Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Even when he softened his religious stance, Dylan found it no easier to fit into the rock mainstream. ‘If you want to sell records4, I’m told you’ve gotta make videos’, Dylan noted in 1985, as if he had just stumbled into the new decade. ‘I know they’re thought of as an art form, but I don’t think they are.’ Twenty years earlier, documentary-maker Donn Pennebaker had shot a film clip to accompany Dylan’s song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, which had widely been acclaimed as the first music video.fn1 Perhaps this convinced Dylan to quip ‘Anyone can make a video.’ But his early efforts to conform with the expectations of the video industry proved him wrong. The clip for his 1985 release ‘Tight Connection’ revealed a man incapable of feigning basic emotional responses in front of a camera, barely able to walk convincingly, and ill at ease even when holding a guitar.

  What had transformed a man with one of rock’s most arresting visual images into a bumbling, self-conscious fool? The demands of a simple abbreviation: MTV (Music Television). On 1 August 1981, it was launched via a small number of US cable networks, presenting nothing but music videos, linked by VJs (video jockeys). As outlets already existed around the world for promotional clips, especially in territories far removed from North America and Europe, many pop acts were accustomed to shooting low-budget films when they issued a new record. MTV, which erupted into a national phenomenon, and was then duplicated across the globe, turned this choice into a necessity. The network established itself as the fastest and most influential method of record promotion, tilting the balance of power within the record industry from radio to television and – more significantly, perhaps – from aural to visual.

  It was quickly apparent that the television camera demanded different qualities from those that would pass muster on the concert stage. Given music of sufficient power, and that indefinable quality known as charisma, rock bands such as the Eagles (whose first collection of Greatest Hits remains one of the best-selling albums of all time) could fill vast arenas whilst standing stock-still on stage – an occasional grimace passing for presentation skills. Even after the advent of MTV, Bob Dylan would perform in almost total darkness, sometimes with a hoodie pulled over his head to ensure that there was no danger of being seen by the audience.

  None of this worked on MTV (although in Dylan’s case it might have made for more compelling viewing than his mid-1980s efforts at acting). The network returned the increasingly adult domain of rock to its original teenage audience, whose basic requirement was visual stimulation. Simple clips of artists miming to their records quickly exhausted their novelty, and so video directors were required to concoct increasingly ambitious dramas to illuminate their stars. Clips needed storyboards and visual effects, just like the movies – with the difference that directors had only three or four minutes in which to capture the aura of an artist, ensuring that subtlety was sidelined in favour of broad strokes of emotion.

  Established stars had to agree to caricature, or at least compress, their three-dimensional artistry into a two-dimensional medium. For Bruce Springsteen, pulling future Friends actress Courteney Cox out of the audience during the ‘Dancin’ in the Dark’ video, ten years of soul-searching about his place in American society was reduced to a cartoon: good-looking guy, muscles, gets the girl (of course). For ZZ Top, anonymous merchants of Texas boogie (bigger than the Beatles in their home state), video turned a lifetime’s vocation into a snapshot – men with beards and a vintage Ford coupé, watching over the soap opera of ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ or ‘Legs’ like voyeurs. There was a simple rule of thumb for stars over 35: the less they were seen in their videos, the more effective their clips. The exceptions were those with a background in the visual arts, such as David Bowie and David Byrne (Talking Heads), whose aesthetic world view encompassed video as easily as it did music; or those like Mick Jagger, for whom movement and narcissism were second nature. For the next generation, those were the attributes which would be as valuable as the mastery of augmented guitar chords, the spirit of a poet or the voice of a raucous angel.

  When we make videos5, I want people to laugh at them.

  Boy George, Culture Club, 1983

  Practically every video I see6 has the obligatory half-naked woman with a pair of high heels strutting across the camera.

  Joe Jackson, 1984

  With support from MTV, British singer-songwriter Joe Jackson registered one of the biggest-selling albums of 1982, Night and Day. Two years later, he promoted the exuberant Body and Soul with a schedule so gruelling that Jackson vowed, at its conclusion, never to tour again. By then, he had already sabotaged his career as a front-line artist, taking a stand so principled – and isolated – that it left no room for manoeuvre.

  On reputation alone, he had scored a 1984 US hit single without making an accompanying video. Then he published an essay in which he lambasted the video business, and by implication MTV, as ‘a shallow, tasteless7 and formularised way of selling music’. He bemoaned the ‘implicit racism of video programming’, a jibe that can only have been aimed at MTV. He assaulted the industry which fuelled it: ‘Desperation and greed are blowing the importance of video way out of proportion … artists are now being signed for their video potential rather than their musical talent.’ In his most crushing comment, he spoke for many silent consumers and artists when he declared: ‘Being forced to associate forever a preconceived set of images with a particular song robs the listener of the ability to use his own imagination.’ This was the curse of a pop video: it took a song which might offer its audience the freedom of the universe, and forced it into a box marked ‘video concept’, after which the brain was hypnotised into seeing the director’s images whenever the song was aired. Not that Joe Jackson was rewarded for his honesty: he never reached the Top 50 of the American singles chart again, and his album sales also went into steep decline.

  Other artists positively exulted in the demands of video. The original British Invasion of American pop in 1964 had depended upon saturation marketing by Capitol Records, and then the innate exuberance and talent of the Beatles and their peers. Its successor, much trumpeted on both sides of the Atlantic in 1983, was effectively an accident of fate – or a gross oversight on the part of the US record industry. America had remained resolutely unmoved by British punk and new wave, and indeed the glam rock and 1950s revivalism which had preceded it. With freak exceptions (M, Sheena Easton), the only British acts to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1975 and 1981 were those whose appeal had become so universal that they had effectively shed their nationality: Paul McCartney, Elton John and the Bee Gees.

  In summer 1982, however, America fell under the sway of an eight-month-old British hit: ‘Don’t You Want Me’ by the Human League. It took four months for the single to climb painstakingly to the top of the chart – its slow progress mirroring the market spread of MTV across the United States. Most American record labels baulked at the shocking expense of shooting video solely for this apparently inconsequential network. As a result, the station’s programmers were forced to air almost everything they were given, regardless of its content. British labels were more accustomed to creating promotional videos, and they provided MTV with an unnaturally large proportion of its infant diet. Sales of these British releases soared in markets where the network was freely available to cable subscribers. As its geographical reach expanded, so did the visibility of acts such as Culture Club, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, A Flock of Seagulls and Eurythmics.

  Each of those groups owned a flamboyant and unmistakable visual image. Here was a version of pop which apparently owed nothing to the past, and which flaunted its sexual ambiguity and outsider chic. Britain was offering America young men with bouffant hair who seemed to spend their time cavorting with lingerie models; or whose designers had styled them like comic-book aliens, hair cut diagonally across their face or sculpted into twin peaks. The Human League’s leader, Phil Oakey, admitted: ‘I wear make-up8 because people will listen to our records more if I wear make-up,
or if I’ve got a silly long haircut on one side. It’s a gimmick.’ There was a boy sporting make-up and braids like a teenage girl, with the voice to match; and a woman whose ascetic crop resembled a male prizefighter. It was impossible to imagine them in a shopping mall or a main street; only in England, exotic land of fantasy, could such diverting, distant, alluring figures exist. And even if teenage America did meet them, who knew what polymorphous lusts they might express? Alongside Boy George and Annie Lennox, Simon Le Bon and Mike Score, America’s bedenimed rockers seemed as out of time as Frank Sinatra in the California of 1967.

  Writing at the height of British chic, Rolling Stone journalist Parke Puterbaugh suggested that MTV was sparking ‘good old-fashioned hysteria9 among teenage girls’. By comparison, ‘AOR radio, the dominant 70s medium, was primarily a male preoccupation, pushing aggressive hard rock with zero sex appeal.’ He concluded: ‘The anaesthetic formula of corporate rock snoozers like Journey, mixed in with all the Springsteen–Seger–Petty clones, had worn out its welcome by the end of the decade.’ His obituaries were premature. (Not to mention inaccurate: far from being finished, Journey were then at their commercial peak.) Rather than concede commercial territory which it had dominated since the 1960s, the American record business belatedly ingested the lessons of the MTV explosion, and retaliated with all the expertise of a military superpower.

  Battle was joined on two fronts, and although Britain’s stars were not entirely vanquished, the balance of power was redressed. Over the next three years, the American industry launched (or relaunched) a succession of MTV-friendly stars whose appeal stretched way beyond the network’s core teenage audience. Meanwhile, it reinvented AOR, hard rock, heavy metal, all those tired genres, by coating them in acquired glamour. Rock bands no longer skulked in shady motels with cans of beer and overweight roadies; in MTV videos, they were surrounded by catwalk models, whose clothes mysteriously fell to the floor as soon as a drummer entered the room. Their power was expressed not just in guitar chords and echoed drumbeats (both of which grew exponentially bigger as the decade progressed), but in sexual and material wealth – fast cars, mansions, electronic gadgets, and the ability to procure unimaginably perverted favours from any girl who caught their eye. ‘Create and preserve the image of your choice’, George Harrison used to say (citing Mahatma Gandhi as the originator of the remark), and no sooner had MTV portrayed rockers as all-conquering sex gods than they miraculously acquired everything that the video director could imagine for them, and more.

  In return for the wildest dreams of the male adolescent (a billionaire’s toys, porn-movie starlets and lines of cocaine that ran to a distant horizon) hard rock had to shed all its awkward ties to the past: its roots in the blues, its reliance on cacophonous guitar riffs, its lengthy instrumental solos, its preference for power over melody. The new rock was, above all else, commercial. It was studded, indeed, with hooks so obvious that even pop stars might once have found them shameless. Beyond that, as the critic Deborah Frost noted astutely, ‘MTV instigated a more profound10 change. Where such metal pioneers as Led Zeppelin had earnest musical aims – attempting to restate the blues with a heady admixture of traditional British folk elements and Middle Eastern musical ideas – such current metal heavyweights as Quiet Riot and Mötley Crüe are really only concerned with presenting the fantasy. And MTV is in the fantasy business.’

  Metal has broadened11 its audience base. Metal music is no longer the exclusive domain of male teenagers. The metal audience has become older (college-aged), younger (pre-teen) and more female.

  Billboard magazine, 1985

  I call it ‘girl-friendly sound12’. Which essentially means when you take an electric guitar you can make it squeal … But the tone has to be there, rich with depth, with character. So even in the super-high registers, you’re not putting your hands over your ears, and the first people who will do that are women.

  David Lee Roth on Van Halen

  The 1984 ‘mockumentary’ film This is Spinal Tap was intended as an exaggerated satire on the business of rock ’n’ roll, centred around an imaginary British hard-rock band hell-bent on disaster. But, as cast member Harry Shearer explained, ‘The closer we dared to get13 to the real thing, the closer the real thing dared to get to us. It’s like reality is calling our bluff at every step along the way.’

  With their kindergarten satanism and grandiose pretensions, Spinal Tap mimicked the worst of Black Sabbath and mid-1970s progressive rock. Neither influence was apparent in the bands whose excesses so amused Shearer. While Britain plunged into the New Wave of Heavy Metal, with its punky energy and horror-comic theatricality, America’s metal bands reinvented the decadent glamour of the New York Dolls and Alice Cooper. To this classic rock ’n’ roll stance – Keith Richards strutting on the Sunset Strip, perhaps – they added the technological overdrive of the 1980s, a penchant for coiffeured, back-combed curls apparently modelled on prizewinners from Crufts, and a disarmingly accessible melodicism. American metal was no longer a full-bore sonic assault, but a lifestyle, with pop anthems as its soundtrack.

  For all its reckless, rebellious, coke-snorting, bourbon-draining, hotel-trashing, girl-exploiting reputation, the music known variously as glam metal, hair metal or even nerf metal was built to appeal to the widest possible audience. Nevertheless, it made its fans feel like a pleasure-crazed elite, whose rapacious appetite for hedonism was only constrained by those archetypal enemies of rock ’n’ roll: parents and teachers. Hard rock’s simultaneous capacity to encompass the extremes of sentimentality and hell-raising had been apparent in Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’ – arguably the two most enduringly popular rock performances of all time. The fathers of 1980s metal, Aerosmith, Kiss and Van Halen, were equally flexible, unafraid to approach disco (Kiss’s ‘I Was Made for Lovin’ You’; Van Halen’s ‘Dance the Night Away’) whilst proclaiming eternal fidelity to the power chord and the all-conquering riff. While Aerosmith could be traced back to the Rolling Stones and Free, and Kiss to Tommy James & the Shondells and Slade, Van Halen were an altogether more peculiar beast. They were led by the swaggering, hell-raising David Lee Roth, whose voice was much smoother than his reputation, and by guitarist Eddie Van Halen. He was the pioneer of ‘tapping’: a two-hands-on-the-fretboard technique which enabled a musician to emit a cascade of notes more quickly than via the traditional division of fingers between the frets and the strings. Its effect could be noted on Van Halen’s 1978 cover of the Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, the raucous fury of the original dampened by the guitarist’s preference for speed over feel.

  Eddie Van Halen was revered as an inspiration for ‘shredding’, which involved what Robert Walser (speaking of the classically inspired metal guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen) called a ‘fetishisation of instrumental14 technique’. Here speed and dexterity were everything; musicians such as Steve Vai, Jason Becker and Vinnie Moore were acclaimed for their breathtaking command of their instruments, as if they were classical virtuosos. Whilst still employing some of the language of metal, their cerebral compositions shared none of its visceral energy or teenage fury. For anyone who cherished rock ’n’roll for its dumb insolence, the ‘guitar for guitarists’ school might just as well have been constructing skyscrapers out of matchsticks or mastering epic feats of juggling.

  The arrival of the Australian band AC/DC – sexist, puerile, and the thrillingly obvious inheritors of the cock-rock school of the Stones, the Faces and Free – offered a traditional alternative to these newfangled apostles of instrumental expertise. Their breakthrough albums were produced by Mutt Lange, whose work on City Boy’s 1978 hit ‘5-7-0-5’ revealed his ability to make every aspect of a record seem larger than life – drums more booming, guitar chords more resounding, vocals more like an invading horde than a solitary man. Here in miniature was the sound of 1980s pop metal, epitomised by Lange’s work on Def Leppard’s Pyromania album from 1983 – its effortlessly commercial pop melodies disguis
ed as titanic blasts of rock ’n’ roll violence.

  For this was metal’s secret in the 1980s: it enabled adolescent boys, with sexual insecurity lurking beneath their bravado, to feel like James Bond crossed with the Terminator; and girls to be swept up in their sway. (A sign of the times: the long-running US pop magazine Hit Parader was relaunched as ‘The World’s Heavy Metal Magazine’.) When Quiet Riot reprised Slade’s ‘C’mon Feel the Noize’, or Twisted Sister echoed a famous Who refrain with ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’, all teenagers were as one – thrilled by the effect that these bands’ outrageous appearance would have on their parents. But for all the epic posturing of their romantic anthems, nobody could possibly be alarmed or shocked by Bon Jovi, whose command of hard-rock dynamics was matched by the instant accessibility of their songs. Their success enabled Journey singer Steve Perry to perform ‘Foolish Heart’ as if his lifetime ambition had been to emulate Barry Manilow; or David Lee Roth to shed his bad-boy image for a synth-pop retread of the Beach Boys’ ‘California Girls’. Image spoke louder than words – louder even than the painfully strangled, ear-piercing shriek which became another metal characteristic, exemplified by the Scorpions and Ratt. As everything grew larger and more exaggerated – hair, drum sound, video narcissism – the ground was set for a band such as Poison, who presented themselves as leather-clad outlaws but sounded no more threatening to society than the Hollies had done in 1965, or Glenn Miller in 1940.