why it be so damned?
if plant and page can get away with it, if jethro tull can get away with it, if pink floyd can get away with it, if the stones can get away with it, if aerosmith can get away with it
...acting like jerks that is, and pretty much jerking off in their albums...
in any case, at least there's still some debate about it, albeit most people are happy enough to say there was nothing good in it, nothing musically important.
well, excuse me, but what a crock of shit. When was rock and roll meant to be important? You mean to tell me there was more to Jimmy Page than a couple of interesting improvisations?
In any case, it would be absolutely incredible that this stuff sucks so much, and yet, some of the bands remain alive to this day.
And here's my little thesis: it isn't the music, because if you sit down to listen to it, it is as good as anything - the riffs, the melodies, the bass - it is the sound of it all. This is an overproduced, overly clinical sound, the attempt by music companies to put gloss over what is a warts included package - and it is that, my dear friends, that people associate with 80s rock. They don't look at the music much because the sound of it is fake, through no fault other than sheer stupidity of the bands - although I wonder how stupid they really were. The music companies had a certain *idea* of what a band ought to look like - and they certainly didn't look like Iron Maiden or Motorhead! Any band therefore either acceded to this or got kicked out. In a vastly uncertain business like music, I cannot - and nor should you - blame any band for cashing in for all they are worth.
Now once you have this, you have a certain loss of control already built in, and that simply propogates through the system to end up with a music that sounds non-vital. I submit that it is that property that people realize as being vulgar; once you hear Robert Plant wail away, Sebastian Bach doing the same is simply going to sound foolish. Importantly it has nothing much to do with the quality of the music, music defined by what the guys are doing not how they are sounding. Which is how I hear it. That is, technically, this was good rock and roll. But that very statement tells all.
It is a great tragedy because some of those guys could really play...it would seem odd would it not that suddenly we have a great sprouting of no-talents? Talent is more or less uniformly distributed.
And who do we blame for this? It is the very same bands everyone revers and loves - the 80s was really the attempt by record companies to create a market out of what existed before, when in fact a market must be allowed to evolve. The truly great tragedy is the fact that some of these bands actually went on to make decent albums - Skid Row made Slave to the Grind; Winger made Pull; Warrant made Dog Eat Dog - the songs off of these are raw, driving, not necessarily pretty, and somewhat cruel. Imagine the waste, all by a foolish attempt to define something that should never be allowed to be controlled. Apart from the mostly unfair criticism that these guys didnt know what they were doing, or that what they were doing was worthless.
They were led by the nose, allowed to break free far too late in their careers - Cherry Pie is a puerile song, but the same band wrote
Uncle Tom's Cabin, and how many people have heard that? It is not without reason that Jani Layne regretted that he would always be known as the Cherry Pie guy. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has 1.5 million views and"Cherry Pie" has 2.5 million. Between the two, musically the former is superior. But that isn't the population people sample from when damning the bands.
The truly awful result of all of this was the rise of grunge, not that grunge was bad, it was quite good, but in making rock and roll as "dead" as possible, i.e. rebel against the hair metal stuff by muting your music, although you wanted to rock out...it pretty much finished things off. We now have close to 2 decades of mostly pointless rock music, and where are the shows the magic and light? It's all over now, baby blue.
