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Fargo Rock City
HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW:
Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City
As experienced by Marc Horton (January 2003)
I've always been slightly ashamed of the irrevocable
fact of my heavy metal adolescence. The closet has
been purged of all vestiges of those halcyon days (the
Queensryche T-shirts, the denim jacket with "Megadeth"
etched fastidiously in magic marker on the back). My
musical tastes have veered, often schizophrenically,
in every direction AWAY from anything with so much as
even a guitar solo in it, as a reaction to those
years. Despite all this, I have lived in acute fear
of certain facts from my past coming to light in the
company of those who would attempt to use it to ill
ends. Those years of paranoia and darkness, however,
have come to an end, thanks to Fargo Rock City. Hallelujah- I have learned to embrace my heavy metal past.
Flashback. 1986, the summer before 6th grade. My
family moves to South Georgia swampland after a
childhood of quasi-military-brat transience abroad.
My neighbor, Brian Brown, plays me Twisted Sister,
Cinderella and Motley Crue cassettes, and I come to
understand that in America, it is not cool to listen to
the same music that the adults in your family listen
to: my Lionel Richie and Boney M tapes were history.
We spend evenings creating a pirate radio station of
sorts. With one boombox, we are DJ's, listening to our
favorite cuts from the above bands as well as
making up skits and fake ads with all the pith and
passion that our 12-year old hearts could summon. And
on the other boombox, we record the whole durned mess.
I had not thought of this particular episode in many a
moon, but after reading Fargo Rock City, I was
scrambling around in the basement at the old place,
trying to find one of the handful of tapes we recorded
that summer. As I look at my CD's and records from
where I sit now, I'm trying to think of the last time
the simple act of listening to music brought me such
unadulterated joy, liberated from the fear of being
judged by my peers. The times are few, and they are,
as they say, far in between.
Now, I understand full well that a book about the
history and culture of hair metal is going to be a
tough sell. Never has a genre been more readily
dismissed out of hand than that period and style from
the mid-80's to the early-90's, when sleek dinosaurs
like Poison and Guns N'Roses stalked the charts and
airwaves. But Klosterman has done the unthinkable by
producing an intelligent, very funny, and most
dangerous of all, completely accurate observation of
what it meant (he will show you that it DID mean
something to a great many of us) to be a fan of
hair metal.
In the guise of a memoir about growing up in "rural
North Dakota"--as opposed to "urban North
Dakota?"-- Klosterman has captured the essence of
music as
an experience, a place to go outside of your own
particularly uncool reality, where Kiss lyrics serve
as moral guideposts in times of emotional and
financial ruin, where a slow dance with your
10th-grade crush punctures the time/space continuum,
where a Lita Ford cassette rescues you from the
banalities of basketball camp.
(One of the most prized
objects that I own, I must confess, is a letter I once
received from Eric Carr, the drummer who replaced
Peter Criss in the makeup-less Kiss of the '80's, after
writing to the Kiss Army. His advice to me, to "keep
rockin', drummer guy," proved to be nothing less than
totally inspirational throughout the years, despite my
never having actually taken up the drums, as I had
said I hoped to in the letter. I remember being stuck
in traffic, and very downhearted, when I heard on the
radio that both he and Freddie Mercury had died on the
same day.)
Klosterman is at his funniest and feistiest however
when it comes to the details, and God help him, he
demonstrates an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the
historical minutiae of the hair metal phenomenon as
well the attendant pedantic and semantic issues. My
only criticism of the book--and it's not much of
one--is that there is no index, which makes finding
that particular ridiculous bit about the Crue, or that
other hilarious quote from Alice Cooper, a task. And
it only became a task for me because I couldn't help
but try to make everyone I knew read the damn book.
But luckily for the reader, the gems are practically
on every page. Of course, the issue of why Van Halen
was a glam rock band (and Def Leppard was NOT) and not
just another rock 'n' roll band is handled with aplomb:
"...listening to Clapton is like getting a
sensual massage from a woman you've loved for the past
ten years; listening to Van Halen is like having the
best sex of your life with three foxy nursing students
you met at a Tastee Freez."
Also, the table listing non-metal songs that were
decidedly cool enough be enjoyed by those within the
glam rock subculture, and the reasons for their
popularity, is a revelation: "Going Back to Cali," by
LL Cool J, for example, was allowed because "somebody
saw the video and wouldn't shut up about it." "So
Alive," by Love & Rockets, made the cut by virtue of
its being "introduced by nondescript 'cool kid' from
neighboring town." His scope extends to the larger
picture, as well. As to the contention that the music
of Judas Priest convinced two Nevada teens to kill
themselves, Klosterman offers, "I listened to (the
album in question) Stained Class, in 1985, at a
friend's house, and that didn't even convince me to
buy the goddamn record."
He makes a valid case, ultimately, against the
stigmatization of hair metal as 'stupid,' by measuring
that argument against the other pervasive criticism,
that it's offensive because it's 'sexist'; surely,
they can't be both, he asks, because if it's not art,
then it can't be offensive (i.e. it can't matter, or
have any sort of real effect). Besides, if you were
20 or younger, and you weren't listening to Poison or
Guns N'Roses in 1988, you were probably listening to
Rick Astley or Milli Vanilli. Give or take a couple
of goth kids, that is. Isn't that more unforgivable?
It's easy to forget, in the years since Nirvana drove
the last nail into the coffin of hair metal how
popular the stuff was. Even if you've never made out
to Warrant in the cab of a Chevy truck, it would be
hard to dispute his claim that "if your first
experience with finger-banging took place between
August of 1989 and March of 1990, it probably happened
while you were listening to 'Heaven'." As for me, I
saw a pair of female breasts for the first time at a
Kiss show in 1989, at which the entire front row was
made up of women who, I remember thinking, seemed to
like the band even more than I did. I may not have
known (or cared) at the time, whether the breasts were
real but I suppose I want to believe that my heavy
metal experience was.
At first, I was taken by how
much Klosterman's experience seemed to mirror my own,
in the sort of way that those boys crying at Morrissey
concerts seem to feel that every word he sang was
coming straight from their own lives. After all, I
went to basketball camp too. And I also have never
heard the Tygers of Pan Tang, supposed seminal New
Wave of British Heavy Metal band; I, like Chuck,
never had long hair but longed for the power which it
seemed to grant. Now, the more I think about it, I'm
just pissed that I didn't write the book. Damn you,
Chuck Klosterman. Damn you to hell.
Also see our other review of Klosterman's book, IV
Check out the rest of PERFECT SOUND FOREVER
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