May 31
85131077
From The Editor’s Desk….....
As you can all see below, the first half of this round of posting has drawn an eMail response. That must mean that the other half had best be posted, so here it is :
Part 2
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the softer side of hard rock/heavy metal; that of AOR. (Even metalheads have a soft side.) A brand of music that was so out of fashion that it had to go to Nashville to get noticed again (Shania Twain, Faith HIll, Lonestar) is now making a bit of a comeback. It combines the power of guitars, bass, and drums with softer vocals and tender lyrics. Hard Rock produces the ballads that rockers shag to, the drinking songs they drink to, and the party songs they party to. Hard Rock tends to be a more equal male to female type gig. In its heyday I went to many gigs where there were more women than men in attendance. Bands like Def Leppard, Poison, Whitesnake and Motley Crue were good at “pulling” the females into the gigs, many of the men on the other hand were there to pull the highly agitated females in the audience. Or as one of my friends (a woman) put it when asked what on earth she was going to a hard rock gig for: “the single women there want to sleep with the lead singer and the men that go want to sleep with the single women.” It is a quite simple idea; let some better looking guy on stage do the getting a woman all hot & bothered and then move in for the kill. This type of music tends be fairly heterosexual, while some of the truly harder types of the metal music (goth, industrial, darkwave, death) attract gay men, tranvestites, and the fetishists. Even so, you could argue bands like Manowar with their leather thongs, chisled naked torsos and good looks could be seen as a bit “camp”. (Think Chippendales with musical instruments and little talent to play them.)
I recently attended a Mortiis (see review: DtD) concert where the crowd could have been seen as a preview audience for the next weekend’s Torture Garden bash. Clothing choices ranged from fetish, through cybergoth, to goth and metal-heads. Leather, denim, pvc, rubber, as well as satin and lace were there for all to see. Ironically, the difference between a lot of so-called “bondage” clothes and “metal” clothes is just where you bought it. Ann Summers charges twice as much for a leather dress as the ‘metal’ clothier down the street. Metal and hard-rock is neither music for neanderthals nor is it only for maladjusted and socially inept men. It is for those who don’t like their music trendy or to be on Top of the Pops every week. HR/HM is as diverse and individualistic as it wants to be, a true example of liberty and free will in action.
Andrew Ian Dodge
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