Heavy Mental

“I remember when metal was something you really had to search out, and now I hear it on car commercials.” – Trevor Dunn.

When I was a kid I loved Heavy Metal music.

It spoke to me, both musically and lyrically.

Much of what revolved around my turn table on the early and mid 80s was created by kids close to my own age who understood, accepted and amplified my teen angst.


Loving Heavy Metal was all that was required for membership in a social club that demanded nothing by way of athletic prowess, good grades or success with the ladies. It was a self imposed prison of anti-social behavior with a marketed look, attitude and soundtrack.

In short it was a marketing jackpot.


It boasted a fashion style that undeniably irritated parents, teachers and most other cliques. Like it's close cousin Punk Rock, the uniform of denim, leather, studs and black concert t-shirts was immediately identifiable, revealing that there was nothing accidental about it. Heavy Metal was a choice, and often a difficult one at that. No respectable cheerleader would be caught dead dating a headbanger -at least not from her own grade (or maybe even her own school). It might have been the long hair, the face jewelry or the none-too-fancy clothes, but it was a look that screamed "loser" to anyone not also into metal.

Heavy Metal had a reputation as music for morons, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I was a pretty smart kid. Many of my friends were as well. Some of them were athletic, too, and a few them weren't so bad looking, either. So what drew us? It was the rebellion. It was a safe form of rebellion. Punk Rock demanded mohawks and liberty spikes, so we tended to draw the line at the doc martens and leather bomber jackets. It wasn't until I moved to LA (still in my teens) that I embraced the colored hair and multiple body piercings that the folks back home associated with Punk.

Ironically, it was when Heavy Metal went from being a musical style to fashion statement that it had it's greatest success. That was the era of glam metal and it was big business. And I hated it, for it was exactly then that it lost its not only its identity but its relevance. Many critics point to the feminization of a predominantly macho music as its downfall, but I'm hard pressed to think of a trend whereby a higher quota of female fans limited the longevity. The cleaner, sexier lyrical direction was byproduct of the expansion of the market and the message changed. And believe it or not, there was a message. Metal had been carefully packaged audio rage,a nd now it was lifestyle music. When the central message changed from angsty-angsty to hanky-panky the end was nigh. The substance was gone, and it was only a matter of time before the early audience left, bringing the broader audience with them.

The metal kids were early adapters of grunge and the generation that followed split their time between alternative rock, goth, rap and industrial, which pulled no punches when it came to cursing on a track or making sexually explicit video clips to promote the records. And this wasn't the girls gone wild brand of titillation, this was deviant. Truth be told, there are great songs from this era, and there are even a handful of classics from the glam era, but there's a reason that every time I hear "I Wanna Be Somebody" by W.A.S.P., I want to bang my head. Even today. It's a song about feeling dissed and the frustration of not knowing what to do about it, and it's set to an aggressive beat and meter worthy of its anger. It may not have charted as high as Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive", but to the kids who listened to it back in the day, I guarantee it still resonates.

As with most musical movements, the easy to market, cleaner version of the real thing overtook the market share allowed for the entire genre, but all that superstar production and songwriting couldn't make up for the sonic power that a band full of ugly dudes could muster at will and on a shoestring budget. So what happened? it was replaced. In time a far more aggressive but commercial version would take over the radio airwaves. It was outright aggro.

From a practical standpoint, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" might as well be the same song as Alice Cooper's "I'm Eighteen". Both were teen anthems, and both charted well. But the great Heavy Metal anthems that appear between those two eras (namely the early seventies and early 90s) are a bit angrier if more focused and less ambiguous. It's that ambiguity that made jocks into Nirvana fans. But if you're looking for the prototypical anger anthem, that first W.A.S.P. record is full of them. Ranging from moderately to magnanimously misogynistic, the lyrical content has not aged well in all cases, but there's a purity to how uncompromising it is. "School Daze" is a desperate, violent take on Cooper's "School's Out" as filtered through the lens of the Asphalt Jungle, while "L.O.V.E. Machine" is seemingly a precursive Marilyn Manson rant as penned by J.G. Ballard, and twice as disturbing as that dyschordian marriage would suggest. But they're anthemic, too. They're not merely angsty, they're pissed, and they might have lost their marbles as a result of it.

W.A.S.P. was not of the old school Black Sabbath pedigree, and they weren't New Wave of British Heavy Metal. They were an LA shock-rock act that went way beyond the hard rock leanings of most of their peers (and I'll include Motley Crue among them) to produce honest to goodness heavy metal. W.A.S.P. were two rails over the line; unmistakeably, unapologetically heavy metal. Girls didn't like them. They were scary. Their songs weren't the play-evil cabaret of Alice Cooper; there was something genuinely upsetting and almost hateful about their lyrics. The song "Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)" is a first person narrative about rape. Geto Boys got nothing on Blackie Lawless. It goes beyond the "frighten mom and dad with crazy heavy metal" schtick, and becomes a very difficult song to defend, content-wise. But that's probably why it went gold back in the era of picture discs and PMRC controversy. It would be years before Death Metal bands could plunder waters this deep, and only the inner city rappers could match the negativity with as much panache -and far more success.

When I listen to the radio, and I hear the music that charts highly, and I'm talking about multi-platinum releases, I'm shocked that there is such a lack of melody, but it has occurred to me that this latest wave of bands is using the abrasiveness as the hook. They can't really compete with the old school on those same terms, so they've changed the game completely. It's no surprise that I don't identify with this new take on the old form, because I really don't identify with the old stuff anymore, either. It's the nostalgia that gets me, every time.

I guess that's why my brother still goes ape-shit when the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" comes on the radio.