Both This Is Spinal Tap and Repo Man are cult films that make fun of a rock youth culture, metal and punk respectively.
Repo Man is the better of the two (again, my original listing of the best pop music films is chronological, not in terms of quality).
One reason is that while This is Spinal Tap made a breakthrough in establishing the “mock-umentary” genre, we’re now pretty used to that. And since one of the main things the film wants to illustrate is how a lot of the music-biz folks are pretentious talkers apt to inflate the importance of a moronic band like Spinal Tap, and since this must be done realistically, we actually have to suffer through a good deal of banality in between the humorous bits. As an entirety, it begins to drag…especially if you’ve seen it before, or if you think a show like The Office gets tiresome. Still, it felt very fresh at the time, and no-one can deny the classic status of its best bits.
I do have one question, though. Did the film contribute anything to the eventual demise, or stylistic alteration, of classic 70s through 80s hair-band metal? Or was that really due to Jane’s Addiction, Metallica, Nirvana, and the likes of Dewey Finn bringing alternative elements to the metal set? In other words, at some level, did the film gradually shame metal-heads into changing their ways?
I ask this because I was a teenager when the film came out, and the response to it was one of my first lessons about the limits of satire.
You see, unlike a number of my high school friends, I had deliberately broken away from heavy metal, for “new wave” and such. I recall looking at one of my three Judas Priest albums, and saying to myself, “This is all about a sick power fantasy. I’m done with this. Right now, it’s so familiar that I still feel some of its pull, but I’m going to tear myself away.” (I don’t recall if I had the humility to admit that my 13-year old Christian hesitations to buy a record with a satanic name had turned out wiser than my later sophistication to go ahead and do so.) The point of this is that the aesthetic and moral status of heavy metal mattered to me in a personal way, and I naively thought that when my doggedly metal-loving friends saw This Is Spinal Tap, they would have to admit my way of thinking, or at least feel the sting of the film’s criticism.
What happened is that they embraced the film, and luxuriated in the irony of doing so. One of them bought the soundtrack, and they’d actually play songs like “Big Bottoms, My Gal’s Got ‘Em” for their own enjoyment!
A precursor there of the “Beavis and Butthead” phenomenon, whereby a show that mocked moronic tube-glued metal heads would often tend to train its regular viewers into actually talking like them.
I guess for that reason, the film is ultimately kind of depressing, and not just for being about a band whose career is failing. You are forced to admit that yes, our pop culture has been so bad, that THIS counts as an accurate satire of part of it. THIS is who we’ve been. We in some way deserve to have those spandex images and those crummy songs burned onto our memory.
And, it probably won’t change anything.
Or was I wrong about that?
July 11th, 2012 | 10:11 pm
I’m a little confused. You don’t mean that Spinal Tap was not a real band, do you?
July 12th, 2012 | 11:33 am
Um, hair-band heavy metal wasn’t serious. It was all a joke anyway. You can’t really satirize something that’s already a joke. (Which was why I was always so confused about the point of Austin Powers).
It’s not like KISS was meant to be taken seriously. Or like any of the spandex and big-hair rockers were actually looked to by their fan base as paragons of fashion, style, morality, etc. It was all about having a good time, which to most people is what rock ‘n roll has always been about. How can you make fun of that? By pointing out that the rockers LOOKED silly? Really? That’s all you got?
Or maybe I’m just saying that because I was born in 1976, not 1966, and didn’t have to actually live through the 1970s (shudder).
Eventually GNR came along with the hair band look but a radically different sensibility than any of their contemporaries, as the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the 80s rock scene, i.e., the last, greatest, most awesomely spectacular of the type, but fatally flawed and unable to adapt to the impending changes about the impact the world. And Nirvana was indeed the meteor that killed everything else, to stubbornly stick to this strange metaphor (forget it–I’m rolling), and Nothing Else Could Be The Same. But the post-Nirvana mope-rockers just aren’t any FUN, and that’s a big part of the reason rock has lost its cultural mojo.
I’ve lost track–have you already said all that before?
July 12th, 2012 | 1:26 pm
djf, if you’re being ironic for the sake of defending the music of Spinal Tap, well, shame on you. But presuming your question is straight, well, the band is fictional and its music was made for the film. Rent it sometime when you need dumb entertainment… …my comments on it above are a bit too downer.
Brian, no, it was no joke. In white suburban-land, from around 1969 to 1979, and even more intensely from then through the late 80s, hard rock was the dominant and most popular rock strain. This applies even more so the lower end of the middle-class and to poor whites. A band like Kiss may have started out partially tongue and cheek, but when your albums go double-platinum or whatever, all the joking becomes reality for much of your audience.
Otherwise, a great comment, absolutely right about GNR and Nirvana, and I like your resistance to “mope-metal.”
My recommendation for rockin’ and not-so-serious fun, however, would be to head less back to the hair bands, than to the rock and roll bands: Bobby Fuller Four, NRBQ, CCR, Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, the honky-tonk side of country, etc. And my basis for saying that is what I have said ad naseum, that however much the metal guys claimed that they were rock n’ roll, their music became a distinct thing. Rock does not equal Rock n’ Roll, despite the usual usage of the terms. Enter “My Generation” into the First Things search bar for my sketching of that distinction.
July 12th, 2012 | 1:28 pm
P.S. My error in using the photo above turned out to be too apropos to correct!
July 12th, 2012 | 2:21 pm
One of my favorite student introductions on the opening day of a semester was from a kid who looked like an updated Spinal Tap parody, with a Mohawk’s hair that swept off his brow and down to the middle of his back. It must have taken great care to accomplish and maintain. (Later in the semester he lost it, after a drug bust.) I ask the usual questions, who are you and what do you want to do with yourself. This kid announced that he was lead singer in a band and that he wrote the lyrics to the songs. “Oh, a writer. Nice. What are your songs usually about?” Kid looked at me, beaming, and said, “We sing about hate.” Instinctively, I said something like, “Oh! You poor thing!” and surprisingly got a laugh from the class.
His gift to me at the end of the semester was a CD of his “music” — he liked me. Heck, I liked him, but not his music. His was a wall of sound band and he used some device when singing that made his voice sound like a buzz saw. He could have been singing about anything, how the daisies bloom in May, or a cover of “I’ve Got a Brand-New Pair of Roller Skates” and no one would have known. Whatever he said would sound like hate. “it’s meant to be Satanic, Mrs. Pitrone.” Ah.
The point about “Spinal Tap” was that you couldn’t really parody that stuff because of the level of absurdity inherent in the genre. Even Nirvana, although it went in a different direction, was all about being EXTREME and when anyone is that far out there, absurdity is just a wink of the eye away. Anyway, so much of that kind of music is about hate, but not hatred of anything that makes much sense, in the vague and generalized mode of adolescents for whom hate is a desirable pose that mimics a principled stand. Poor things.
July 12th, 2012 | 5:28 pm
Kate, that’s a very funny exchange.
July 12th, 2012 | 6:15 pm
Carl, my question was facetious. I’m surprised you didn’t pick that up. I guess my point was that Spinal Tap, although fictional, was a lot of fun (both the film and the music), and, since fun is the point of pop music, Spinal Tap is as good as a real band (and better than most, at that) for purposes of the casual music consumer. Sorry if I’m being impermissibly flippant.
Incidentally, I don’t see how Spinal Tap could have contributed to the death of hair metal. Spinal Tap came out in 1984, and hair metal continued to fly high through the end of the 80s, until, as has been said, Nirvana came along and spoiled all the fun.
I, too, have noticed that the fun element of rock seemed to dry up after Nirvana (although I recall there was an attempted garage rock revival in the mid-00s). Any thoughts on why this might be?
July 13th, 2012 | 7:35 am
yeah I am with djf, Spinal Tap is a real band with real music. I just got done button mashing “Tonight, I am going to rock you Tonight”, on guitar hero, and my video controller guitar is about the best I can do in terms of a musical instrument, so just in terms of a conspiracy of the demos, there is no way in hell I am signing unto an inflated standard of “real” or “band”… Rock is all about being a bit flippant.
Making it in a band is a difficult grind. Damn even unlocking songs with guitar hero on medium is hard work! Kudos to Spinal Tap for earning a living around the butt of a joke. Cult Classic? Check. Napster Parody, and copyright/fair use panel controversy? Check. Guitar Hero creed. Check.
Of course Guitar Hero 2 has a lot more real bands, because when the first Guitar Hero came out there was a bunch of aesthetic and moral status hand wrangling,by the lawyers/record labels/bands.
GNR and Nirvana=solid, both far more substantial than Spinal Tap.
Ironically in terms of guitar hero, it is factually true to say that Spinal Tap was a real band first, and that only latter did Nirvana get suckered into the fun/controversy… Including a joke about the newest version including a plastic gun(which was obviously false)
But if Nirvana was about ruining all the fun, then Novoselic, Grohl and Love stayed true to form by demanding that a Kurt Cobain Avatar not be capable of being unlocked… apparently he is only to appear with Nirvana Music, so he does not get diluted by 14 year olds jamming Spinal Tap.
July 14th, 2012 | 6:10 am
Well, recall the ending. Guest/Reiner seem to really dislike the premise of this series. “‘Rock’ is always taken seriously SOMEWHERE.” There’s no need to innovate when you can just persist somewhere where culture has moved differently.
I was reminded of the movie when the brilliant Japanese metal band Boris ( who generally sound like this http://pitchfork.com/tv/pitchfork-music-festival/991-2008/1975-boris-pink ) released 3 L.P.s in 2011. 1 was a parody of Japanese “j-rock” (basically, heavily pop-influenced progressive rock; think of what pop emo was to “real” emo). It was simultaneously mocking and reverent, a real conundrum. What’s most interesting is that it was the best album of the 3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVJ0YVkOAaA They were doing it for fun, not out of desperation. Still, like Spinal Tap, “Why move forward artistically in an ‘objective’ way when we can just alter our audience?”
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