Growing up, I would never have called myself a metal fan, but I was surrounded by it, and it turns out years later it seeped into my bloodstream, lurking, coated in hair spray and spandex.
I’m no metalhead, but music of my youth I once dismissed as crude and tacky I frequently find myself head-banging away to, here in the distant future where what’s cool and uncool seems to matter a lot less than it once did.
I liked either the most amiable of ‘80s pop – Men At Work, Billy Joel, Howard Jones – or proto-goth cool like Depeche Mode, The Cure and Peter Murphy. But you could not grow up in a high school in the 1980s and not be constantly exposed to the metal* – whether it was MTV, the radio, or all the “stoner” kids with Metallica logos sewn on the back of their jean jackets.
(*Yeah, there’s a million subsets of “heavy metal” from the opaque drone of sunn O))) to the cheery pop of Van Halen, but when I say “metal” here I’m mostly talking about the mainstream hair metal that dominated the day-glo mid-80s.)
There was no internet, so the world was smaller and a million skittering sub-subcultures didn’t yet exist. Much of the same culture washed over us all. You knew who Bon Jovi was unless you lived in Amish country. So I knew “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” “Welcome To The Jungle,” “Here I Go Again,” because who didn’t? And yeah, the sexist, ridiculous video for Mötley Crüe’s “Girls Girls Girls” in constant rotation on MTV did kind of make me feel funny inside.
Yet I imagined myself a broody intellectual and I’d never lose face by saying I was a fan of Guns ’N’ Roses or anything like that. I would pretend that I didn’t actually think that first chugging guitar line in Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name” was kind of cool.
Metal scared me, slightly, because I was told it was scary. Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, hulking and slathered in makeup, smashing down the door and yelling “We’re Not Gonna Take It”; Quiet Riot showing a man wrapped in a straitjacket and horrifying mask on the cover of the .45 single for “Cum On Feel The Noize.”
I remember someone smuggling a copy of Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark At The Moon album into a church youth group, of all places, and woo boy it was terrifying looking, Ozzy all kitted out like an Oliver Reed werewolf and demonic light surrounding him.
The kids who really, really liked Def Leppard and Poison and Anthrax were the jocks or the stoners, the outcasts or the bullies, and I was somewhere in-between hiding in the shadows with the theatre kids.
Fast-forward 30+ years or so, though, and I appreciate the glittery excess of all that uncool ‘80s metal more than I ever thought I would. It’s comic-book soundtrack music, with zero self-consciousness. In the recent strange years of pandemics and fascism and the internet imploding, a guy with a bit of makeup and poofy hair yelling about Satan is actually kind of comforting, a familiar old frenemy rather than the apocalypse in leather boots. It’s a chance to exhale and escape, from a real world that’s way madder than any satanic panic.
So I sometimes crank up Ozzy’s “Crazy Train,” GnR’s “Paradise City,” the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like A Hurricane,” Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” and I feel the years slip away and get what all the fuss was about. It’s not deep – it doesn’t get the same woozy feelings in me that the same era’s New Order’s “Age Of Consent” or Erasure’s “Victim Of Love” do, but it slices into some little primal part of my ears and makes me smile, a little. I was afraid of these guys? They’re just having a laugh with their guitars and their poses, eh?
While I’ll always love my Depeche and Coltrane and Bob Dylan and Flying Nun and all the other music I’ve fallen in love with over the years, I get now why you might wear a Metallica logo on your jean jacket.
Nik Dirga 