Fargo Rock City

by Chuck Klosterman

  Still, we somehow managed to use a band’s songs and videos—and more importantly, a band’s social posture—to get an image of what kind of women they preferred (or appeared to prefer). This goes back to the idea of thinking about pop culture even when it isn’t there; with only scraps of information, metal followers were able to construct the sexual appetites of their favorite musicians. Here’s a list of what type of girls the premier metal groups liked (or at least seemed to like) …

  GUNS N’ ROSES: Bisexual models; submissive women; girls who would buy them booze.

  MÖTLEY CRÜE: Strippers; women who have sex in public (particularly elevators); lesbians.

  RATT: Hookers with a heart of gold. Or strippers with a heart of gold. Or thirteen-year-olds.

  WARRANT: Virgins who exhibited the potential to become nymphomaniacs.

  DEF LEPPARD: Drunk girls; female vampires.

  THE CULT: Female vampires only.

  FASTER PUSSYCAT: GNR rejects.

  W.A.S.P.: Magician’s assistants; women with rape fantasies; lower primates.

  AEROSMITH: Models, but not waifs; high school snobs; more girls who like having sex in elevators.

  CINDERELLA: Gypsies.

  TESLA: Farm girls; whoever they used to date in junior high.

  SKID ROW: Nameless, faceless, top-heavy sex machines (with hearts of gold).

  BULLETBOYS: Girls with particularly deep birth canals.

  L.A. GUNS: Drug-addled hitchhikers who like rough sex.

  BANG TANGO: Faster Pussycat rejects.

  VAN HALEN: Party girls; bikini models; the homecoming queen; cast members of One Day at a Time.

  DAVID LEE ROTH (solo): The same as Van Halen, except with bigger boobs.

  BON JOVI: The girl next door.

  VINNIE VINCENT INVASION: The dominatrix next door.

  SLAUGHTER: Girls who couldn’t make the cut as Bon Jovi groupies.

  WINGER: Whoever Bon Jovi groupies used to baby-sit.

  POISON: Girls who liked to tease; girls from small towns; good girls gone bad.

  KISS: Any girl who wasn’t dead.

  IRON MAIDEN: Dead girls.

  JUDAS PRIEST: Boys.

  METALLICA: None of the above.

  Oh yeah … I guess I forgot Whitesnake. As previously stated, they liked girls who fucked cars. But all this analysis only provides us with half of the intercourse equation. We know who all these bands liked to sleep with, but what about the rest of us? If ’80s metal was so sexual, what was the best metal song to actually have sex to?

  This is a complicated question, because most prototypical metal fans never had sex. Thus, we have very little historical precedent to use as a guide. In the film Less Than Zero, Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz make love gravy to the song “Bump and Grind” off David Lee Roth’s first solo album, but this was not a particularly romantic interlude. I went to high school with a secretly sleazy farm girl who once said it was “totally awesome to fuck to Faster Pussycat,” and since this girl always had a lot of boyfriends, I assume she knew what she was talking about. But these two examples are pretty much all we have to work with.

  Part of this problem is that metal is painfully Caucasian, and most good sex music is made by black guys: Prince, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, etc. Logic would therefore indicate that Living Colour should have been the sexiest metal band of all time. This was not the case. I recently re-listened to both Vivid and Stain, and neither made me want to sleep with anybody, except maybe a guy. However, the experience did re-instill my belief that (a) I am not a glamour boy, and (b) I am fierce.

  So what makes for a good sex song? That depends on whom you ask. I recall having a heated argument with a woman over what made for better sex music: White Zombie or Yanni. In my mind, “More Human Than Human” is very sexy; I actually think it sounds like sex. My female opponent strongly disagreed with that assertion, although I don’t think she was so much advocating Yanni as she was attacking White Zombie. But this really isn’t the point (especially since when we did end up having sex, we were listening to Steely Dan). The point is that just about everyone sees a clear difference between “making love” and “fucking”—even headbangers.

  If you want to “make love” to a heavy metal song, you’re probably going to lean in the direction of a power ballad. Luckily, there were about 4 million of these made between 1983 and 1991. The origin comes from the big ’70s arena bands: Aerosmith (“Dream On”), Nazareth (“Love Hurts”), Lynyrd Skynyrd (“Tuesday’s Gone”), Black Sabbath (“Changes”), and KISS (“Beth” and “Hard Luck Woman”). None of these songs were particularly sexy (Skynyrd’s was probably the best for slow dancing), but they did set a universal template that a thousand bands copied: You put bittersweet lyrics against an acoustic instrument, and then you steamrolled the refrain with a plutonium-heavy guitar riff. The chorus was the “power,” the verse was the “ballad.” If you were a guy in the backseat of a car, you went for the bosom during the chorus.

  The popularity of the ’80s power ballad was mainly due to a radio mentality that carried over from the previous decade. If a rock band wanted to break into the mainstream in 1976, they needed to release a love song that radio stations felt comfortable playing. Since MTV was originally programmed like a Top 40 radio station, they often used the same criteria for breaking metal acts. Extreme’s “More Than Words” is a prime example; in fact, when MTV first played that song’s video in the summer of 1991, VJs would regularly compare Extreme to KISS (i.e., a hard rock group who used a love song to cross into the mainstream).

  “More Than Words” was about as good as power balladeering ever got. On the whole, Extreme was only slightly better than okay, but they were great at this kind of prom schlock (“When I First Kissed You” off the same album is also quite capital). Unlike most of their spandex-clad peers, they didn’t feel the need to inject their heavy metal roots into the middle of every sweet love song. That proved to be very wise. I’m always a little surprised by how well “More Than Words” stands up over time, but I think I know why it does: It’s legitimately romantic. It kind of makes you want to cuddle up to someone, especially during the harmonizing. If you lost your virginity to this song, it might be an embarrassing story to tell people, but—at least when no one else was around—it will still seem special to you.

  Unfortunately, there really aren’t too many other power ballads that qualify. Warrant’s “Heaven” would probably make the cut, as would a song by the band Steelheart that I can’t remember. Truth be told, Journey, Boston, and Styx were much better at this sort of thing than groups like Quiet Riot and Trixter.

  Faster Pussycat’s “House of Pain” was a really wonderful ballad, but it had nothing to do with sex (or even girls). The same goes for the Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home” and Slaughter’s “Fly to the Angels,” which was supposedly not about suicide but certainly seemed like it.

  Guns N’ Roses’ biggest ballad was “Patience,” but that was about not having sex. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” was a little too upbeat in the beginning (and a little too menacing at the end), and “November Rain” was too much of a wedding song (and I thought that before I saw the video). The best GNR sex song was actually “Rocket Queen,” which isn’t a ballad at all, except maybe at the end.

  But perhaps you don’t want romance. Maybe you want the same thing all those metal dudes claimed they needed: Hot, gooey, uninhibited pelvis banging. Well, you’re in luck—there’s bushels of material for those purposes too: Def Leppard’s “Saturday Night (High N’ Dry),” Mötley Crüe’s “Sumthin’ for Nuthin’,” the KISS songs “Lick It Up” and “Fits Like a Glove,” Cinderella’s “Push Push,” Faster Pussycat’s “Little Dove,” Warrant’s “Sure Feels Good to Me,” Poison’s “You Can Look but You Can’t Touch,” “F.I.N.E.” from Aerosmith, Vinnie Vincent’s “Naughty Naughty,” and a song by Danger Danger that was also titled “Naughty Naughty.”

  Oh yeah … and that Whitesnake song. I forget the title. Something about fucking a car
, I think.

  April 23, 1988

  The 1988 Class B State Speech & Debate tournament is held in Mandan, North Dakota. Meanwhile, Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly” crawls up to No. 59 on the pop charts.

  At this point, I find myself driven to inject Lovely Lita Ford into this discussion.

  Lita Ford was one of heavy metal’s “exceptions.” This means ninth-graders constantly used her as a pertinent example whenever they wrote an essay for English class that argued metal was more than just satanic cock rock (in case you’re curious, the Christian supergroup Stryper was the other overused “exception” for these arguments). Ford began her career in the seminal all-female band the Runaways, a group that has since become a favorite among rock writers. The other star from the Runaways, Joan Jett, became a successful solo artist, but people rarely considered her version of hard rock to be metal. I’m not completely sure why this is. Part of it was timing; “I Love Rock & Roll,” her biggest hit, had come and gone before the modern glam era exploded. More importantly, Jett was always more of a punk rocker than a metalhead. That fact has become even more evident during the past decade; today she’s a lesbian icon and the godmother of riot grrls.

  However, Lita took a different path. She was metal to the core, even marrying Chris Holmes of W.A.S.P. (that move heightened her “bad girl” credibility, because Holmes had posed in the “For Ladies” section of Hustler magazine and evidently has a huge dick). In a lot of ways, she tried to embody the fantasy image created by all those macho male groups. And—at least in 1988—she succeeded.

  I discovered Lita as a sophomore in high school. She had released the single “Kiss Me Deadly,” which went to No. 12 on the pop charts but pervaded bedrooms and school parking lots far more often than its Billboard peak would indicate. “Kiss Me Deadly” was similar to “Talk Dirty to Me” and “Panama”—it was simply a great pop song, and anyone who tries to argue otherwise is ignoring the actual tune and attacking the genre. This is not to say Ford had some special gift for making music; “Kiss Me Deadly” is basically the only better-than-average song she ever made (and she wasn’t even the credited songwriter). I can barely remember anything else on the album (Lita) it came from: I know she had one song called “Back to the Cave” and another called “Blueberry,” plus a semipopular duet with Ozzy Osbourne that seemed to openly promote suicide pacts. This is the extent of Lovely Lita’s musical legacy.

  However, I really liked Lita. Of all the albums I never actually listened to, it was probably my favorite. Lita was crouching on the front of the record, kind of like Daryl Hannah in Clan of the Cave Bear. In one of the photos inside, she was wearing one of those Mexican bandoliers across her chest, and she made the bullets look foxy. Lita was ready to go to war … and then come home and bang somebody.

  My fondest memories of Lita focus around a particularly unrocking time in my life. I was fifteen and attending the North Dakota state speech and debate tournament in Mandan, North Dakota, right across the Missouri River from Bismarck. My speech coach (a semihip English teacher named Brenda) drove me and two girls (including Janet Veit!) the four hours to Bismarck, where I was scheduled to compete in extemporaneous speaking. We even stayed in a hotel, which is always strangely exciting during high school.

  I spent most of the trip down talking about Lita Ford. The reason I can so clearly remember this is because it was the first time I ever really talked about anything sexual in the presence of women. Prior to this weekend, the only time I had ever discussed a physical attraction to a woman was with other guys (usually in some type of cliché locker room situation). As soon as we got to Bismarck, we went to the local mall and I immediately bought the Lita cassette. I didn’t have my Walkman with me, and my teacher’s car didn’t have a cassette player; basically, it was a useless acquisition. The four of us spent about two hours in this mall, and I didn’t buy anything else (although I did play three dollars’ worth of Elevator Action in the arcade). I mostly walked around the shopping center, reading the Lita liner notes. I also remember thinking it was very strange that the floor of the Bismarck mall was carpeted. Actually, that still seems strange to me.

  For the next two days, I loudly insisted that I wanted to sleep with Lita Ford. And I suppose I did. Why wouldn’t I? Lita was the rock chick I had always heard about in other bands’ songs. The fact that I couldn’t play this cassette didn’t matter; in fact, the music might have made me less interested, because most of Lita turned out to be shit. But at the moment of purchase, I had to assume that every song on the LP was going to be as cool as “Kiss Me Deadly.” Talking about the music was more exciting than hearing it (which is still the way I feel about most rock ’n’ roll).

  In retrospect, it seems clear why Lita Ford was the catalyst for my sudden willingness to talk about sex. She may have been totally unreal, but she was a step closer to reality. I mean, at least Lita Ford was a woman. She wasn’t David Lee Roth talking about a woman. She wasn’t acting as the faceless recipient of Blackie Lawless’s penis. Lita was a female entity with a real personality. And since my only exposure to sexuality had been through metal music, I was only going to be comfortable expressing an attraction to a woman who existed in that world. I had never had a girlfriend in my life. I had never even kissed a girl. Even though I was thinking about sex constantly, I had no idea how to process or manage those kinds of thoughts. But I did understand hard rock. I understood the glam rock depiction of being in love and being in lust. And I didn’t feel awkward having those feelings toward Lita Ford. Somehow, I felt like I knew what I was doing.

  Every once in a while, Ford is remembered as a rare role model for female guitar players in the 1980s. She was one of the few women who succeeded in a male-dominated world, and I’m sure some girls did look up to her. But she may have even done more for stupid boys like me. As contradictory as it might seem, Lita Ford made me think about sexy women as people—not just as the subject of some long-haired guy’s lyrics.

  The irony to all this is that by talking about Ford as an exception, I am unconsciously working under the assumption that heavy metal is sexist. I’m discussing metal’s sexism as if it’s an indisputable fact, outlined in the Constitution (or at least in the Articles of Confederation). Sometimes I forget that this may or may not be true. I guess I never consider the alternative.

  Certainly, ’80s metal was almost always about sex. And—certainly—that sex was almost always described from the perspective of a man. But does this automatically mean it’s sexist? Do those elements automatically make anything (or everything) that comes with it a sexist art form?

  Probably.

  I suppose any opinion that comes almost exclusively from one gender is going to be sexist, although the term “genderist” would technically be more accurate. This is amplified when the subject is physical intercourse; few aggressive opinions can be safely expressed about sex, and never by guys like Sebastian Bach.

  I’ve always been baffled by—and strangely attracted to—feminists. It’s hard not to notice their amusing hypocrisies more than their “confrontational” ideas, as is typical of most people who hold strong opinions. Feminists are one of the three kinds of people who express the most outrage over the sexual content of metal music. The other two groups are right-wing Christian conservatives (who express outrage over pretty much anything that’s remotely interesting), and pseudo-intellectual male academics (who share my attraction to feminists but actively try to do something about it). I am most interested in the arguments from classic feminists; I use the modifier “classic” to differentiate between prototypical ERA types, like Gloria Steinem, and those so-called neo-conservative feminists like Camille Paglia (neo-conservatives like Paglia tend to adore cock rock and seem just as crazy as classic feminists, but in a good way).

  I never give any credence to the anti-metal arguments from Christian conservatives or sensitive male feminists. The first group bases its stance on an enforced morality, and the second group holds their argument because they
think it somehow makes them seem smart. Neither has any idea what they’re talking about. I will, however, listen to antimetal arguments made by classic female feminists (and I have on countless occasions). The problem is that—no matter how intelligent they may be—they inevitably attack the same ideas they typically support. It’s kind of like whenever abortion opponents argue in favor of capital punishment, or when ardent pro-choice types talk about the inhumanity of the death penalty. The philosophical inconsistency always overwhelms the potential for logic.

  Often, feminists go after the alleged misogyny in metal with a stock argument that’s hard to counter: “If I’m offended by it,” they say, “then that is proof enough.” The thinking is that the only criterion for what is offensive is that someone was offended by it. In a linguistic sense, the argument makes perfect sense. In reality, it means less than nothing. In fact, this kind of thinking is the worst thing that has happened to language, publishing, and damn near everything else in society over the last twenty years. If you are personally offended by the “Hot for Teacher” video, it might be because the video is sexist. It also might be because you’re the kind of person who is easily offended. Or it might even be because you’re fucking crazy. But regardless of how you feel, your personal feelings do not constitute an argument over whether something is sexist.

  A slightly more compelling argument (the operative word being “slightly”) is that metal was sexist for “contextual” reasons. The suggestion is that it inevitably placed sex in a context that made women objects or victims (or at the very least secondary to the existence of a man). I suppose this is somewhat true. I slip into that argument when I write about Lita Ford. It’s hard to imagine rock music done any other way, though. That’s the nature of personal art. Liz Phair certainly sings everything through the eyes of a woman, and her narratives sometimes portray men as jerks and manipulators. Chrissie Hynde does that same thing—yet I would never assume the Pretenders were sexist. That’s just the way songwriting works. When I try to think of pop songs that objectively paint both sides of a relationship, the only one I can come up with is that tune from the Human League where the girl was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar.