Fargo Rock City

by Chuck Klosterman

  Another good reason to hate heavy metal is Ted Nugent, or—more accurately—people who are like Ted Nugent. Every time I go to a big rock show, I see herds of these kind of men, and they always make me wish I had the power to give people polio.

  As a singular entity, Nugent is not wholly terrible. He didn’t make much good music during the glam ’80s, but his musical legacy was always within earshot. The vast majority of his best songs are about (or at least make reference to) vaginas, but his guitar playing has always been pretty bad-ass. All the hair bands who consistently ripped off the riff from “Cat Scratch Fever” usually hit pay dirt (L.A. Guns, for example). I tend to enjoy both of Nugent’s songs that prominently feature the word “wang,” and the seemingly endless “Stranglehold” was a mainstay in Dr. Johnny Fever’s playlist on WKRP In Cincinnati. So it’s not like we didn’t know who Terrible Ted was.

  Even as a human, Ted is palatable. His “political” take on all that liberal, leftist bullshit is refreshing, and there’s something weirdly charming about his maniacal desire to kill every deer in North America. I certainly have no qualms with the idea of killing animals. After years of research, I have come to the conclusion that animals enjoy being eaten; they think it’s fun. If Ted wants to ice a few thousand ungulates before he takes his own dirt nap, I won’t hold it against him.

  My problem with Ted Nugent is that guys who aspire to be like him—or just are like him by default—make me feel ashamed for liking hard rock. They have no sense of humor, and they beat people up and they kill cats for no reason. They get totally fucked up on Budweiser anytime they’re in public; if they smoke pot, they only do so when they’re already drunk, so they never get mellow (it just makes them a little less predictable, which isn’t necessarily good). Once you become friends with these people (and if you’re from a small town, you will), you can never relax. If you get drunk with these guys and pass out, they will write on your face with a black Magic Marker. They will literally piss all over you. They will steal your car and intentionally drive it into a ditch. Ex-cons always talk about how the rules of society don’t apply inside the walls of a prison; I have to assume the penitentiary experience is akin to partying with a bunch of Nugent disciples. If you’re not consciously being an asshole to someone else, you will become a victim. And what can you do? Nothing. And why not? Because these are your goddamn friends.

  Over the past decade, the main band that is ridiculed for being a bunch of white trash imbeciles is Lynyrd Skynyrd. I honestly think a lot of that baggage came from an early clip of Beavis & Butt-head: In the very early B & B vignette (way back when it was only a four-minute segment on MTV’s Liquid Television), a drunken, aging redneck declares that somebody should “Play some Skynyrd, man.” In a matter of months, this became a familiar taunt to toss toward idiots (I can’t prove that this otherwise forgettable MTV moment was the absolute origin of the anti-Skynyrd movement, but it certainly seems more than coincidental). I can understand why Skynyrd is an easy target for ridicule; their overt appreciation of the Confederate flag made them seem a wee bit racist, and their overplayed, bourbon-soaked swamp rock seemed outdated the moment is was released. But the ignored reality is that Lynyrd Skynyrd was a brilliant collection of songwriters: Their records have a regional quality that’s usually only heard in hip-hop or old country, and the lyrical content is remarkably gutsy (when you consider the demographic of their core audience, releasing an antigun anthem like “Saturday Night Special” could have been career suicide). The assertion that Skynyrd is the music of the dumb is unfortunate, even though it sometimes might be a little true. But if anyone should be shackled with that label, it should be Ted and his crossbow of doom.

  Obviously, this is all pointing to a clear contradiction. The logical reader is asking, How can you attack Yngwie Malmsteen for being pretentious and “smart,” and then proceed to rip Ted Nugent for fostering low-grade humanity and being boorish and “dumb”? It would seem that the Motor City Madman presents a product that is perfectly opposed to the Swedish fretmonger, so it’s hypocritical to despise them both.

  But it’s not.

  It’s not because they are not really opposites. They both suck, but for totally unrelated reasons. Malmsteen was pretentious in the literal sense of the word—people often say “pretentious” when they mean artsy or conceited, but it really means pretending to be something you’re not. Yngwie pretended he was a hard-rock Mozart because normal people didn’t like his music. He used classical training to hide from his own mediocre songwriting. And by the same token, Nugent was boorish in the literal sense: He was clownish and rude, but in a rustic way. There was no theater or irony to his caveman persona, and it established the wrong kind of credibility. Sexist, jingoistic, anti-art rhetoric can be clever—but only if the motive behind it is to entertain, not to persuade.

  Right now, the most popular example of American low culture is professional wrestling. The World Wrestling Federation’s Raw Is War is the most highly rated program on cable television, and Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling is not far behind. Not surprisingly, the wrestling industry has a close relationship with heavy metal, particularly ’80s metal. The most popular personality in the “sport,” Steve Austin, has his own compilation of rock anthems titled Steve Austin’s Stone Cold Metal—it includes two KISS tracks, the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” an old Def Leppard tune, and Austin’s theme song “Stone Cold” by Rainbow. The WWF and the WCW both have multiple records that promote wrasslin’ through metal (in fact, the WCW has a tag team sanctioned by KISS). Even the low-grade ECW (the industry’s “extreme” third tier) has a pretty decent collection of metal acts covering other metal acts (Motorhead performs “Enter Sandman,” Bruce Dickinson does a Scorps song, etc.).

  The connection between wrestling and metal is pretty obvious: They’re both redneck obsessions dripping with wry humor. Pro wrestling particularly appeals to wife-beating trailer park residents, drunk college sophomores, and acerbic cultural pundits; that’s pretty much the same audience for Mötley Crüe in 1999. Wrestling is not stupid—it only tries to look that way. And the same can probably be said for Ted Nugent. The danger is that the people who love wrestling (and metal) the most don’t want to see the joke. And it’s not that they’re fools who don’t “get it”: They get it completely. They just prefer to consume the satire as reality. Self-righteous TV critics used to criticize All in the Family because they feared the audience would be confused by Archie Bunker’s prejudices. What these critics were too stupid to realize is that people who related to Carroll O’Connor’s character knew he was a bigot and they knew he was supposed to be a negative image. That’s why they liked him.

  In the same way, there are people who watch wrestling because it’s considered trashy and idiotic. Elitists go to operas they don’t understand because it makes them feel separate from the rest of society; blue-collar drunks watch pro wrestling for the exact same reason. Artists like Nugent foster that kind of anti-intellectual perspective. What probably started as a gimmick (at least from the perspective of the record companies) has evolved into a very real, somewhat scary philosophy. People rail against the posturing of metal, but the real problems begin when the posturing ends. That’s when an artistic image becomes an actual personality type. That’s when people start to see aggressive music as a call to actual aggression, and the enemy becomes anyone who doesn’t openly embrace stupidity. And (to paraphrase sports radio host Jim Rome), that’s when you hear the six most dangerous words in North America: “You think you’re better than me?” Whenever that phrase is uttered in a small-town bar, somebody is going to lose teeth.

  Some things are funny because they’re true. Ted Nugent would be funnier if I ever got the sense he was lying.

  June 27, 1992

  The world premiere of Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain” video.

  By the time MTV turned ten years old in 1991, pretty much every rock video made by a major label artist was pretty sophisticated
. Every metal artist was churning out videos (Mötley Crüe made five for Dr. Feelgood), and Saturday night’s Headbanger’s Ball was an essential part of MTV’s weekly programming. Though a lot of the vids still looked the same, they were higher-grade knockoffs; technology made everything look more expensive and professional. In 1992, Skid Row made a simple black-and-white clip for “Monkey Business” that was just the band rocking in a desolate field (with a monkey), but it was doctored and tweaked enough to get substantial airplay all summer.

  However, one band took the potential of video and pushed it to its ultimate extreme—so far, in fact, that it’s unlikely any rock group will ever again try anything as ambitious or insane. The band, of course, was Guns N’ Roses. The project was the ultraexpensive, ultimately unsuccessful Use Your Illusion “video trilogy,” and it may have been the decision that turned GNR from the biggest band in the world into … well, into what they are now.

  What Guns N’ Roses tried to do (or, more accurately—what Axl Rose tried to do) was take the three ballads off Use Your Illusion I and II and become George Lucas. Without fear of hyperbole, it can be said that this was the most ostentatious video concept ever attempted by a major rock artist. The goal was to make three videos that could stand alone (and therefore enter MTV’s heavy rotation), but they would also be interconnected in a way that they could be watched in sequence, much like a twenty-two-minute art film. Though I recognize the mild absurdity of this self-indulgence, I also think Guns N’ Roses has never been given proper credit for attempting something that was legitimately formidable. In many ways, making three intertwined videos is a much more difficult assignment than making a conventional rock film (like The Wall or Stop Making Sense). The audience for videos is consciously expecting—almost demanding—a collection of eye-catching images not connected by a narrative. People who went into a movie theater to see something like The Song Remains the Same knew what they were getting into, and they watched the event as a feature. GNR expected people to follow a crazy, non sequitur story line that was (a) usually incomplete, and (b) dependent on their ability to recall videos they weren’t watching. In retrospect, it was an almost impossible task.

  In theory, here’s what the Use Your Illusion trilogy was supposed to mean—or at least what I can deduce from watching it a few dozen times (I realize Rose has periodically commented on what all this was supposed to teach us, but that doesn’t necessarily relate to how it came across on the TV). Regardless of the artistic intent, the plot seemed to work like this: “Don’t Cry” was the first video, but is actually the second act of a three-act play (thus, “Don’t Cry” contains the story’s conflict). “November Rain” was the second video, but it’s actually the story’s first act (even though it opens with the beginning of the third act and ends with the conclusion of Act II). “Estranged” is the third act and supposedly the conclusion, but it has clips from both Act I and II and really doesn’t explain anything at all.

  On paper, this obviously makes no sense. On screen, it’s only slightly more clear. But this is how a concept video works when you take it to its most logical (illogical?) extreme. This is “art,” although history has not treated these videos very well.

  Released to TV soon after the Use Your Illusion records hit stores on September 17, “Don’t Cry” opens with a baby who has extremely (in fact, unrealistically) blue eyes, immediately followed by the image of a crow. The next shot is Axl walking through a blizzard, holding a bottle of booze and a gun. The significance of these clips is alluded to later in the production, but never explained. However, we soon get to the important stuff: Axl, looking very pissed off about something, gets into a fight with housemate Stephanie Seymour, the Victoria’s Secret supermodel who was Rose’s real-life lover. Seymour has a gun and Rose violently pushes her against a wall, which is a little disturbing in retrospect, particularly since Seymour would later accuse Rose of abuse (they eventually settled out of court; a 1995 issue of Parade magazine indicated that Rose’s insurance company agreed to give Seymour a settlement of $400,000, but Rose’s lawyers denied any payout).

  This is a great example of what was so uncomfortably compelling about Guns N’ Roses. Unlike other metal artists, Rose was completely willing to combine his personal life with his public persona: Not only does he use his real girlfriend, he openly addresses his two greatest demons—violence and misogyny. Later in “Don’t Cry,” we learn the apparent reason for the domestic dispute: Rose has been unfaithful (or at least very friendly) with a blond girl at a piano, causing Stephanie to slap the woman and start a cat fight. Once again, the action is a glimpse into Rose’s psyche; he has projected another of his weaknesses (jealousy) onto Seymour, and he’s also exposed his personal sexual fantasies in a somewhat negative way (Rose has often admitted that he loves to watch lesbian sex, and the girl-on-girl fight in this video is far more sexy than scary).

  Since “Don’t Cry” was the first of the three videos (and arguably not even part of a larger trilogy, depending on who you believe), it’s a little more autonomous than the other two clips; when it first moved into MTV’s rotation, even diehard fans had no idea this was part of a larger project, so “Don’t Cry” needed the ability to stand alone. During the chorus, the band is shown performing on the top of a building with a helicopter in the foreground. Axl wears flannel and a Jane’s Addiction T-shirt, while Slash wears a sign that asks “Where’s Izzy?” For most GNR followers, Slash’s sign was the most intriguing part of the clip, because—at the time—Izzy Stradlin was rumored to be quietly quitting the band (Izzy, who cowrote “Don’t Cry” but does not appear in the video or any leg of the trilogy, officially quit the group in November of 1991). Shannon Hoon, the lead singer of the band Blind Melon and a key contributor to the Use Your Illusion albums, also appears on the rooftop. Hoon would die of an overdose while touring in 1995, thereby destroying the theory that all pop stars become legends if they die early.

  At the time of its origin, most people thought “Don’t Cry” was an attempt at video surrealism that had no clear purpose. However, there were some overt references to the other videos (even though none of the viewing audiences knew they were supposed to be looking for them). Rose is shown thrashing in water, which connects with the conclusion of “Estranged.” One scene has three Axls in the same room simultaneously, obviously suggesting a multiple personality disorder (we also see Rose talking to a female psychiatrist). Another shows a grave marker that indicates W. Axl Rose was born in 1962 and died in 1990. Later videos would never explain the syllogism for the second date.

  My favorite part of “Don’t Cry” is when Slash consciously drives a car off a cliff, and the car immediately explodes. In the next sequence, Slash plays his solo at the cliff’s summit, and then he throws his guitar over the edge. Without getting too obvious, the symbiotic relationship between the car and the instrument tied Slash back to his own Appetite for Destruction. However, these scenes have no bearing on the overall work, and they seem to have been included simply because it seemed like a cool idea that someone might misconstrue as symbiotic. The same can be said for the closing shot, where we see the original infant from the video’s opening, only now it has incredibly green eyes. It links the beginning of the piece with the conclusion, but it has no significance on anything (unless we are to assume that Axl is implying that he had a twin brother who was separated from him at birth, a concept that is just stupid enough to be possible).

  The understanding that this was going to be a trilogy emerged with the next video, the epic “November Rain.” When it premiered on Headbanger’s Ball in the summer of 1992, it was hyped by MTV as the greatest video ever made. Immediately after its virgin broadcast, VJ Riki Rachtman looked directly into the camera and earnestly said, “That [pause] … was amazing.” This was funny for three reasons. It was funny because Rachtman was acting like he had just seen the video for the very first time. It was also funny because Rachtman actually had a cameo in the video, which seemed like a conflict of interest but
was mostly just weird. However, the main reason it was funny was because “November Rain” was a ludicrously overblown mini-movie that absolutely did not work as a music video.

  As time has passed, my take on “November Rain” has softened. When I watch it now, it seems like a big, better-than-average attempt at doing something “historical,” and in that respect it was successful. Like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” it’s the kind of video that’s only played during MTV countdowns (the sequence changes slightly every Memorial Day weekend, but “November Rain” typically places fourth or fifth on MTV’s list of all-time videos, behind “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Thriller,” Madonna’s “Vogue,” and Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”). The obvious problem is its length, and videos are hard to edit down (Metallica’s “One” faced the same quagmire, and fans were always upset by the edited, less-powerful version of that video).

  The director for the three videos was Andy Morahan, an established videographer who earned a living by directing videos for rock superstars (including George Michael’s “Father Figure”), commercials for Guess jeans, and that horrible third installment of the Highlander film series. While most of Morahan’s work with GNR is structured around Dadaistic imagery, “November Rain” is not. “November Rain” follows a traditional (almost cliché) dramatic narrative: It opens with Rose taking pills to cure his insomnia, only to dream about the joy of his wedding and the death of his wife (once again portrayed by Seymour).