permanent Vacation and Pump, were about sex. Same could be said about Alice Cooper in that time period. That bugged me. Before that, Alice was about ghost and goblins and being crazy. Now he was trying to be like Aerosmith. I liked some of the songs from that era but I still felt that he sold out. I caught his concert at the Saddledome in Calgary on January 16. 1990, and although I enjoyed it, I can't say that I had witnessed prime Alice.
Alright, so let's head into the murky depths of Mr. Brain and see what we can pull out.
5. Your Filthy Little Mouth by David Lee Roth.
Yeah, I know this album was recorded in 1993 but I'm going to allow it for a number of reasons. The first is that for much of the 80s, Diamond Dave was occupied by Van Halen and was required to write songs that were consistent with the band's image. He embarked on a solo career in 1985 with an EP of cover songs before launching his first LP, 1987's Eat Em and Smile, as a bona fide solo artist. The charting single from that album, Yankee Rose, sounded like a typical rock and roll song - some dude talking about how hot some chick is. In fact, the song was about the Statue of Liberty, which had just undergone some restoration work. Diamond Dave employed a double entendre, singing what rock and roll is (usually) all about while paying tribute to an American icon.
By the time Your Filthy Little Mouth came out, Diamond Dave stopped being an arena-filling megastar and started being more of an acquired taste. He was probably cool with that because there was a brooding intelligence lurking underneath the vapid party-party songs he penned throughout the 80s. When I read his biography, Crazy from the Heat, I knew I was in for much more than a laundry list of conquests and stoner stories. This cat had things to say about world politics, growing up Jewish, and the state of Israel. I respected him. I still do.
Which brings us back to Your Filthy Little Mouth, written at a time when youthful idealism was duking it out with the pragmatic cynicism of middle age. In no Big Ting, he wails "they finally tore the old schoolhouse down/ forever gone my history/ Yeah, what used to be. And now when I go drivin by and point to where I used to go to school I'm pointing at an A&P."
But my favourite head-turning bit from that album comes from the track You're Breathing It, which is about living in a big city as society becomes more and more lawless. After a few minutes of talking about anarchy in the streets (Dante's Inferno meets the Price is Right) Diamond Dave drops this bombshell: "And if you think that violence never solved a thing, I differ. It solved some crackhead dealer down on 14th Street much quicker."
Mic drop.
And then there's this modern rephrasing of the Apostle Paul: "And I'd love to talk philosophy but I gotta take a piss. Man, that philosophy, it runs right through ya..."
4. Home Sweet Home by Motley Crue
This is the only song by Motley Crue that I like. I remember listening to their Theatre of Pain album when I was a teenager. I remember not really liking it but thinking that I had to listen to it because it was what other kids my age listened to so I had better listen to it or they might think I was weird. Seriously, I had no interest in smoking in the boys room. I thought cigarettes were disgusting (I still think that) and I further thought that 13-year-olds who smoke in school bathrooms were not little rebels, they were dummies playing fast and loose with their health.
Motley Crue was all about getting drunk and getting stoned and getting laid night after night after night, all while wearing clothes that looked like they were designed by someone who thought he was simultaneously dressing Victoria's Secret models and extras from Mad Max. As such, Home Sweet Home is the most honest and vulnerable these four dudes ever wrote. It teaches the same thing that the Bible teaches - the booze and the dope and the groupies ain't gonna give you any everlasting joy.
"My heart's like an open book for the whole world to read. Sometimes nothing keeps me together at the seams." So the singer wants to go home where he can drop the rockstar pretence and be accepted by the people who really know him. "I'm on my way, just set me free, home sweet home."
3. The Price by Twisted Sister
Showbiz dreams - any dream, for that matter - requires sacrifice. Twisted Sister started out like any non-manufactured band. They were unknowns. Slowly, very slowly, they built a following until the massive success of their 1984 album, Stay Hungry. The cover of that album showed lead singer, Dee Snider, dressed as the world's scariest transvestite and getting ready to chow down on a bone. The casual observer would think that Stay Hungry was about cannibalism. In fact, Stay Hungry referred to staying focused on what you want to accomplish.
If anything, it's a theme throughout the album, which is actually pretty positive and almost Christian (it's certainly more Christian than a lot of the CCM garbage you might hear where Jesus is recast as a boyfriend rather than king/saviour/judge.) The Price was written by Dee Snider after a telephone conversation with his wife, who had reminded him that he had been on the road for so long that he hadn't seen his family in months. "That's the price you pay," someone said and Mr. Snider wrote this song immediately.
"How long I have wanted This dream to come true. And as it approaches I can't believe I'm through. I've tried, Oh, how I've tried. For a life, yes a life I thought I knew. Oh it's the price we gotta pay And all the games we gotta play Makes me wonder if it's worth it to carry on. 'Cause it's a game we gotta lose, Though it's a life we gotta choose And the price is our own life until it's done."
Kind of reminds you what Oscar Wilde once said. "There are two great tragedies in life. One is not getting what one wants; the other is getting it."
Oscar Wilde is talking about the big things in life, of course. (This morning, I wanted a bowl of shredded wheat for breakfast. I got what I wanted and I don't feel all that devastated.) When you pursue something, you give a lot of stuff up, and maybe you'll realize that when you're standing on the podium.
2. Love's a bitch by Quiet Riot
This may be the stupidest and most indefensible entry on this list, but I mention it here because I first heard this song around the time I was losing my innocence and started discovering girls.
Love's a bitch is the last song on Quiet Riot's 1983 album, Metal Health.
Loves got me by the ass again
I've been in love since I don't know whenI keep a-runnin' and I don't know why
Love's givin' me a crock of lies
Out of breath and I'm out of time
Misery is what I find
See, at the time, I didn't understand how love could bring you misery. I had my parents, still together after 13 years, and THEY loved each other. Ditto for my grandparents, aunts and uncles. My world was a world of TV commercial pepsidented love. I didn't even know what divorce was until I was 13.
So then Shteevie becomes a teenager and - miracle of miracles - some girls actually want to date me. Like all junior high romances, they didn't last. At that age, you're a commodity, not a person. You'll get dumped for the silliest reasons, like you don't wear your backpack properly or you like Duran Duran. In my case, it got back to the girl that some people considered me a geek because of a lame air band I did in Grade 7. That was enough to make her call it quits with me.
I didn't shed any tears over the demise of that 48-hour relationship, but I found a cure in music. If heavy metal bards are good for anything, it's helping teenagers get over heartache and Kevin DuBrow of Quiet Riot's hyperbolic Love's a Bitch, for me, hit the nail on the proverbial head.
1. Burn in hell by Twisted Sister
Of all the songs on Stay Hungry, this was the one that made my mother nervous. The album came out in the midst of the 1980s Satanism scare and there was a tendency to think that this song glorified devil worship and gave the middle finger to the Bible. My brother used to torment my mom by singing the chorus out loud, spelling out the word 'hell' instead of saying it, as if that divorced the song from its black magic.
The song made me nervous too. I would often skip it while rotating between Stay Hungry's two most popular songs, We're Not Gonna Take It and I Wanna Rock. But this was the era before CDs and since one song was the second track on side one and the other was the first track on side two, that involved a whole lot of fast forwarding and cassette flipping.
Then the day came when the family went to see Pee Wee's Big Adventure. There's a scene near the end where Pee Wee Herman is running through a movie studio and one of the scenes he interrupts just happens to be Twisted Sister making a video for - you guessed it - Burn in Hell.
I reasoned that if Burn in Hell was appropriate for a PG movie, maybe I should give it another listen. This I did when I found myself in my bedroom with no one else in the house. I loaded Stay Hungry into the ghetto blaster that I'd received as a Christmas present in 1983, cued it to Burn in Hell, and then started to listen. I felt like I was about to commit a mortal sin.
Instead, I got the exact same theology of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol. Ebeneezer Scrooge was a transvestite.
Comments
Post a Comment