Dear Mr. Klosterman,
Having laughed, agreed, and argued my way through "Fargo Rock City," your delightful critical/personal mosh with metal in America, I found myself at the foot of your Afterword. Climbing my way through it, I arrived at your final, desperate goal, your one last shot to convince the metal-haters that Motley Crue matters.
You make your case by comparing the Crue to Radiohead. Radiohead, you say, is by far the better band; in fact, one of the best. Yet, you say, "You know what? I could never love Radiohead as much as I loved Motley Crue."
Right. Okay. You've thrown the gauntlet. Now...now tell us why. Tell us why, Chuck, and make it good.
"I could never love Radiohead as much as Motley Crue because..."
Yes? Because? Because?
"...because I'll never be 15 again."
WHAT??
"...It's all about the timing, you know?" you finish.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO! You have to do better than that. If that's all you can come up with--that you were fifteen--then we might as well be talking about Debbie Gibson. Scritti Politti. Nu Shooz. Animotion. (There was a band called Animotion, right? I didn't hallucinate that? Or was it an album title. I'm not sure. ANYWAY, as Klosterman is fond of saying, in caps.)
Again: If the only reason you loved and continue to love the Crue is because of "timing," then we could be talking about anybody. Any act. I realize we're not, which kind of makes the point. But still. Your age is not good enough.
Good enough reasons are, in fact, peppered through the book itself. My favorite is the following. Of Poison's Bret Michaels, you write (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "He didn't want to be an artist, he just wanted to be cool." This is not just an observation; you offer it as a reason why Michaels was, in many ways, a better artist than a 'real' artist. And with all due caveats and loopholes, I agree with you. That works on both a flippant and a meaningful level to explain why someone would genuinely prefer Poison (or the Crue) to a more 'serious' band.
Why? It's like tap dancing. Tap dancing, which is profound, completely ignores its profundity. It just wants to be (and inherently is) cool. The United States is, I believe, the only nation whose homegrown arts--jazz, the blues, tap dancing--joyously ignore their own profundity and just reel around, in love with their doomed exhilaration. The looseness, the (slightly deceptive but even more genuine) letting-go and letting-be, the "hey we're just trying to have fun/be cool/whatever," the smiling through tears and the weeping through laughter, the meeting of pain and joy that produces ecstasy...those things pull the American soul. They're the river.
At its best/worst, hair metal (like pop, which it despises) touches that river.
Motley Crue has touched that river.
For me, Guns n' Roses--another favorite of yours--touched that river more purely. But you know what? The Crue touched it too. They did, and they still do; I like "Saints of Los Angeles." "We are, we are the saints/We signed our lives away/Doesn't matter what you think/We're gonna do it anyway." That's the American rebel yell right there.
That and a hook is love; at least the kind of love you mean.
Motley doesn't have to be as good, or 'as good,' as Radiohead for someone to love it more. Or to matter as much, at least in the way that you define 'mattering.' And maybe that's the real issue, is your definition of what it means to matter artistically. But I think that, in your afterword, you were reaching beyond that to embrace every possible definition of what it means to matter artistically. And so again: American art is an art of the ephemeral. Tap dancing, which unravels itself as it goes. Jazz improv. Things which transcend themselves by pretending to be less than what they are. The shrug. The glance. The Rat Pack. Etcetera. American art is ephemera.
And so, occasionally, American ephemera can be art. They intersect.
The Crue flickers at that intersection.
And you know what? Got nothin' to do with fifteen.
