Tom Pepinsky

Category: Music

  • Glam, Metal, and Regime Change

    I recently had the opportunity to guest lecture in my colleague Mona Krewel‘s course Politics and Music. The title of my lecture: Wind of Change: Glam/Metal, Protest, and Regime Change from Berlin to Tahrir Square. You can see the slides here (PDF).

    Although it is certainly fun to play “Heroes” and “Youth Gone Wild” to a room full of nineteen year olds,* I found it much more challenging to prepare this lecture than I had expected. It’s easy to read lyrics and see how they are political, and it’s easy to show videos of bands performing during important political moments, but teaching good social science about how music affects something like regime change is hard.

    The approach I followed is this. Start with what we know about regime change: what causes it? Under what conditions do regimes collapse? That gives us a series of analytical approaches and causal pathways that have regime change at the end. From there we can ask, where does music—of any sort—fit into those causal pathways?

    My preliminary thoughts are that we can think about glam and metal as having three roles in creating and sustaining oppositions to authoritarian rule. Glam or metal can function as a regime defier, a type revealer, and a coordination device.

    1. Regime defier: the music itself—both lyrics and performance—undermines ideological hegemony or social conformity
    2. Type revealer: listening to glam or metal is a signal of what you believe or value, and allows others to infer whether you share common characteristics
    3. Coordination device: performances serve as focal points, and the creation and distribution of illicit music creates interpersonal trust and develops movement expertise

    Now we have at least some analytical purchase over how glam and metal might matter for regime change. But it always pays to be skeptical, so I concluded the lecture by inviting the students to question everything that I’d told them. Specifically, I invited them to ask

    1. Is glam/metal special or unique? My guess is no: rap, punk, hip hop, and other forms of music could probably do the same thing.
    2. Is glam/metal incidental? There’s a good case that it is. Think of it this way: did the cassette player cause the Iranian revolution?
    3. When does glam/metal help and when doesn’t it? There is much more metal out there than there is regime change.
    4. Is glam/metal fundamentally democratic? Aside from the obvious point that, say, Nazi black metal is pro-Nazi, I think that there is a good argument that metal’s characteristic focus on power could easily be used for illiberal or anti-democratic purposes.
      The case for glam is different. I’m willing to bet that glam’s characteristic focus on gender non-conformity makes it fundamentally liberal as a musical genre.**

    NOTES

    * It is also interesting to think about how both metal and glam emerged from the same late 1960s U.K. psychedelic rock scene.

    ** David Bowie’s Nazi period may be evidence against this proposition.

  • The Decent Album Hidden within Use Your Illusion I-II

    This month is the 25th anniversary of the release of Use Your Illusion I/II, the Guns and Roses double album widely considered to be the perfect illustration of what happens when a rock band gets so famous that no one will prevent them from making terrible decisions. The albums were bloated, overlong, full of clunkers, heavily produced, and oddly reminiscent of 70s arena rock. Reviewers were confused; although they received general praise, just about every single one has a line that starts something like “unlike the hard-charging Appetite for Destruction…” and ends up apologizing for “My World.” The albums sold like mad, but no one prefers them to their predecessor. There exists a genre of reviews and remembrances that attempts to rehabilitate the two albums as “not that bad” or “rather well orchestrated,” but it is forced.[1] Forget individual songs—as albums, and especially as a double album, Use Your Illusion I/II is a pompous mess.

    Growing up in the 1980s in Central PA, most everyone I knew was a fan of GNR’s Appetite for Destruction, and just about everyone was really excited about the release of their sophomore album. I count myself an early GNR fan, and distinctly remember where I was the first time I heard “It’s So Easy“.[2] I also remember going right out to the local Boscov’s when UYI1/2 were released, and with only enough money to buy one, grabbing a UYI1 CD and heading straight home to listen to it on my own, new, CD-equipped boombox. I had hoped for more of Izzy Stradlin’s grimy mix of hair metal and LA punk, full of splashy cymbals and power chords arranged over minor thirds, I got Axl Rose trying to pull off Meatloaf or Elton John.[3] I quickly put down UYI1 in favor of Blood Sugar Sex Magik and the Black Album, both released right around then, and just as heavily produced too, but much better.[4] I never even bought UYI2 until college, when I thought I might as well complete the pair, and have never purchased any GNR music since.

    I have always wondered “what might have been” with the Use Your Illusion fiasco. What would have happened had GNR’s handlers forced them to throw out the waste on the two albums, think hard about the album’s structure, and put together something coherent? What if, in an alternate universe, Use Your Illusion was just one album? Could it have been better?

    The rules underlying this exercise are simple: make a new album where

    1. Each track has to be a song that was actually included on one of the two albums.[5]
    2. The total album length has to be realistic.

    The point of this is not to imagine GNR writing a different album, but could they have done this particular album better. I would like to add an additional rule that eliminates some of the songs with the more openly crass and misogynistic lyrics, but it happens to be the case that songs like “Back off Bitch” and “Get in the Ring” have aged particularly poorly (never good to begin with, they sound downright silly now), so the rule is superfluous. And there’s no getting around the fact that such a rule was not applied to Appetite.

    Another stipulation—not a rule, just a condition—is that songs featuring audible guest appearances by other vocalists are penalized. This is otherwise known as the “Alice Cooper Penalty.” It is not applied to “Don’t Cry” because no one can hear Shannon Hoon singing on it.

    Use Your Illusion Track Listing

    SIDE 1
    1. “Right Next Door to Hell” (3:02)
    2. “Dust N’ Bones” (4:58)
    3. “Civil War” (7:42)
    4. “Double Talkin’ Jive” (3:24)
    5. “Pretty Tied Up” (4:48)
    6. “Dead Horse” (4:17)

    SIDE 2
    7. “You Could Be Mine” (5:43)
    8. “Don’t Cry” (4:44)
    9. “November Rain” (8:57)
    10. “Bad Obsession” (5:28)
    11. “Garden of Eden” (2:41)
    12. “Estranged” (9:23)

    8 out of the 12 songs are from Use Your Illusion I, which is appropriate because this is the album that had more Izzy Stradlin’ on it. Songs from Use Your Illusion II written by Izzy are more likely to appear than songs not written by Izzy. It is also the case, however, that Izzy is responsible for some clunkers on UYI1 that didn’t make it. The entire album clocks in at 65:07, 10 minutes shorter than either of the overlong original albums. It even allows for a ballad-y second side which might be likened to GNR attempting to do a side-two-of-Abbey-Road-meets-Bat-out-of-Hell.

    I will freely admit that this album is still not a particularly great album. However, if this were all that had been released in September 1991, we would not be remembering it as an indulgent, overblown mess. We would remember it as a major label sophomore effort by a band evolving in sound, comparable to, say, In Utero, but not, say, Pinkerton.

    NOTES

    [1] The argument, for example, that “Don’t Damn Me” is a good song is ridiculous on its face. Axl admits it that the song sucks in the song itself.
    [2] Sitting on my grandmother’s front porch in North Carolina, probably early 1988, with my older cousin playing the tape on her boombox.
    [3] HT to AB for the metaphor.
    [4] Even 12-year old me could tell that Nevermind was something different—and great—altogether.
    [5] I consider this rule to be somewhat artificial, considering that the actually-existing albums contained covers of songs by Wings and Bob Dylan, and UYI2 contains a cover of a song on UYI1. In a preliminary version of this list I replaced “Pretty Tied Up” with “Monkey Business,” which I have always believed would be have been a great GNR cover song. However, the prominent cowbell means that it is more a Steven Adler track than a Matt Sorum track, so ultimately this does not make the cut.