THE WORST NEW ACTS OF THE '80s

Anastasia Finn

Around the Finn house, Ralph and I and our two teenagers have found that making a list every June of the things that we’ve liked and disliked about the year to date helps us get more out of the latter half of the year. Last June, for instance, my own list included our younger boy Chip’s A in social studies and his older brother Jerry blocking that punt in the big game against Centerville in my Likes column, while my Dislikes included Chip’s vasectomy (he said he just wanted to know what they felt like—and there went our grandchildren [we think Jerry’s gay])—and Ralph’s affair with that slut in his office. Which I know I promised I wouldn’t mention again. So kill me!

The other day, while putting up some of the apricot preserve Ralph sometimes kiddingly tells people he married me for and the boys really go for too, even though not as effusively, I realized that we’re right in the middle of the ’80s, and realized that the list idea might work for rock ’n’ roll in general. That is, if we name the names of those who’ve made it hardest to continue to love rock ’n’ roll through the first half of the decade, maybe they’ll be so ashamed that they’ll go into other lines of work, and the decade’s latter half’ll be that much better for it! I know what you must be thinking—that a 46-year-old suburban mother and homemaker can’t really have that terrific a conception of what rock ’n’ roll’s all about. But to think that way is to plummet into the trap we all fall into at your age—that of believing that the only hip people in the world are those who were born within three years of yourself in either direction.

It so happens, punk (in the Clint Eastwood sense), that at 18, I was masturbating to Elvis’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” a record whose sexiness, excitingness, and essential rock-’n’-rollness will exceed that of the combined catalogues of Motley Crue, Ratt, and 35 of your other heavy metal favorites if they’re still recording when they’re my age. And don’t think that making apricot preserves is all I do with my spare time now, either. I keep a ’58 Les Paul and a Marshall stack I got at a yard sale around Eastertime a couple of years ago in the basement, and when the boys don’t have their SAT’s coming up and Ralph isn’t irritable from a hard day at the office, I go down there and play along with my Hendrix eight-tracks for hours on end. In other words, to paraphrase Leiber & Stoller, by way of the Coasters, don’t give this article no dirty looks, young readers, for old Mrs. Finn’s hip, and knows what cooks!

And so, to our list. Ralph and I were two of the three American moviegoers who thought that This Is Spinal Tap was an orgy of squandered opportunities. Funny as it intermittently was, it wasn’t nearly as funny as actual groups like Grim Reaper. Of course, the film was (occasionally) ha-ha funny, while Grim Reaper, with their ugly voices, ugly faces, ugly songs, and ugly ideas, are a lot more lose-your-mostrecent-meal funny.

What isn’t funny at all is that there are apparently tens of thousands of teenage boys who feel that groups like the Greeps (not to mention Motley Crue and W.A.S.P.) are expressing the rage that they themselves feel as a result of having no car, horrible acne, no money, bad breath, and no social grace whatever even while their hormones are playing the most sadistic imaginable trick on them—making it absolutely painful not to get laid.

When my brother and husband were boys, don’t you imagine they went through the same thing—just, for that matter, as their fathers did, and their fathers too, back to the beginning of time? Of course they did. Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones

got my brother through it, Jerry Lee Lewis my husband, and Benny Goodman my dad. I will not allow you to tell me that music needs to be as ugly and mean-spirited and perverse as the Greeps’, Crue’s and W.A.S.P.’s to make a boy’s adolescence survivable!

I’ve read dozens of interviews in which Motley Crue describe themselves not as a heavy metal group, but as a rock ’n’ roll band (“a good rock ’n’ roll band,” in Nikki Sixx’s utterly false words). Pardon my French, but bullshit. If Johnny Rotten was the antichrist, groups like Motley Crue are the antirock. Rock ’n’ roll is music for balling, in both the sexual and non-sexual senses—a music of joy and exuberance. Motley Crue’s music isn’t about those things at all, but about vengefulness and greed and the perverse need to dominate. These guys don’t want to make love to women nearly as much as they want to humiliate them, and if you identify with that, it can only be because you’re mortally terrified that your penis is smaller than it ought to be and that if a girl ever lets you show it to her, she’ll giggle at it.

What can you say about a group whose one original idea was to place the dots that every heavy metal group in the world seems to sprinkle above its name these days between the letters of its name, a group whose stage show is apt to feature their bass player smearing blood on a chained young woman, a group that seems to exist only to make Motley Crue look like paragons of taste and integrity in comparison? That they’re beneath contempt? Consider it said about W.A.S.P.

Speaking of little dots, the only thing I can think of that I like about my next nominees is that they haven’t put any4 thing over the a in Ratt. Yet.

How do I detest this poor man’s Aerosmith? Let me count the ways. I hate their extraordinary ugly front man, who moves like a dork, has the third most unsightly hair in rock ’n’ roll (after the Scorpions’ lead singer and Ronnie Dio), and sings in a petulant whine. I hate their admittedly dexterous lead guitarist’s reluctance to do anything other than show off. I hate their logo. I hate their name, I hate the drummer’s name. What sort of rock star, for Pete’s sake, calls himself Bobby Blotzer?

Speaking of whom, it’s clearly high time for the formation of a rock group portrait vigilante group similar to the Better Video League. Just as the BVL has forbidden directors of rock videos to make more than four cuts per bar after June 30, 1985, so the new group that I’m calling for here will forbid rock’s top photographers—your Matheus and Zlozowers and Alfords and so on—to snap their shutters so long as anyone is pointing at them or snarling as though to impress the portrait’s eventual viewer with what a debauched badass he is.

I haven’t seen a group picture of Ratt in which Blotzer, at least, wasn’t either pointing or snarling. If you want my opinion, he’d be a lot better off doing something about how generously overfed he looks. (Here at Finns’, you get dessert only after passing a weekly love-handles examination—if I can find some to grab onto, you get only vegetables.)

Madonna’s singing makes the Ratt brat’s sound like Steve Perry’s in comparison, or Luciano Pavarotti’s. Which is only fitting, in view of the feebleness of her songwriting. Her hair looks as though it was last brushed in 1976 (am I the only mother left in America who’d tried to instill a sense of the importance of good grooming in her youngsters?), and she’s a lot prouder of her belly button than is warranted. But as far as the lady’s overestimation of her own, uh, erotic appeal, don’t trust me— trust an expert: my husband. After watching Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher,” say, or Chicago’s “Stay The Night” on MTV, Ralph usually excuses himself and hurries into the john. But “Like A Virgin” doesn’t even get his nose out of U.S. News and World Report, let alone Hustler. (The

boys gave him gift subscriptions to both for his more recent birthday.) To call her the Pia Zadora of new wave disco is to insult Pia Zadora.

Billy Idol, whose videos seem to be geared to the clientele of gay leather bars, strikes me as he most obnoxious “solo” artist in the history of Western popular music, but not because he has nothing to say. Over and over again, his videos (for which his songs seem excuses) tell the listener, “Nyah nyah na nyah nyah— I’m better-looking than you are.” The famous author Nick Tosches believes that Bill couldn’t frighten his (Bill’s, not Nick’s) beautician’s poodle (Nick has a Lhasa Apso), but knowing that countless hundreds of American teenagers sit still for his relentless contemptuous sneering scares the absolute devil out of me. Can it be that they didn’t get enough love at home?

You’ve got to hand it to Frankie Goes To Hollywood—it isn’t any old band that can actually make a mother nostalgic for the Village People. Where the VP’s had a fairly terrific Levi Stubbs-ish lead singer, Frankie has a nasal bleater who looks like the smartass everyone at your junior high longed to pants on principle. No matter what you offer me, I refuse to make a “Frankie say” quip, but I will go on record as still believing that disco sucks.

They call themselves A Flock Of Seagulls, but A Load Of Crap would be a lot more like it for this bunch of hairdressers with delusions of grandeur (live, they put more reverb on everything than any other group in the world). In his 1983 CREEM article about the group, John Mendelssohn (whose Eleganza column we discourage the boys from reading because it’s usually just verbatim quotes of death threats from teenagers we’d hate for ours to be influenced by) predicted that no one would admit to remembering a thing about them in 18 months except that the lead singer’s was the most idiotic hairdo in the history of rock ’n’ roll. I’m betting that he’ll be proved right!

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Lots of rock ’n’ rollers are dim-witted, but none of them can hold a candle to Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons, whose excruciating “new wave,” uh, synthpop is enough to make us Finns long for Berlin, who are also excruciating, of course, but whose own frontperson (get it?) both looks and sings lots, lots better than Dale, and occasionaly gets a really gorgeous melody to work with too.

Speaking of Dale’s shrill mindlessness, I’ll grant you that Elvis himself wasn’t exactly Susan Sontag intellectually, but Dale compounds her shrill mindlessness by having copped all of Lene Lovich’s most annoying vocal mannerisms without any of her wit or power. The sad thing is that Terry Bozzio, her husband, is one of the nicest guys in rock ’n’ roll, and very possibly the best drummer drumming, along with ex-Blondie Clem Burke (whose Chequered Past would have been on this list too if I had any reason to believe that most readers’ response wouldn’t be either “Huh?” or “Who?”).

(Speaking of might-have-been-on-this-list’s, can someone somewhere please explain the appeal of Peter Wolf, who’s homely, perpetually disheveled, can’t sing, except for an occasional passable imitation of one of the easier black vocal mannerisms, and can’t dance?)

U2’s flag-waving, scaffold-climbing, Conscience of Rock rhetoric, and relentless self-righteousness and -congratulation get on my nerves like gangbusters, but there’s no denying that Bono’s a gifted howler, that The Edge is a uniquely inventive and exciting guitarist, and that a few of their songs are terrific.

Take away the excellent singing, the inventive and exciting guitar playing, and the terrific songs and you’ve got the Alarm, the only group in the world that used more hairspray that Motley Crue. Around the Finn house, we get a kick out of referring to these guys as UI-V2. Try it in the privacy and comfort of your home, and see if you don’t enjoy it too!

The perceptive J.D. Considine hit the nail right on the nose in a rival magazine when he suggested that the Alarm’s stock in trade is “generic youth idealism.” You really can’t help but get the impression that these boys decided to join rock’s New Inspirationals more because they thought it would get them an audience— and wealth, fame, and women—than because of any actual conviction.

These ill-assorted young Welshmen’s passionate, if very fuzzily articulated, hopefulness is obviously preferable to the heavy metal boys’ misogyny and vindictiveness, at least one of them—lead singer Mike Peters—is every bit as nice a guy as Terry Bozzio. But guitarist Dave Sharp is one of the great windbags of current British rock, along with, say, the Fixx’s Cy Curnin, and I’ve never seen a photo of the group in which the drummer wasn’t simpering behind his sunglasses.

Outraged letters on three-hole notebook paper should be addressed to me, Mrs. Anastasia Finn, in care of this magazine. Please enclose return postage and refrain from the use of language you wouldn’t want your clergyman or vice principal to find out you use. And remember that making threats through the mails is a federal offense.