If I never glimpse another Rock ’n’ Roll Bad Boy sneering at me on my television screen, trying to impress me with how unashamedly wicked and depraved he or she is, it’ll be too soon.

Once upon a time, musicians behaved onstage as though they yearned for nothing more than their audience’s pleasure. They wore shoes in which they could see their own reflections. There are those who’ll tell you that Soul Brother No. One in those days either fined or fired members of his band who failed to keep their slippers polished to a sufficiently dazzling gloss. But there are others who will tell you that he had them murdered in their sleep.

Entertainers somehow managed in those days to sound sincere when they told their audiences things like, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a pleasure and a privilege to be back here in Cleveland.” The creases in their clothes were sharp enough to slice soft vegetables. They said things to their audiences like, “Gee, but it’s great to be back here in Philadelphia!” They grinned with all their might while they said it. They’d had their teeth capped. (The idea was that audiences deserved better than to have to look at less than perfect teeth.) They effaced themselves as though it were going but of style. “Here’s a song that goes something like this,” they’d say, as though approximation were the best they were capable of.

It was going out of style. All of those conventions took a merciless trouncing at the hands of the second biggest stars of both of rock ’n’ roll’s first and second generations. First Jerry Lee Lewis demonstrated that a performer could leer at his audience in such a way as to demand, “Wanna make something of it?,” could flick the very comb he’d just run through his greasy hair in their faces and still exit the premises not only unbloodied, but with howls of adoration ringing in his ears.

Then the Rolling Stones picked up where he’d left off. Except for the incontrovertibly narcissistic Brian Jones, they went out of their way to make it appear as though the clothes they wore onstage were the same elpthes they slept in. Their album covers were ,full of lurid life-size pimples, and their publicity photos seemed to have been chosen on the basis of how swollen-faced and toadlike they made Mick and Charlie appear. Mick flicked no mere comb, but wiggled his ass in his audience’s faces. In every way, they were as scandalous as they could be. How could we help but adore a group that dared to be so ...real?

Of course, the Stones’ repulsiveness came no more naturally to them than suits and ties and sunny good nature had come to John Lennon. Their pose was hardly more real than anyone else48.1’s, nor less a function of their manager’s vision of how most quickly to get rich.. He’d seen that there were already quite enough smiling, identicalsuited pop groups that bowed to their audiences after every number. And Andrew Loog Oldham had heeded well The Lesson of The Founders—that if a musician had the sound and the cool, he could flaunt showbiz tradition until the very cows came home and only be loved all the more for it. (Provided, of course, that he kept his hands off his 13-year-old first cousin, in or out of wedlock.)

Rock ’n’ roll performers no longer feeling constrained to patronize their audiences was 'the good news. But was there ever bad to go with it! With the institutionalization of the Rock ’n’ Roll Bad Boy shtick, arrogance, condescension, and perversity soon came to be applauded for themselves. Ages after the ancient conventions of show biz had tossed in the towel and slinked gimpily into the sunset, the greasy comb-flicking remained in a hundred new guises.

And now we reap the whirlwind, for arrogance, condescension, and perversity are virtually second nature to countless members of rock’s third generation who

have neither the sound' nor the cool.

I’ve just watched a video of Joan Jett, whose one claim to fame, in my perception, is having demonstrated that boys no longer enjoy a monopoly on Rock ’n’ Roll Bad Boy obnoxiousness. Shamelessly vengeful and mean-spirited, the video is primarily concerned not with uplifting, nor even entertaining, but with ridiculing the dozens of record companies who recognized Joan’s brilliance only after the atrocious “I Love Rock And RoH” had become a hit, and features Her Gratingness doing more sneering in approximately 100 seconds than Elvis did in his entire career.

This is progress?

I know. I know. Watching her drip bile in the faces of those who snubbed her, Joan’s hundreds of millions of fans are entertained, and maybe even vicariously drained of their own rancor. Forgive me, though, if I fail to perceive that as something to be pleased about.

Jett’s hardly alone in playing to her audience’s ugliest impulses, though, not while the likes of Billy Idol and heavy metal heartthrobs Motley Crue roam the airwaves. As I’ve noted in this column time and time . again, I’m as big a fan of S&M as the next ; fellow—so long as it’s confined to one’s own j home. When it dares to insinuate itself into \ other people’s homes, though, as it does in j the scene in the “White Wedding” video in ' which Idol pushes a ring onto his bride’s finger so roughly that she bleeds, I will say, “Uh uh!” as loudly as any man.

I am weary of being pouted at, fed up with being snarled and sneered and snorted at.

I don’t care if this makes me appear the world’s most boring old fart, but I would love to see a resurgence of musicians making their audiences believe that performing their music is a joyful experience. Call me a contemptible comball, a ludicrous old boob with cat chow for brains, but I would love to be smiled at.

Alannah Currie snatches this month’s coveted Garment of the Month award in absentia for the deliciously ludicrous hat she wore onstage through the Thompson Twins” recent tour of the Americas. Fabricated to Alannah’s own specifications by London milliner Stephen Jones, the hat featured a bill of which the King of Ducks himself would have been proud. Relaxing for a moment during her group’s appearance on Solid Gold, Alannah—who ought to use a great deal more eye make-up—told Eleganza that the hat was inspired by none other than Grace Jones, who was often glimpsed traipsing around the Bahamas in nothing but a bathing suit and a pair of Mickey Mouse ears while the Twins were there recording their most recent album.

But even while Alannah Currie snatches this month’s coveted Garment of the Month award in absentia for the deliciouly ludicrous hat she wore onstage through the Thompson Twins’ recent tour of the Americas, Prince, inventor of that rarest of things—an entirely distinctive brand of glittering dandyism—deserves to be carried around on the shoulders of this column’s countless tens of thousands of loving and devoted readers.

Next month: why Prince’s is the coolest physical image in American pop since Bob Dylan’s electric-haired troubadour in winklepickers period. M'