The sexism of the scene is undeniable, but Penelope Spheeris’ Decline II literally gives viewers the chance to see the bands via the female gaze, flipping the concept of objectification on its head. Poison was our Frank Sinatra, our Beatles, our Bay City Rollers, our Backstreet Boys, our One Direction. A lot of the love I (and lots of other women in their late 30s-early 40s) feel for hair metal is directly related to the fact that I was eleven to thirteen years old during hair metal’s reign, which, according to a recent New York Times article analyzing Spotify data, is the most important time period for women in terms of forming our musical DNA. In my fantasy, somehow he had a photograph of me in my baggy acid-washed jeans and my paint-splatter-print sweatshirt and wanting to touch me had turned him into a rock ‘n’ roll clown. When I heard Def Leppard’s “Photograph” for the first time, I was roller skating at the YMCA and immediately started pretending Joe Elliott was singing directly to me. When I heard that metal, I pictured men and men alone, fighting or rampaging the land or brooding and snarling, nary a woman in sight. I liked Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Metallica in 1986, but their music also felt inaccessible and very much not for me. Pre-glam, metal was heavy, serious and angry. Some of the women wax poetic about “having all that hair over you ” and claim that men dressed like women “bring out the bisexual tendencies.” One Decline II interviewee claimed “if I look more feminine I get laid easier” and several men make the same claim. When I started puberty, the pin-ups and the pop music laid out for me were all hair and guitars and lipstick and I was there for it. I was also just a little bit too old for New Kids on the Block.
I’m from extremely rural New Hampshire I didn’t know about young David Bowie, Marc Bolan, or the New York Dolls until I was much older. “They’re gorgeous!” proclaimed both my friends’ horny older sisters who would occasionally let me sit on their waterbeds and look at their Bret Michaels posters and my friends’ horny older brothers who would follow it up with “What?! They look like four hot chicks!” When Poison’s seminal debut Look What The Cat Dragged In came out in 1986, no one knew what to make of this band that looked like four extremely well-contoured, pouty women who wore lots of pink and purple lace and feathers. He later started the Sunset Strip club the Cathouse with his roommate, Faster Pussycat’s Taime Downe, specifically with the goal of “meeting hot chicks.” Hair metal, in spite of its goofy, gross sexism, didn’t just attract and encourage female fans like the glam rock of the 70s, it co-opted feminine clothing, makeup and hair styles. In a 2014 screening and panel on Decline II at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, glam metal scenester/host of MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball Riki Rachtman describes discovering the joy of metal when a bunch of girls he knew told him they were going to see Quiet Riot.
When I first saw it in 1992, I immediately felt ashamed of the Whitesnake and Poison tapes that I'd bought with my allowance and loved just a year before.ĭespite this, I love Decline II and rejoice in its 30th anniversary this month. Decline Part II, on the other hand, was always something we brought out to poke fun of.
As a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s, my friends' older siblings hauled out often-pirated VHS tapes of her feature films, along with the original Decline, as examples of cool movies featuring cool characters.
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