HUNKA MUNKA BURNING LOVE

METAL VIDEO

Richard Riegel

I don’t mind confessing that I like Dee Snider a little better each time I watch his Heavy Metal Mania show on MTV. In fact, I.R.S.’s The Cutting Edge and Snider’s fangbang hour are just about the only monthly relief products I can purchase over the counter to escape the pain MTV programming has become.

As it happens, I’m writing this in the midst of MTV’s Spring Break coverage, so my outlook may be a trifle jaundiced. A little while ago, I clicked on my tube just in time to catch some beach moron with an underwear size at least twice his I.Q. smash a can of beer against his calcified skull, while Martha Quinn gave me a first-hand, on-the-spot, instagush report of this important cultural event. Still, even routine MTV programming has become a dismal ache to sit through...Damn! Another Phil Collins video, that makes 28 of ’em since the last acnexploitation-movie-starring-MollyRingworm commercial, ZAP! to you, buster, I’m gonna write my congressperson first thing in the a.m. about having both you and your cousin Joan deported—both you Collinses have grown much too rank and rotten off our central heating and plumbing...

The problem for the stillconscious video consumer these days is that the already limited alternatives to MTV seem to be fading away. I was briefly enthusiastic about USA’s Radio 1990 last year, when it looked as though resident critic Lisa Robinson was using the show as a vehicle for breaking modern rockers with the mass audience. But unfortunately for all of us, the Rolling Stones have released a new album this year, and that sliced-bread event will dominate at least the next 347 Radio 1990 telecasts. Just watch, Lisa will leave ho-hum duties like introducing the ZZ Top vids to Kathryn Kinley, so that Grand Dame Robinson, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, can give us nightly bulletins about how Mick had his nostril hairs styled by Giorgio di Piorgio of Rodeo Drive, butch waxer to the stars, etc., etc. Special consumer quiry: Q: Howcum Lisa Robinson wears black on every episode of Radio 1990? A: Because she’s still in mourning for the 70s, the one decade that really mahttered, deahs.

Actually my favorite veejay these days is Donnie Simpson of BET’s Video Soul. He can be as glib as Frankie Crocker or Alan Hunter, but, on the other hand—Donnie knows his place, knows he’s not about to be called up to the majors of MTV/VH-1, not when they’re already two tokes over their self-imposed color line. So some evenings Simpson cracks up and starts goofing on the whole teleprompted absurdity of his situation, laughing with his eyes crinkled up that folks in our country actually take showbiz seriously. I also appreciate BET's tendency to program a wildly random & stimulating assortment of videos (is their computer ON something?) But BET hasn’t exploited its own strengths recently; at least half the time I tune into the network nowadays, instead of Donnie Simpson and his technicolor vids, I get some creepy white hustler lecturing the brothers and sisters how they can make money in real estate. Sounds like yuppieism has spread to the dark & lovely set, too.

Which leaves me stranded on the desert isle of Heavy Metal Mania with the increasingly-lovable Dee Snider. Given my druthers, I’d druther watch the newer-wave videos on The Cutting Edge, but nevertheless Heavy Metal Mania is so different from most MTV programming that it comes out kinda charming, in its own spiked-wristband way. The stylistic concentration of metal video after metal video (nothing but!) makes the hour move fast & lively, and Heavy Metal Mania is also one of the few spots in the 24-hour MTV day where you’re 100 percent safe from Phil Collins videos. Not to mention that veejay Dee Snider conveys some of the most genuine emotion you’re ever gonna get from this network. Dee truly loves this stuff, and doesn’t mind saying so two dozen times per hour; he could really give a flying hockey puck about keeping up with Simon LeBoner trends.

Snider speaks to his metalfan viewers with a hoarse, excited tone that’s fatherly and concerned but never condescending; I’m starting to think of Mr. Snider as the Captain Kangaroo of the adolescent metal brigades. I even felt sorry for the big Dee when he advised a letter-writer that Heavy Metal Mania doesn’t show hardcore vids because there are “No hardcore thrash videos available, they cost too much for those bands to make.” I know that’s a lie. Husker Du come to mind immediately as a neo-hardcore band with several vids primed and ready to thrash. But I also know Dee Snider knows in the depths of his platform-booted heart that that was a lie he “had” to tell, that even as a guest veejay Dee’s as much of a victim of MTV’s relentless market-researching computer as we, the long-suffering consumers, are.

HUNKA MUNKA BURNING LOVE

OK. sez the long-suffering reader of this column, we already knew Dee Snider’s a nice guy, how about getting to some of the videos he programmed this month? OK, sez me. fair enough, here’s one that you might even get to see on the non-Dee eternities of regular MTV; Ozzy Osbourne's “Shot In The Dark.” The plot is simplicity itself: a darkhaired (nice touch!) teenqueen motors off with her pals in a Caddy convertible to attend the Ozzy 0. show, and while standing out in front of the stage with the other brainbangers, gets gradually mutated by the savage metal music into the black-clawed, thigh-booted, snarling-fanged, ruby-eyed loveloop dominatrix from the cover of Ozzy’s The Ultimate Sin album. Hea-vee, but the way they sneak this one past “Day” Tipper Gore is that in the performance segments Osbourne bears an uncanny resemblance to the

late Elvis P. in all his white spangly-caped-crusader bloato glory. No redblooded Yank would dare mess with this latterday King, but on the other hand Ozzy’s Elvisoid apparition makes me worried about his health. Is Harriet gonna come in the sauna some morning and find Ozzy stretched out cold, a mesquitebroiled bat torso still dangling from his icy lips?

Presley-ghostly or not, Ozzy’s video makes a better show than that of his former

mates, Black Sabbath featuring Tony lommi’s

“No Stranger To Love.” This vid is no stranger to anything, as it appears to have been constructed from scraps of cutout vids Tony got on sale at Odd Lots. Besides the usual Dobermans, Cadillacs and indoor-outdoor leather, this video features an l-am-onecool-stud plot even more forgettable than the eyebrows Tammi Faye Bakker misplaced back in 1963.

Iron Maiden haven’t

forgotten their native English history, at least not in their “Aces High” video, which is intercut with footage of the Battle Of Britain & quotations from Churchill’s famous weshall-fight-those-Jerry-sons-ofbeaches-on-the-beaches defiance. All the history is in black & white; Iron Maiden save the full color for their own Viking-toned performance. But I love to watch the old clips of those Spitfires blasting the German planes out of the sky. Those never-so-few R.A.F. lads kept the Nazis from conquering England, so that it could remain a free country where even today guys like Judas Priest’s Rob Halford can get up and strut around as naugahyde Nazis any time they feel like it!

Legs, meet Noxzema! Or at least meet Girlschool, who applied the foamy stuff to their metallic-haired gams before they shot their “Running Wild” video. But they donned leopard skins and bird plumage to re-animalize their limbs in the meantime, and in some ways the whole vid resembles an outtake from the musical Cats. Dig that leprechaun bum and the skyscraper-flats stage background. Personally, some of you teen lads out there who are still sorting out your sexual I.D.’s would do well to worship these shrill ladies of Girlschool, rather than the nicky sicks of certain male-metal groups I could name. Girlschool look at least 1000 percent better in the leather sportswear of choice.

So that’s it for this month; don’t forget Dee Snider’s promise; “The metal community does have a heart.” (His may be as big as all outdoors, but if he sez “Call your mother & father into the room!” the next time he introduces a Jimi Hendrix video, he’s gonna get a return visit from the throatpolyp fairy.)