#prompt: glam punk reader

[daianysx]

☆ Eddie Munson x Glam Punk Reader ☆

— Requested by @geacola96.

[bloodybells1]

Motley Boo: The Dirt 2019 and a Tertiary Failure to Reframe the “Baddest Band”’s History within Patriarchal Discourse

It’s difficult to overstate the impact Mötley Crüe made on the history of heavy metal with their 1981 debut album, Too Fast For Love. Raw, phlegmatic, and, yes, fast—it clocks in at less than 40 minutes—the album dropped into the world of heavy metal like a megaton anvil (or a turbocharged racer, depending on how you looked at it). The repercussions were conclusive and far-reaching. Shortly after the release, the band would support established acts like Kiss on the road, and later followed up the record with an even bigger smash hit, Shout at the Devil, permanently engraving them into the annals of heavy metal. 

What distinguished this freshmen effort in the larger context of the metal scene, however, was the band’s—well, really, Nikki Sixx’s—intelligent cross-referencing of glam rock optics within the giant soundscape of the Marshall amp set. Almost a decade before Guns’n’Roses would introduce a similarly decadent soupcon of glam rock attitude into heavy metal’s DNA (more in the form of LA dispossession, but you know what I mean), there stood Crüe, bow-tying the cranked distortion of heavy metal with an androgynous, lipstick-smeared pucker.

Yet, the record was more than just a public relations gambit to redesign heavy metal in the image of T. Rex. After all, it seemed the band had actually made a great album. It was good enough to make it into the mixtapes of LA punks and New York skinheads, at least, as well as those of breadbasket-America headbangers—quite a feat for a band that cared little for the punk scene’s headier nihilism. Punks, for their part, looked past the cockrocking and focused instead on the record’s straightforward production and live sound. As it turned out, it was a good sign that a band like Crüe, for all their apparent fluffiness and ostensibly commercial leanings, had gained the favor of this more reticent community, having passed the “canary in the coal mine” test of punk rock’s preoccupation with authenticity.

And yet, I bet the first thing that comes to mind when prompted by the name of Mötley Crüe, at least to that of the layman, isn’t the infectious speed of “Live Wire”’s thunderclap-opening riff, but rather the band’s notoriously depraved extracurricular reputation. In fact, the quartet was already infamous for debauched hedonism prior to their even getting signed, the lore going back to their salad days as local lotharios at the Viper Room in downtown Los Angeles. Right out of the gate, they were as famous for fornication and drug abuse as for their music. 

Far from discouraging the storyline of excess, Crüe seemed right at home with their association with drugs and sex. The emphasis on carnality became a career-long feature of their mystique, both as a marketing strategy and as a core element of the philosophy implied in their music. Ultimately, they would enshrine this element in the form of a tell-all, committing all the sordid details of their exploits to paper in their aptly-named 2001 anthology of licensed sin, The Dirt. 

Couched as an entry of the confessional genre, the volume was jointly written in equal parts by each band member, offering long, anecdotal chapters, written in an extemporaneous, oral style. The accounts dove deep into the cesspool of their origins and the progress of their career. Obviously, the band didn’t write an exhaustive account of their entire story up to 2001, when the book was published, on their own; journalist Neil Strauss adroitly arranges their tracts with a wink and a nod. Not satisfied with a simple tell-all, though, he weaves the band members’ submitted drafts and “journal entries” into a grand narrative fabric that belies not only Strauss’s objective’s gaze, but a teleological vision of the price of fame, a tale steeped in storied entries of similar abasement, perhaps dating all the way back to Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A rebours.

Despite The Dirt’s clear insistence on the prevalence of moral transactionalism, it has nonetheless become known as a foundational text for the “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” trope of decadence. Readers seem to cherish the opening chapters of early hedonic excess without making much of the larger morality play laid out through the book’s end. The earlier chapters are so naked (excuse the pun) in their reportage of the band’s debauched activities, they’ve been taken as advertisements for that behavior. This rendering misappropriates the book’s real value—as a text on moral cosmology—by turning it into further glorification of rock’n’roll’s early hedonistic credo. Those early chapters are really a set up for what the book truly is, and should be known for most, that is, a discrediting of that credo.

The Dirt makes a clear case that the band has paid for their excesses—Vince Neil loses his daughter, Nikki Sixx almost dies, Mick Mars fights his way up to become the true sage in the band, Tommy Lee keeps getting divorced. These facts are laid out convincingly through a simple prose style: diaristic reportage of the self that, through careful pacing, mines deeper and deeper levels of personal pain and reckoning. Strauss is methodical in doling out these sojourns into the moral deep, making sure not to preempt their trials with hints of the future (never mind that we know how the story ends). This, along with the distinct voice of each band member, has the added effect of keeping the reader on the edge of their seat.

The supranarrative that emerges by the final page, one that supplants the traditional one that the unsuspecting reader no doubt imports into the book from decades of formulaic pandering to baser perspectives, states the fundamental primacy of Fate, that even the world’s most riotous band could not escape cosmic will. Mötley Crüe, as authors of the commodity known as “Mötley Crüe,” and through the media amplification of commodity fetishism, have become godlike and must be thrust down, made human again. Fate will make a human out of the man no matter how demiurgic he becomes. 

It’s no surprise that, with heady matter like this associated with a known commodity like Crüe, an early film deal sprang out of the publishing of the book. The Dirt came out in 2001, 20 years after Mötley Crüe came on the scene, and it has taken almost as much time for its dramatization, in the form of a Netflix biopic, to emerge. That’s a long time for a movie based on a book to come out, and there has understandably been a lot of anticipation.

Through the years, I’ve come to loathe biopics, which with few exceptions turn out to be the mere regurgitations of original texts, authored under viably artistic circumstances and trademarked, but then repeated by a committee of capitalist shills for a waiting audience eager to consume the brand anew. This explains why almost every biopic is a formulaic compendium, lacking any vision or direction, since its objective in the first place is to provide brand pornography for consumers of established texts.

It’s quite sad that the cinematic dramatization of The Dirt is no exception to this rule. It so exemplifies the craven absence of real art in the modern biopic as to appear almost comical at times. Indeed, when I looked at the image on my Netflix home page of the movie, I initially thought that perhaps someone had given Mötley Crüe’s inimitable story the Christopher Guest treatment.

Alas, no.

The movie is a sorry parade of every single biopic cliché that was ever established in the history of biopics. I won’t go into just how pathetically—shamelessly, even—this movie panders to the basest titillations of brand pornography. That sad fact has been firmly established by the critical consensus. (It carries a 43 percent Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes, a rating I, in fact, find charitable.) My point in writing about this infuriating piece of exploitative pablum is to direct the reader to the incredible missed opportunity of this movie.

As I’ve already written, the book’s greatest accomplishment is not the lascivious proxy to bad behavior its protracted tales of sexual promiscuity and substance abuse offer the more upstanding, less adventurous reader. It’s the successful reframing of the “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll” narrative as a cautionary tale. Granted, we’ve seen this story inscribed into the annals of pop stardom before the publishing of The Dirt (hello Buddy Holly movie, Walk the Line, et al). Yet, its innovation lies not in the mere fact of the reframing, but in its offering the pen to the miscreant author: The Dirt is perhaps the first bad boy memoir: a behind-the-scenes tell-all yes, though of the Gore Vidal sort, and repurposed for the headbanger set with a moral edge.

By 2001, it had long been understood that this snot-nosed gang of aging rockers no longer had a decent recording in them (that’s no criticism if you believe, as I do, that the artform of rock music entails an inherent expiration date).  Instead, they produced a memoir that, shot straight from their shaky typewriters and notebooks, reinvents the band as willing atoners. In so doing they reemerge as personal subjects of a grand, cautionary tale, a heavy metal story for the era of Oprah, if you will. Mötley Crüe, then, performed a more authentic act in the writing of this book than any album they would have dared record.

Yet, along the current of its blood-soaked river of retribution, The Dirt, misses one crucial point of reckoning, one that positively begs for further exploration. 

Thanks to the #MeToo revolution, we are now given a critical apparatus to judge the excesses of the past committed in the name of patriarchy. Prior to this revolution, texts containing sexist, heteronormative givens were accepted reflexively by the zeitgeist. These were mythologies that historically debased and objectified women as the enslaved recipients of male lust, simple organs of the hedonic will of masculinity. We might have laughed at the music video for “Looks that Kill,” which features, among other debasing tropes, a gaggle of women in generic Neanderthal livery, but today we laugh harder—and more painfully. We no longer turn our eyes away from the now obvious rooting of this imagery in patriarchal attitudes.

The Dirt admittedly has almost nothing to offer by way of a #MeToo moment. (Early kudos, though, to Mick Mars who dedicates many of his paragraphs to the ludicrousness of male promiscuity.) But this isn’t necessarily a shortcoming of the book, anymore than that we may fault any number of classic stories and records that import similarly unexamined masculine, heteronormative givens into the 21st Century. As late as 2001, our eyes were yet glazed over with the unquestioned spectacle of male desire. Furthermore, the book is rife with vulnerable emoting and painful rumination. It thereby confers it an atmosphere of thoughtfulness. To a certain extent this vitiates against accusations of insensitivity.

But this potential forgiveness isn’t possible in cinema, where the taut storyline and shorter format require a more conclusive, unshaded verdict. Never mind that in 2019 it’s positively inexcusable. The #MeToo movement has today firmly established a visible discourse that supersedes antique notions of male desire, yet the movie seems to have taken no note of this seismic occurrence. To name but one of the movie’s baffling examples of cultural myopia, there are at least two scenes portraying women materializing out of the darkness underneath dining room tables, complete with satiated visages fresh from a round of clandestine fellatio. This is only one of the movie’s dated pickings from pre-#MeToo boilerplate, but it is perhaps the most glaring.

The film seems to conflate factual verisimilitude and hindsight objectivity; to which the simple response is that portraying something “as it was” doesn’t inoculate you from the sins of the past. One need only watch a couple seasons of another Netflix offering that traffics in garish ‘80s pop-cultural paraphernalia, GLOW, to witness a successful handling of these two elements. Many of the antique notions that were part and parcel in the ‘80s are now clearly offensive from today’s standards of race and sex discourse. These are reframed as racist and sexist mythologizing by the show’s deep dives into the family life of one of the African American wrestlers.

There’s nary a hint of this sort of wokeness from the film version of The Dirt. You really have to scratch your head as to how the committee let this fly, not to mention how desperate anyone would need to be in order to ignore such profligate tone-deafness under their collective noses.

The Dirt in 2019 truly encapsulates the most tragic outcome of a band like Mötley Crüe. The film’s failure as a work of art is not surprising when you consider that most biopics fail in that regard (Bohemian Rhapsody, anyone?). But the movie’s failure becomes truly irretrievable, of a completely different order of magnitude, when you consider that Mötley Crüe missed another opportunity to reframe themselves along the contours of contemporary discourse. They were successful in 2001, when, during the era of Oprah, they took their foundational text of rock’n’roll hedonism and reframed it as a personalized descent into Orphic confrontation. This gave us cause for hope in 2019, during the era of #MeToo, when the missing piece of that story, the accounting with the greater societal harm caused by unexamined patriarchy, was given an incredible opportunity to be placed back into the spine of the band’s legacy. Unfortunately, as Netflix and Mötley Crüe have made clear, the hope was misplaced.