METAL AS ANYTHING

Rip It Up, Issue 154, 1 May 1990, Page 14

METAL AS ANYTHING

My musical taste went kerrang the day I saw Axl Rose winched into latex trousers, caressing the . r • mike, his hair wild as a tomcat, screeching 'Welcome to the Jungle'. That poignant moment in the video when he arrives in LA as a seventeen year old, baseball cap on the back of his head, a bundle of frustrated desires from Indianna waiting to explode in LA. So romantic, rebellious and iconoclastic: a young man angry about nothing except his frustrated will to be wild.

This is the allure of the current 1 ; metal craze, which is not so much heavy as hard, fast and glamorous. • Heavy metal is an outmoded term, implying depressive black-out music * played by aged rock dinasours rising from some cellic swirl of doom and gloom. The new age of metal dawned in Los Angeles under harsh sun. It's been simmering there since the early eighties when bands like Motley Crue started slithering around in the cracks between punk and rock. A bit later boys like Axl

Rose arrived in town from hicksville USA, having nutured their musical.

sensibilities on a wicked combination of gospel choir singingjand Kiss (an oft cited inspiration for the glamorous new rockers). It's been written that the new age ’ of metal dates back to 1983 and the mega-success of Def Leppard's Pyromania. Seven million units later, | rival record companies were

wondering howthe hell they could duplicate the phenomena. How come this macho, blue collar male music was making it on the mainstream airwaves, appealing to girls as much as boys and establishing itself as the hottest vibe in the market? Lavish production values help and the glimpse of a softer underbelly to the hardrocking stance. New metal acts that have made the charts in the USA did so on the strength of a ballad (Skid Row's 'lB and Life',

Winger's 'Headed For A Heartache') while all the best hard rock albums ‘ feature at least one deeply moving song (Motley 'Without You', Axl Rose waxing lyrical on 'Sweet Child of Mine', Def Leppard pleading for 'Love and Affection'). The black American acts have got Soul, but nobody can croon abouttheir lonely heart as fetchingly as a white

American metaller. And then there's the matter of image and a swoon-worthy lead s singer. As any good girl with a weakness for bad boys in black leather trousers can tell you, there are few sights more moving than that of a long haired youth with cheekbones to die for singing his - lungs out about love lost and .f loneliness endured. The female fans' first impulse is to save him. Failing

i. I J ? that, she buys the record. | Skid Row's Sebastian Bach and Guns n'Roses' Axl Rose lead the pack when it comes to mad, bad,

beautiful lead singers. But what all; the bands in the new wave of metal share, the boy wonders anr/theold lags back from the dead (literally in Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue's case: 'Kickstart My Heart' is about the

attentions of a paramedic, note paramour) is an attitude that captures the true spirit of rock and roll. Which is equal parts juvenile delinquency, abject longing, and naked lust. New Metal appeals directly to the disaffected eighteen year old in all of us. It's energising. It's not destructive, suicidal or nasty (the thought for the day on the last page of US heavy ; metal mag Circus reads: "Remember, the superior person shows his character by lifting others, not putting them down"). But it does encourage the urge to party to the max. Of course boys just wanna have fun. But the best metal acts hit a - 'Zj-i

passionate, romantic nerve buried deep under all the excess. They can swing from a mood of wild abandon to a depth-charged acoustic ballad in the space of a fret change. - Quite frankly, at the end of a decade characterised by yuppie greed and hypocrisy, neo-conservatism and social ;

selfishness, American sleaze rock hits you like a blazing tonic. Especially now that we've exchanged the Me decade for the In the caring, sharing, environmentally conscious nineties, long haired .’ metallers hell bent on having a good time offer a bracing alternative to the self-consciously intelligent alternative scene.

Things do get a little sexist now and then but at least these men are on their knees bellowing that they want WOMEN because women are driving them CRAZY with DESIRE-. Which is extremely appealing to a woman turned off by her middle class male peers who, by the time they hit thirty, have lost most of their charm along with their hair and their waistlines. ■

Okay, I concede that Motley Crue's 'Girls, Girls, Girls'video indulged in an ugly dollop of gratuitous sexism (we got the idea

you liked the strip show, guys, you didn't have to carry the girls out over your shoulders at the end of it) but for really offensive emotional attitude, listen to Bros singing 'I Owe You Nothing'. Give me Motley Crue any day. Even their supposedly offensive lyrics have a good natured air of reckless bravado (seen at its silliest in that football chant for the bedroom 'She Goes Down').

The new metal isn't about macho piggery. It's fun and trashy, a pop version of a B-grade Roger Corman movie where the heaviest thing on anybody's mind is a hangover. The emotion is melodramatic, the . r ■. menace is cartoon and if the men's intentions are less than honourable . > « sometimes, well, at least they're being up front about it. Scratch the. surface of your average, achingly sensitive 'alternative band' member and you'll find a libido that beats as strongly for Kylie or Madonna as the next man's. : Anyway, just how macho can a man be when he's wearing more . hairspray and jewellery than you .are? Squeezed into tight leather i trousers, shirts unbuttoned to the naval, hair down to here, today's i heavy metal men are tease artists whose every move is calculated to I turn women on. Music to a liberated woman's eats indeed.