Fargo Rock City (16 page)

For a group like Cinderella, the failures were all too obvious. The video for “Nobody's Fool” has the band performing amid bright pastel lighting (one assumes this is supposed to seem surreal), but the subplot revolves around a girl who runs home and takes a nap. If this is supposed to indicate why she is not a fool, I don't get it. The clip for “You Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone)” has the group playing instruments around a lake (or possibly a loch); the majority of the footage frames Tom Keifer plunking away at a piano while the sun sets behind him, and it ends up looking like a promotional clip for a travel agent.

Even worse was “Coming Home,” a minifilm about a mysterious man (probably an aspiring soap opera actor) who rides a motorcycle to “come home” to his blond love interest. Judging from the terrain and the copious windmills, the lonely blonde vixen evidently lives in Kansas. The narrative of the video is a rote replication of the lyrics, a technique that almost never works. Poison's “Fallen Angel” tried the same approach, and it failed just as horribly.

In “Fallen Angel,” a teenage girl makes an announcement at supper: “I've decided to move [
dramatic pause
] … to California [
longer dramatic pause
] … and I want to leave on Friday.” A few seconds later, she gets off a bus in L.A. and immediately becomes a whore. Bret Michael explains that she's just a small-town girl with her whole life packed in a suitcase by her knees, and she's
rolling the dice with her life. At the conclusion of the video, another small-town girl gets off at the same bus stop, and one assumes she is destined for the same slutty future. Actually, this video may have been a form of subliminal marketing for the band. It seemed to be delivering a peculiar rock message: “Stay with your parents! Never go anywhere! Stay in your bedroom and listen to more Poison tapes!” It's kind of like the ending of
The Wizard of Oz.

However, Poison did make one wonderful concept video, even though its greatness might have happened by accident. When Poison released “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” to MTV audiences, the goal was to show their fans what “life on the road” was like. A decade later, the result is kind of spooky, especially when viewed against Poison's ultimate collapse. Today, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” seems like a sobering examination of Poison's alcoholism, and it deserves a compliment few rock videos can be granted—
it looks real.
There is a shot of bassist Bobby Dahl being carried off the stage by a roadie, and there is no question about the validity of his intoxication. Retrospectively (and perhaps unintentionally), “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” has become a conceptual artifact of the glamorous, pathetic existence of a metal band embracing the height of its self-indulgence (in other words, the other side of “Pour Some Sugar On Me” and “Paradise City”). The sunken, drunken eyes of Michaels say a lot about rock 'n' roll: The dudes in Poison were famous, but they still lived like jobless guys who never made it out of Pennsylvania. Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.

The metal bands who consistently made the best concept videos were the groups that truly understood their audience. As I grow older, it's getting harder for me to remember who and what I could relate to when I was fifteen, but I bet it was Skid Row. Though they did make at least one clip that was a literal depiction of a song (“18 and Life”), two of their other early vids were brilliant examples of the less-is-more philosophy of filmmaking. The core shot in “Youth Gone Wild” was just a kid
running
—you
can't see his face and you don't see where he's going, but it seems obvious that he's running
away
from something. “Piece of Me” has the same aggressive aesthetic, and the images go straight for the adrenal gland: It's footage of a particularly violent concert, evidently a riot going on outside a Skid Row venue. I suspect the director staged the whole thing, because I've never been to a rock show policed by storm troopers and attack dogs, but it looks remarkably plausible. There's actually a great deal of creative tension in “Piece of Me.”

All three of these videos were shot in black and white, and they provide an amazingly insightful portrait of Skid Row's audience: Even though they had a cute lead singer and a bunch of radio songs, Skid Row was a band for the bad kids. These were not the kinds of fans who spent $80 on leather pants, $11 on hair mousse, and still got a CD player for Christmas; these were the kids who wore denim jackets and wrote “Skid Row” on the back with a black Magic Marker. These were the kids who stole cheap beer and actually got in real trouble. These videos show why Skid Row could release a ballad like “I Remember You” and still tour with Pantera (which they did in 1992). They spoke to the people who felt Skid Row was part of their own identity.

The opposite of the Skid's pseudo-realism were all the postapocalyptic videos that spoke to absolutely no one, but still succeeded on the strength of absurd entertainment value. For whatever the reason, Mel Gibson's 1981 film
The Road Warrior
influenced metal video-making in a major way. Videos from two high-profile releases from '83 (
Shout at the Devil
and
Lick It Up
) constructed fantasy worlds that appeared to be set in postnuclear wastelands where it's always very windy and all the women wear ripped clothes.

Mötley Crüe's “Looks That Kill” stars a Xena-esque female character who emancipates a corral of strippers, much to the chagrin of the Crüe (who were thereby forced to call on the power of Satan by joining fists and creating a fiery pentagram). Mötley's “Too Young to Fall in Love” was more of an Asian kung-fu thriller (best remembered for Tommy Lee spitting out a mouthful of rice),
but its
Escape from New York
vibe was very much the same. Meanwhile, KISS sold themselves as warriors who walked the earth for no reason in particular. “Lick It Up,” the first video that showed KISS without makeup, suggests that futuristic women will live underground and eat navy rations—but only KISS can help them rock! Its artistic companion, “All Hell's Breaking Loose,” evidently takes place at the same time and place but also includes a lot of women fencing.

To be honest, my favorite postapocalyptic video was probably Lita Ford's “Kiss Me Deadly.” The entire clip was basically just Lita, writhing in a cavern after the world had been destroyed. Luckily, the holocaust that prefaced “Kiss Me Deadly” did not seem to affect Lita's bosom, which always seemed on the brink of escaping from her leather corset.

The problem with metal concept videos was pretty simple: They didn't have a concept. Very often, a director tried to be inexplicable in the hope that it would seem innovative. Kix's “Don't Close Your Eyes” has lots of shots of trees set against weird, muted lighting, but nothing much happens. White Lion made three videos like this. Winger's “Headed for a Heartbreak” is shot in black and white, but it's mostly images of Kip Winger trying to look forlorn; if they hadn't included a few extraneous shots of some unknown woman's cleavage, “Headed for a Heartbreak” would resemble the opening sequence for a gay porn flick.

But not everybody failed. The Cult beat the odds and got it right. They were always a little more artsy than their contemporaries, and their videos showed it. The action is pretty subdued in “Fire Woman,” but it still seemed cool; it opens with a replication of the
Sonic Temple
album cover (smart marketing, boys), and it features Ian Astbury banging a tambourine like Linda McCartney. “Edie (Ciao Baby)” is far more stylized than the vast majority of hard rock vids, almost akin to an INXS video.

Van Halen was another who made this work, this time with “Hot for Teacher,” a perfect fantasy with a strangely disturbing sense of humor. However, I must begrudgingly concede that the
all-time best concept video was Metallica's “One.” It was a big deal when Metallica made this clip, because they had never done a video before and usually implied they never would. “As for a video for MTV, there's no thoughts about it,” drummer Lars Ulrich said in the summer of 1988. “Having one is pretty useless anyway.
Headbanger's Ball
is a fucking joke.” But when the band finally sold out (read: got smart) and caved into MTV's begging, they made a visual composition that was credible, intelligent, and downright spooky. Using footage from the 1971 movie
Johnny Got His Gun,
Metallica created a seven-minute, twenty-four-second masterpiece that far superseded the original film. The images are now totally familiar to anyone who follows hard rock; a soldier loses his arms, legs, sight, hearing, and voice. What's interesting is that if you have not seen this video, it's almost impossible to understand what “One” (the song) is supposed to be about—but once you
have
seen the video, it doesn't seem like the song could be about anything else.

For a lot of purists, that's exactly what's bad about music videos: They stop people from creating their own perception of what a piece of music means. By now, even the interpretation of sound has become a socialized process. Without a doubt, the video age is the worst thing that ever happened to teenage creativity. But—at least in the example of “One”—it's hard to imagine how any kid could come up with anything better.

Whitesnake's “Here I Go Again” is America's No. 1 single, ousting Whitney Houston's “Didn't We Almost Have It All.”

Intelligent metal fans always felt a grudging sense of respect for Whitesnake.

Whitesnake was not very cool. This was mostly because they were fronted by the generally unappetizing David Coverdale, the male slut who replaced Ian Gillan in Deep Purple from 1973 to 1976. Coverdale was from a bygone era, and—no matter how hip and popular his band became—that fact was always a little too clear. Whitesnake was overtly constructed, and unabashedly so (especially when axe mercenary Steve Vai joined the group). They had no grit.

Coverdale was always accused of ripping off Robert Plant; Plant himself was particularly willing to rail about this similarity. Indirectly, Jimmy Page made the same comparison when he created Coverdale-Page in 1992, one of the worst experiments in rock history and assumedly just a way to goad Plant into recording
Unledded.
For all practical purposes, Coverdale was always a shameless Plant imitator—but sometimes it worked. “Still of the Night” was the Gen X “Immigrant Song.” It was hard to resist a lot of Whitesnake's songs.

Their biggest hit (and their only No. 1 single) was “Here I Go Again.” This song is interesting for a couple of reasons, but mostly for its video. Though the lyrics of the song are about forging
one's own path and being a loner, the director of the video interpreted the song far differently: He seemed to think this song was about watching a woman trying to fuck a car. Luckily, this was 1987, and Coverdale happened to be dating Tawny Kitaen. Ms. Kitaen isn't a particularly skilled thespian, but she is very,
very
good at humping the hood of a Jaguar. “Here I Go Again” almost immediately became the most popular video on MTV. Coverdale and Kitaen would later split (surprise!), and Tawny claimed that her car-fucking was the primary reason Whitesnake became commercially popular and that she deserved a huge chunk of the back royalties. She may have a decent argument.

That video is kind of a microcosm for the '80s metal mantra—
everything
was about sex, even when it wasn't. It was certainly the genre's most pervasive cliché and its most maligned Achilles' heel. The element of sexuality was what set the glam aesthetic apart from other forms of loud rock 'n' roll.
Rolling Stone
writer Kim Neely had a firsthand look at two styles of hard rock (she first broke both Guns N' Roses and Pearl Jam to mainstream readers), and when I asked her what
really
separated '87 metal from '93 grunge, she said it was basically fashion—but she wasn't referring to clothes. She meant a sort of intellectual fashion: “Every style of music has its own philosophy and ethics. Heavy metal's philosophy was about getting as wasted as possible and walking into a room with a bimbo on both of your arms. All the bands that came out of the Seattle scene wanted the exact opposite of that. But the audience for both kinds of music was basically the same.”

Hair metal's relationship with sex is pretty overt (at least on the surface). It continues to this day, at least in certain subcultures. There's still at least one place where '80s metal is thriving—strip clubs. “Girls Girls Girls” will always be in heavy rotation at any nudie bar, just like “Monster Mash” will find its way onto AM radio every Halloween. Both lyrically and sonically, glam metal is the sensible accompaniment for removing one's pants for money.

One of the many negative synonyms for '80s metal was “cock rock,” and the term is still thrown around whenever someone
wants to attack any masculine genre of music. A few especially impolite artists, like Gene Simmons of KISS, actually embrace that moniker (he claims a good rock guitar player “plays [the instrument] with his dick”). That kind of attitude is mostly unleashed for effect; it basically stares musicologists in the face and says, “Okay, Poindexter—tell me what you think
that
means.” It's really more of a sociopolitical argument (albeit a pretty primitive one).