Classic Albums: Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Rust Never Sleeps

Every now and again I rediscover an old favorite album that I'd let get way too dusty.  About this time last year, just as I was preparing to leave Texas for New Jersey, Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps was a constant companion through the emotional ups of leaving a wretched work situation and the downs of saying good-bye to some truly wonderful friends. Rust Never Sleeps is tailor made for such conflicting emotions, in that it has a contemplative acoustic side, and one hard-rocking electric side. In fact, it's really the only Neil Young album to properly combine his two main modes: high-voiced introspective folkie and Jimi Hendrix by way of Kurt Cobain electric guitar wizard.

Strangely enough, I used to associate RNS with working in a factory. I bought it on cassette (yep, I'm that old) the summer after my first year of college, which I spent toiling in a rubber parts factory. I'd been inspired to buy it in the first place after hearing "My My Hey Hey" (this is the Live Rust version) on the classic rock station at work. As a 19-year old I was attracted to that song's seeming defiance in the lines "Rock and roll will never die" and "it's better to burn out than to fade away." I was also aware that the latter line had sadly been part of the aforementioned Cobain's suicide note.

Now that I am in my mid-30s, Young's age when he wrote the song, I hear the defiance differently. It is a defiance against the inevitable ravages of age, which I am now coming to grips with. My mind isn't as sharp, my energy wanes, gray hairs appear above my temples, and the confidence I once had that I could beat the odds has pretty well been beaten out of me by life. Young is taking Dylan Thomas' "rage against the dying of the light" and giving it a rock and roll twist. It still resonates with me, but in a much deeper way.

The second song, "Thrasher," (the link is to a slightly different version) has similarly revealed its deeper meaning to me with my advancing age. It's a very poetic story of taking a road trip early in the morning and seeing thrashers going out to take in the harvest. I used to think of the words as mysterious and abstract, but now that I'm older, I see that it's about the changes that come with the passage of time, including the biggest change of all: death. It's also obliquely about the passing of friendships, and leaving people behind on the road of life. The latter concern has been bugged me a lot last year as I prepared to get out of Dodge, which was sweet in its escape from a horrible work environment, but sad in that it tore me away from people I love. The song itself is more about the bitterness of abandoning false friends, but I think I'm within my rights to twist the song to my own purposes.

When I popped the tape into the cassette player of my car on the way to work at the factory in the morning, it always took me through the third song, "Ride my Llama," which has an admittedly stupid-sounding title. However, it has a certain foreboding, minor key feel, which suited my lack of ethusiasm over spending nine hours in devastating summer heat working on machines with plates heated to over 400 degrees. The next song, "Pocahontas," is an absolutely stunning meditation on the genocide of Native Americas and the hollowness of material progress. The last acoustic song, "Sail Away," is a bit of a folkie soft-rock throwaway in the best seventies style, but it is a much better than average example of the genre.

Flip the record over, and Neil hits the listener with, in my opinion, the all-time king #1 blockbuster showcase for his distinctive electric guitar playing: "Powderfinger." It sounds pretty glorious for a song about dying young from a misfiring rifle. The soaring breaks are reminiscent of a hawk being struck by lightning.

The next song, "Welfare Mothers," basically a bad joke encased in a killer riff, and probably the weakest song on the record. That being said, there are plenty of pyrotechnics.

Following "Welfare Mothers" is the more oblique, time-signature shifting "Sedan Delivery," which has lyrics about the sordid underbelly of life befitting a Tom Waits composition. It took a long time for this song to sink in, but now I must admit it has a kind of dirty beauty.

Young ends it all with "Hey Hey My My," an electric reprise of the opener. Instead of the mourful acoustic guitar, there's a absolutely brutal electric riff that practically stabs the listener's ear. This song pretty much explains why Sonic Youth would open for Young in the early 90s, despite differences of age and temperment. The cry to burn out rather than fade away is more powerful here, but also a little more desperate, too.

Like almost all albums except for a precious few, Rust Never Sleeps is not perfect, but it is much more than the sum of its parts. There are few albums that still contain a capacity to inspire and resonate thirty years later, and Rust Never Sleeps belongs in that rarified space, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Progressives Need to Stop Celebrating and Start Organizing

A note to my progressive brethren: I know you are happy about today's SCOTUS decision, but this is no time for gloating or complacency.  Remember back in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected?  You guys showed up in unprecedented numbers to his inauguration, declared an end to thirty years of Reaganomics, and generally behaved as if the other side would somehow concede defeat and acknowledge the popular mandate behind the new president.

If you remember, conservatives responded by letting loose the dogs of political war.  Glenn Beck was on television every day comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, Republicans in Congress began filibustering and obstructing just about every progressive initiative, and the moneymen on the right astroturfed a pitchfork-wielding army of angry resentful White people, otherwise known as the Tea Party.  The complacency and lack of fight in the progressive ranks gave us the current wingnut House and governors like Scott Walker who are hell-bent on destroying collective bargaining rights.  The ass whupping the Democrats received in 2010 happened largely because the other side dropped any pretensions of civility or centrism and got their hordes to the polls in big numbers while many Obama voters stayed home.

Progressives seem to forget that the opposing political party is not a rational institution, but that it has become a batshit-crazy vehicle for an extremist Christo-libertarian ideology.  You don't have to go far to find evidence of this.  In the aftermath of the SCOTUS ruling today, the former spokesman for the Michigan GOP called for armed rebellion against the provisions of the healthcare law.  Indiana Republican Mike Pence compared the ruling to 9/11.  You cannot let your guard down around these types of people for even a second.

The other side will gnash their teeth and wail about today's Supreme Court decision, but they have plenty of loaded guns waiting to be fired.  Today they censured the attorney general in an unprecedented move that now appears to be based on utter falsehoods.  They are currently doing their best to restrict voting under the guise of limiting "voter fraud" in ways that are both racist and nakedly intended to win the election in swing states.  Speaking of disenfranchisement and racism, the Republican Party of Texas in its official platform has called for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the piece of legislation that has made the 15th Amendment a reality.  (I would even hazard a conspiratorial guess that the attacks on Holder are intended to stop the Justice Department from interfering in the disenfranchisement campaign.)  The conservative movement has marshaled unprecedented financial power, and is manipulating the law to set up massive piles of untraceable cash to be used in all kinds of negative propaganda against the president.

President Obama will be outspent by his opposition in this campaign, thousands of people who will want to vote for him will be turned away from the polls, and the nation's most popular cable news network acts effectively as the propaganda arm of his opponents.  So please, fellow progressives, stop gloating on Facebook about today's decision.  Now is the time to help explain the benefits of the health care law to those who are still fuzzy about it (and with good reason.)  Now is the time to get out the vote and to fight to make sure all of the votes get counted.  Don't make the same mistake you made in 2009-2010, because the people who are against you will stop at nothing, including fanning the flames of white racial resentment, misogyny, and homophobia, disenfranchising voters, and spreading scurrilous lies to put their extremist ideas into practice.  This is not a time to celebrate, but a time to organize, mobilize, and to fight.

Parenting Dilemma: When and How Do I Introduce My Children to Star Wars?

Sometime in the next month, my wife will be giving birth to twin girls.  This event has forced us to consider all kinds of questions, from where we want to settle down to what kind of food we feed them.  Last evening my wife and I discussed a less pressing, but very difficult question: when and how will we introduce them to Star Wars?

I must say that I am amazed at the staying power of Star Wars amongst children born decades after its initial release.  I lived much of my early childhood totally immersed in the Star Wars universe, playing with the toys and acting out scenarios with my friends for hours on end.  Once we got a VCR in 1985 and they started showing the films on television, I managed to tape and watch them over and over again.  One of my sisters always recounted her favorite dream ever, which involved Han Solo landing the Millennium Falcon in our backyard and whisking her away with him.  I spent much of the summer of 1983 wearing two t-shirts: a black one that read "Beat It!" in large red letters, and a kind of powdery blue shirt with Luke Skywalker wielding a lightsaber.  The next year I gladly choked down the vile concoction that was C-3PO breakfast serial and jumped for joy when I got the Ewok village toy set for Christmas.

 I never would have thought that Star Wars toys would be just as common a quarter of a century later.  This weekend my in-laws had a backyard party at their house, and I was amazed to see one little tyke wearing shoes with C-3PO and R2-D2 on them, and another with a t-shirt depicting Yoda wearing sunglasses.  These boys seemed to love Star Wars just as much as I did when I was younger.  I once worried that my kids would think of the things I love as outdated or lame, but it looks like Star Wars is something that we could share together.  However, I am not sure how to bring it into their lives.

The question of when and how to introduce Star Wars came up after we watched Revenge of the Sith (the third prequel, for the uninitiated) last night, which my wife hadn't ever seen, despite (or perhaps because) her love of the original trilogy.  It seems she stopped watching Attack of the Clones after about fifteen minutes, thinking it to be a steaming pile of crap (can't say I disagree) and gave up on the prequels.  Conversely, both she and I like Revenge of the Sith, which I consider to be at least the equal of Return of the Jedi (perhaps that is damning with faint praise.)  I asked her whether we would introduce the prequels to our twin daughters, start with the original trilogy, or simply pretend that the prequels never existed.

From a chronological, story-arc perspective, it makes sense to start with prequel number one, The Phantom Menace.  It's not just the well-documented lameness of this flick that bugs me; however, but the knowledge that kids love Jar Jar.  I am so afraid that if I start with this film, my girls will think Jar Jar is the coolest and funniest, with his slapstick antics and muppet-like voice.  If that happens I just might have to put myself in exile in Dagobah.

My wife and I have agreed to start them with the original Star Wars (I refuse on general principle to call it A New Hope.)  It's an obvious choice, considering it's the first made, etc., but we are also especially keen on starting here because Princess Leia is such a badass in this flick.  I am already having to contend with the fact that social norms are molding my daughters into objectified beauty objects, at least based on the fact that we've been gifted all kinds of frilly pink baby clothes.  They'll need some role models, and in this movie Leia will provide a good example.  It is she who leads the rebel forces and manages to keep the Death Star plans safe.  She manages to withstand torture without betraying her people.  She refuses to play the damsel in distress, shooting storm troopers and repeatedly telling off her would be captors.  ("Into the garbage shoot flyboy," "Will someone please get this walking carpet out of my way," and "Aren't you a little short for a storm trooper?" are particular favorite lines in this regard.)  You can easily contrast Leia's toughness with the simpering antics of Padme/Amidalla from the prequels.  In the third installment she seems to spend most of her time doing her hair.

At this point I figure I will introduce Star Wars around age four (I really can't wait for this moment), and pretend the prequels don't exist until they ask questions or their friends say something about it.  I like the third enough to maybe make an exception.  The other thing to consider, of course, is which version of the original trilogy to show my daughters.  I only have the "special editions" version on DVD (I've got the remastered originals from the 1990s on VHS), so I should probably go out and get the non-gussied up versions on DVD, which you have to buy separately, at a premium, and which come with the special edition discs that I already had to pay for.  I rented the DVD version of the unaltered Star Wars a couple of years ago, and was blown away at how much it looked like the mid-budget 1970s film that it was.  It was liberating and glorious, and it made what Lucas accomplished in 1977 with mostly unknown actors and little studio support that much more of a creative triumph.  Of course, my daughters probably will find the CGI Jabba the Hutt more interesting.  But damn it, there are sacred things in this world, and my daughters should not live in a world where Greedo shot first.  

Children are unpredictable, and my two girls might not care about the differences between the originals and special editions, or even have any interest in watching Star Wars at all.  I'll be happiest if they can explore their own interests, whether or not I share them.  That said, I will feel a little secret sorrow if they don't like Star Wars, akin to the anguish I felt when I first saw Han Solo frozen in carbonate as a five year old.  After all, I first saw Attack of the Clones with my pops, and it was a great emotional moment for us to return to very same theater where he'd taken me to see The Empire Strikes Back those many years ago. The new film might've been shitty, but walking out of the theater with such warm memories rekindled, I don't think we really cared.

Completing the Circle: Lincoln's Tomb and My Love Affair with History

One day about a year ago while I was sitting at my desk in the midst of a hectic day, I experienced one of those rare memory recalls that are just as vivid as they are unexpected. It didn’t wash over me so much as stab my heart with a realization almost thirty years in the making. I was finishing up writing my last lecture on the Civil War with some material about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Looking for visual material, I chanced upon a photo of Lincoln’s tomb, and was suddenly, unwillingly transported back to the summer of 1980.

It was sunny that day when my family, on vacation, visited the Lincoln-related sites in and around Illinois’ capital, including New Salem, which I particularly enjoyed. Having spent the whole day learning about Abraham Lincoln, we finished it all off, appropriately enough, with a visit to his tomb. At that time it had fallen into severe disrepair, and I distinctly remember the many cracks in stone steps where I sat despondently.

I had just been inside the unnaturally cold marble crypt, its eerie silence oppressive as I gazed upon the sarcophagus holding Lincoln’s dead body. My mother, bless her, never sugarcoated the reality of death for me when I was young, something that I am eternally grateful for. Right there she matter-of-factly related to me the details of Lincoln’s murder in Ford’s Theater at the hands of the scoundrel John Wilkes Booth.

This may sound implausible, but I think at that very moment the inherent unfairness of life first impressed itself upon my mind. It just didn’t make sense to me that such a great person could be shot down in cold blood. According to my parents, as I sat inconsolable on the decaying monument’s steps, I asked them if Abraham Lincoln still had his beard in heaven. (My mother never gets tired of that story.)

And so, over thirty years later, now teaching others about Lincoln’s death, it felt as if some great, mysterious circle to my life had finally been completed. For the first time I truly know the exact moment that ignited my lifelong fascination with history, an obsession that goes back to my earliest memories and which will define me until the day I die.   So many things I once cared about intensely matter little to me today, but history has stuck hard, and it will never go away.  After years of study and multiple diplomas my understanding of the past has certainly become more sophisticated, but the past retains its power to prick my heart and rend my soul as much as it did those many years ago.

Songs About the Suburbs

Although a majority of Americans live in suburban areas, apart from three months of my life spent crashing on the suburban couch of two of my college friends, I have lived either in urban neighborhoods, college towns, or rural outposts.  For that reason, they've always seemed a little exotic and strange to me, but despite that fascination with suburbia I have no desire to live there.  I like having either access to the culture, walkability, and excitement that urban concentrations bring or the quiet and nearness to nature of small towns.  I do like to visit, mostly since my wife's folks live in the suburbs, and when we spend a Sunday afternoon there we get to enjoy easy access to convenient shopping and tree-lined curvy streets made for bicycle riding.  I say this at the start just to let y'all know that I do not possess any knee-jerk snobbishness about suburbia, it's just not the type of place where I'd prefer to hang my hat each night.  I think we as a society make our mole-hills of personal preference into mountains of perceived elemental differences and should just let everyone like what they like.

Now that I'm spending more time in the suburbs, songs about suburbia keep popping in my head.  These tunes tend to be pretty critical of suburban life, mostly as a protest against the shallow consumerism of the postwar American Dream.  With the current housing crisis and growing environmental consciousness, the suburbs have lost much of the allure that the songs I am about to discuss were protesting against.  Perhaps this sub-sub-genre is about to come to an end.  Anyway, here are some of the more interesting songs about suburbia as I see it.

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The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"


This is the first song about the suburbs I ever really got into, although it's meaning was a little unclear what it was all about.  Back in 1986-87 I religiously watched reruns of the Monkees' TV show and via my cousin listened to all of their classic albums.  This song confused me a little since I was used to pop songs about love and romance rather than wry bits of social commentary.  As I got I got older, I started hearing lines like "rows of houses that are all the same/ and no one seems to care" in a different light.  Of course, by that time I had gotten pretty tired of my monocultural home town, and even though it was rural rather than suburban, when Mickey Dolenz croons "I need a change of scenery" I could hear him loud and clear.

Rush, "Subdivisions"


I used to hate Rush in large part due to Neil Peart's rather daft lyrics, but now I love his drumming and the band's musicianship so much that I just tune out the words.  This is one case where his emotive, teen-angst riven "nobody understands me" standpoint actually works.  Instead of building up some kind of Ayn Randian superman battling anti-individualism as the center of his song, the criticism of conformity hits a less ephemeral and more tangible target: modern suburban life.  In fact, the line about the subdivisions' "geometric order" creating an "insulated border" against the city is actually quite artful.  The main irony here, of course, is that the suburbs that Peart and co. depict as a soul-sucking wasteland also produce about 90% of their fan base.  (The video pretty much lets the cat out of the bag on this point.)

The Kinks, "Shangri-La"

Ray Davies of the Kinks is probably rock music's greatest poet of daily life, and someone who has written songs about the perils of moving to the city ("The Big Black Smoke") and idealizing traditional life in English villages ("Village Green.")  He also penned one of the greatest songs about postwar suburban life, since it gets at the illusory nature of its promises.  At the start Davies terms the suburban home a "paradise" and "kingdom to command" so much more comfortable than the "lavatories in back yard" of the old working-class neighborhood, but soon all is not well, since there's nothing else to aspire to.  In the key words in the song's opener, "You've reached your top and you just can't get any higher/ you're in your place and you know where you are."  It's a place with creature comforts like a TV set, car, and radio, that increasingly begins to feel like a trap where "you're too scared to admit how insecure you are" and everyone gossips about you.  If this is all there is to look forward to, life is pretty damn bleak, a point that Davies makes just as effectively as literary critics of suburbia like John Updike, Richard Yates, and John Cheever.

Weezer, "In the Garage"

Of course, not all songs about suburban life are necessarily so heavy-handed and didactic.  Sometimes they just give the listener a nice little slice of daily life, and "In the Garage" is a great example.  The narrator of the song, who appears to be a disaffected nerdy kid with few friends, talks about the garage as his suburban refuge where he can look at his KISS posters and read his Dungeon Master's Guide without being mocked.  I bought this album right when it came out in the summer of 1994, right before I left home for college, and when my first roommate loved it too (and understood what it meant) I knew we'd get along really well.  Much of my adult life has been spent making friends who, like me, spent their adolescence sheltered in their geeky cocoons.

Arcade Fire, "Sprawl II"

It seems to have become a sport in the indie-rock world these days to attack Arcade Fire, the reason being something I call "Malkmusitis" in honor of Stephen Malkmus, former lead singer of indie greats Pavement.  There is no greater sin in indie music than unironic earnestness and emotion.  If your songs are anthemic without being satirical (like the Arcade Fire's), they are deemed cheesy or uncool.  I for one love their last album, appropriately titled The Suburbs.  (On it they get a little revenge on their too-cool-for school hipster detractors with "Rococo.")  My absolute favorite song on the record is "Sprawl II," a sweeping number that combines New Wave and disco with an emotional evocation of suburban sprawl as an endless, suffocating Moloch-like beast eating its children alive.  As a child of rural Nebraska, I do have to say that when I first went to sprawled-out cities like Denver as a kid, the sight of sprawling "shopping malls like mountains beyond mountains" made me queasy in its endlessly repetitive artificiality.

Parliament, "Chocolate City"

I know this song is about cities and not suburbs, but it's a pretty sly and powerful riposte to the white flight to the suburbs.  Clinton refers to cities with a black majority (like my own city of Newark) in the beginning, before building up to the revelation that the nation's capital is "Chocolate City."  He imagines a black president and cabinet in what was once the White House, and the chorus proclaims "we're gaining on you!"  It's a very different American Dream than the one being propagated in the "vanilla suburbs."  Although it's not one of George Clinton's better songs from a groove perspective, the musicianship is great as always, and the political message ought to let folks know that George Clinton wasn't just about laying down party jams.

Cranky Bear on the Sinking Ship of Public Higher Education

Editor's note: for those of you unfamiliar with this blog, I have a guest blogger friend by the name of Cranky Bear whose missives I occasionally publish in these pages.  CB is much more profane and unrestrained than I, and out of fear of attracting lawsuits or protest I often edit or refuse to publish much of his material.  In this case I agree so much with his message (though perhaps not with some of his more impolitic words) that I will publish it unadulterated.  You have been warned.

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This is Cranky Bear here with a fire my belly and righteous indignation in my soul.  As some of you know, ole CB once cracked the boards of the academic stage before leaving behind one of those rare tenure-track jobs to live in the Cranky cave with Mrs. Cranky teaching cubs rather than bears the ways of history.  When I left the academic world I got a little misty-eyed about giving up the life of the mind and whatnot, but nowadays I feel that decision was the case of one smart-ass rat fleeing a desperately fucked-up sinking ship.

I worked in public higher education for five long years, at non-flagship universities at that.  For thirty years these institutions have been getting slowly starved of state funds while having to pay for non-academic expenses like gilded gyms with rock-climbing walls, flat screen TVs in the library, and a whole panoply of assorted deanlets with cushy salaries.  Tuition skyrocketed, as did the ranks of the "contingent faculty," who labor without security, benefits, or adequate pay.  I was one of these poor souls for two years, and saw how my university's survival depended upon laborers who had no voice in university affairs and were treated like human garbage.

Since the onset of the current economic depression, things have only gotten worse.  Public universities around the nation are cutting departments wholesale, with Latin, Greek, German, and philosophy especially gutted.  Most of these universities still retain their football teams, of course, and I would love to see a law stating that no institution that lacks philosophy but retains a football team ought to call itself a "university."  Few people seem to care, mostly since these institutions -SUNY-Albany, Louisiana-Lafayette, etc.- largely service working and lower-middle class students at a time when papers like the Times focus their higher education coverage on how to get their readers' bourgeois children into big-name universities.  The young people at less rarified "directional" state unis having their education trashed were already stabbed in the back and left for dead by a system that simply does not give a flying fuck about their future.

That silence might change now that the elite flagship state universities are undergoing a similar process of "streamlining" whereby higher education becomes strictly vocational and programs are funded or cut on the basis of the money they generate.  The news trickling out of the University of Virginia seems to indicate that its popular president was fired for failing to do the bidding of the corporate interests that now finance the university in the aforementioned absence of state support.  It seems that the same people who wrecked our economy weren't just satisfied with that, and now they want to throttle quality public education to death while spouting the useless, pernicious bullshitting cant of "innovation."

To them "innovation" means maximizing profit at all costs, damn the consequences or any other value apart from the cash nexus.  In my three years on the tenure track at a horribly mismanaged state uni, I got to learn all that this entails.  It means moving courses online even when there is no demand for it.  It means eliminating whole departments and fields of study that do not advance the cause of training students to be corporate drones unable to question the economic system fucking them up the ass on a daily basis.  It means turning the professoriate into just another bunch of replaceable, expendable "employees" doing the intellectual version of working the counter at McDonald's.  It reduces teaching to "customer service" and scholarship to an afterthought.

After decades of state negligence, our corporate overlords have been stepping into the financial breech, and now get the to call the tune, which is a ditty that calls for a demented neo-liberal St. Vitus' Dance whereby contingent faculty are worked to death for low pay and all that is not intended to make money gets thrown on the dung pile to rot.  Now that they provide the funding, the corporate hyenas feeding on the corpse of higher ed can even get universities to generate research findings that benefit them.  Many public universities are public in name only, since they get so little of their funding from either state or federal government sources, and this has had disastrous consequences.

It's taken a good three decades of rot to set in to get to the current state of affairs where whole academic disciplines are being destroyed and the average faculty member is a low-wage drone paid by the course rather than a tenure-track professor.  I hate to burst your bubble, boys and girls, but this type of decline cannot be reversed.  We are now witnessing something truly disgusting: a society standing by and watching while one of its greatest and most storied institutions -something so key to the enlarging of its middle class and economic prowess- bleeds to death in the gutter while hyenas and vultures rips its flesh and grab its wallet.

As is the case with so much of our American life today, the elites won't bother to do anything because they left public higher ed for dead long ago.  The elite will continue sending their kids to well-funded elite universities where their administrators have endowments so large that they can swim in them a la Scrooge McDuck.  The rest of the poor plebeians will be fed on a thin gruel of glorified vocational training, and true public universities will go the way of the Model T.  It's a sick and disgusting state of affairs, and in those in charge will get what they want: a compliant, semi-moronic populace educated well enough to do their stultifying cubicle jobs, but not knowledgable enough to question their own enslavement.  God knows we're more than halfway there already.

I for one got sick and fucking tired of trying to resist change as inevitable as the tides.  Teaching in low-level public higher education began to feel like collaborating in a disgusting and vile lie, one I could no longer tell without prostituting my soul.  For those of you still in that world, enjoy it while it lasts, cuz it sure won't be around too much longer.

80s Metal: Heavy Metal Parking Lot versus Rock of Ages

Evidently there's a Hollywood adaptation of the 80s metal jukebox musical Rock of Ages that's hitting the theaters.  Apart from seeing Tom Cruise channel his couch-jumping energy into playing an Axl Rose manqué, I have no interest in seeing it.  In these types of musicals the original songs get pasteurized and homogenized worse than Velveeta, and in this case, the source material (hair metal) ain't all that great to begin with.

It all looks to be a pretty unrealistic, air-brushed, and sanitized version of the whole 80s metal scene.  I should know, because metal ruled my small Nebraska town growing up.  This was not the music of glamor, but of dirtbag burnouts slamming back big-mouth hand grenade bottles of Mickey's Malt Liquor while blasting Motley Crue from their Camaro car stereos.

Listen up kiddos, if you want a glimpse of the real thing, check out the guerrilla documentary/anthropological field report known as Heavy Metal Parking Lot.  It is what it says: a bunch of footage shot in 1986 in the parking lot of an arena before a Judas Priest concert.  (Notice that these are the true metal fans out for a true metal band, not suburban teeny-boppers with mall hair hoping to see Jon Bon Jovi shake his be-spandexed little ass.)  The makers of the film have provided us with a one-of-a-kind document of a bygone age, and entertainment that's much more fun (and disturbing) than anything Hollywood can conjure.  These sixteen minutes are also a powerful reminder of the dangers of nostalgia.