TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101491/1014440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 85

Heavy Metal Goes Platinum


Polishing their music, if not their image, rock's raunchy, long-
haired rebels win a growing mainstream audience

By GUY GARCIA -- With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles


    Poison. Anthrax. Alice in Chains. Skid Row. The band
names alone conjure images of mayhem, torture and death.
Heavy-metal rock, with its raw lyrics, pummeling beats, banshee
vocals and buzz-saw guitars, seems custom-made for leather-clad
lowlifes with tattooed biceps and lobotomized brains. Teenagers
love it. Always have. But during the early 1980s, when the
insipid glam-rock of Duran Duran ruled the charts, heavy metal
was the idiot in the basement, shunned by music-industry
executives and dismissed by critics as adolescent noise.

    Not so in the hardheaded '90s. Today Duran Duran is
history, and heavy metal is white-hot. Thanks to bands like
Metallica, which sold 650,000 copies of its namesake album in
the first week of its August release, every parent's worst
nightmare has become a record executive's dream come true.
Metallica entered Billboard's top-albums chart at No. 1 and
stayed there for four weeks, spawning the hit single Enter
Sandman. Even the critics are coming around. Rolling Stone
awarded Metallica four stars in its review, calling it "an
exemplary album of mature but still kickass rock & roll."

    Metallica is not the only band turning heavy metal into
pure platinum. Skid Row's latest, Slave to the Grind, has sold
2.5 million copies worldwide since last June. Van Halen's For
Unlawful Carnal Knowledge entered the charts 13 weeks ago at No.
1 and sold 2 million copies in less than a month. Poison's past
three albums, Look What the Cat Dragged Down, Open Up and Say
Ahh and Flesh and Blood, have sold a combined total of 12
million copies; all five of Motley Crue's have sold more than
1 million each.

    Those numbers are giving metal bands the kind of clout
once reserved for pop's biggest stars. In August Columbia
Records signed Aerosmith, a hard-rock band with metal overtones,
to a $30 million-plus contract. Motley Crue's deal is even
sweeter. Elektra Records will pay the Crue at least $35 million,
including a $22.5 million advance, for its next five albums.
Meanwhile, A&M Records expects big things from Soundgarden, a
Seattle-based band that packs the sonic punch of early Led
Zeppelin.

    MTV, which features heavy-metal bands every Saturday night
on the Headbangers' Ball program, acknowledged metal's
ascendancy by inviting Metallica to play on its 1991 video
awards show. On that show, the Viewer's Choice Award for Best
Video went to Queensryche, another metal band with a broad
following. In October the heavy-metal scene will get its own
Grammys when the first Concrete Foundations Awards are held in
Los Angeles.

    Most metal bands still must rely on concerts and word of
mouth to sell records. "It's a cultlike audience," says Geoff
Mayfield, director of retail research for Billboard. "A record
like Metallica can sell without airplay and without MTV. So
there is a voracious appetite."

    Musically, heavy metal has evolved somewhat, from a
monotonous barrage of frenetic tempos and slashing guitars
toward richer aural textures and even an occasional ballad.
Metallica is typical of the metal bands that have renounced
their raunchy roots and polished their music, if not their
image. Gone are the crude lyrics and blaring wah-wah guitars
that marked its sound in the mid-'80s. Many of the tunes on
Metallica could almost be called reflective, like Holier Than
Thou: "Gossip is burning on the tip of your tongue/ You lie so
much you believe yourself/ Judge not lest you be judged
yourself."

    Metal musicians play to the alienated fantasies of a
mostly white, young and male audience by portraying themselves
as disillusioned outsiders who have turned their backs on a
corrupt civilization. Dressed like renegade bikers, they sing
anthems to the rebellious and the wild, or wild at heart.
Outrageous behavior is more than a pose for many of them,
notably Skid Row's lead singer, Sebastian Bach (ne Bierk), whose
on-the-road antics have included tearing up hotel rooms and
striking a concert spectator with a bottle that he hurled into
the audience.

    "Things have come full circle," says Bach, a Canadian who
sang in church choirs before finding his true calling in the
Toronto club scene. "In the '70s pop was more hip, and now the
energy of punk has come into heavy metal. Punk was a socialist
thing, and metal was a capitalism thing." Yet both are
sneeringly anti-Establishment. In Slave to the Grind, Skid Row
proclaims, "Can't be the king of the world/ If you're slave to
the grind/ Tear down the rat racial slime."

    "We're not going to f---- in' sell out like the
mainstream," vows Bach. "The kids can see through the
phoniness." No doubt. Which could raise a ticklish problem for
bands like Metallica and Skid Row, which presume to voice the
disaffection of middle-class youths while earning fat-cat
salaries. To stay on top of the heap, metal's messiahs may have
to figure how to keep both their millions and their edge -- or
risk becoming long-haired rebels without a cause.