Do or Do Not.

I’ve never made any bones about the fact that I was (I guess I should say am) a big fan of 1980s pop metal. I’ve written before about my five favorite metal concerts; I wrote an entire post about Bon Jovi action figures and another about the utterly talentless and justifiably forgotten Britny Fox, of all things. I’m now on my third trip through Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City, a book in which he puts way more thought into the history and cultural meaning of eighties’ metal than any sane person should do.

But reading that book has made me realize how we may have tried to retroactively reclassify and attempt to marginalize the music that was the dominant form of most of the 1980s, and it’s made me think about my own relationship to hair metal. (Maybe for the first time.) Read the rest of this entry »