Back in style like it's going out of style
New albums by Extreme, Y&T and Filter show that there’s no such thing as falling out of fashion anymore. Faded trends are no longer punchlines but cultural artifacts to be appraised.
Of all genres of music, it’s ‘80s hair metal that arguably best illustrates the power of online culture to breathe new life into long-dead trends. When popular tastes shifted dramatically in late 1991, big-haired rock bands like Extreme were effectively wiped out. The change—though it’s now remembered by journalists and musicians alike as an extinction-level event—didn’t quite happen overnight, however. In fact, when Extreme released their ambitious concept album III Sides to Every Story in September of the following year, Greg Sandow of Entertainment Weekly hailed the album (with some reservation) as “a masterpiece of musical craft, full of finely-wrought detail—new colors, sudden changes in texture, melodies spawning surprising new versions of themselves—that you’d normally find only in classical works.”
Not to suggest that Sandow didn’t mean what he wrote, but his review reads like the perspective of someone who took it as a given that Extreme’s place in pop culture was here to stay. After all, the band had just scored two monster hits the year before, reaching #1 and #4 on the Billboard chart respectively with the ballads “More Than Words” and “Hole Hearted.” And when the single from III Sides, the more straightahead rocker “Rest In Peace,” received airplay on MTV and rock radio into 1993, things were looking up for the band. But III Sides sold a fraction as many copies as its predecessor, 1990’s Extreme II: Pornograffitti, which went double-platinum in the U.S. on the strength of the aforementioned singles.
By 1993, the landscape no longer looked safe for a flashy Eddie Van Halen-inspired guitar shredder like Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt. Nevertheless, Bettencourt—who’s been featured in Rihanna’s live band—was armed with an innate gift for shoehorning sophisticated arrangements into tunes that were easy to digest. One could actually argue that his pop instincts hit their peak with III Sides. Sure, moments on the album bear a resemblance to the most puffed-up commercial hits from the likes of Winger and Whitesnake, but he was actually channeling classic icons like Queen and Elton John. And if we’re being honest, the distinction between the artists gaining and losing credibility at that time wasn’t as clear as we might think. Compare Bettencourt’s guitar heroics to Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid’s, for example, and you’ll definitely uncover some overlap. (Fittingly enough, the two bands are scheduled to tour the States, Australia, and Japan together beginning this August.)
If one wants to argue that Living Colour albums like Time’s Up and Stain (released five months after III Sides) showed more versatility and depth, it wasn’t for lack of trying on Extreme’s part. And if you hold III Sides up against an album like, say, Terence Trent D’Arby’s Symphony or Damn—his equally sprawling attempt at an opus, also from 1993—it’s as if Bettencourt and D’Arby (now Sananda Meitreya) were drinking from the same well of inspirations. Both records flaunt rather than shy away from pretension. Both largely succeed at presenting outsized concepts as relatable, groove-thumping pop with a hard rock edge (and vice-versa). Alas, the uprising of so-called alternative music was at hand, and Extreme’s days as a going concern were numbered—or so we thought.
It goes without saying, but a lot has changed in the intervening decades. Case in point: when Extreme released “Rise,” the leadoff single from their new album Six, this past March, Bettencourt’s guitar solo set off something of a viral sensation. Justin Hawkins of the neo-hair/glam outfit The Darkness posted a video titled “Holy F***ing Sh*t. I Can’t Handle This” lauding the solo, while a clip of popular YouTuber Rick Beato analyzing the same solo has, to date, drawn two million views. Beato’s subsequent interview with Bettencourt has been watched over a million times, and the album’s first three videos have, as of this writing, racked-up more than seven million views combined. In June, a week after the album’s release, Extreme frontman Gary Cherone told radio host Eddie Trunk that he was “overwhelmed” by the response.
Meanwhile, YouTube percolated with the usual slate of review and reaction videos from smaller channels that attracted anywhere from hundreds to thousands of viewers. This kind of buzz, though modest, is certainly significant, and it would have been inconceivable when Extreme released their last album Saudades de Rock in 2008. More generally, if you visit the Full In Bloom YouTube channel, for example, you’ll see that there’s quite a robust appetite for clips about the bands that haunted West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip back in the ‘80s. That appetite is apparently strong enough for the Numero Group label to have released a box set last October priced at $100 titled Bound For Hell: On The Sunset Strip.
Where Full In Bloom dives deep into the minutiae of the hair metal scene, Bound For Hell dives even deeper, with obscure fare from L.A. bands like Steeler, Bitch, Rough Cutt, and Odin—a band you might remember from their inauspicious hot-tub appearance in director Penelope Spheeris’ 1988 film The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years. Spheeris notably approached her subject much as an anthropologist might. Bound For Hell does the same, only with a new twist. Where Spheeris clearly meant for her audience to cringe at the excess of her subjects, Bound For Hell is aimed more at collector types who can’t resist the allure of digging for rarities.
If the loud haircuts and trashy costumes stick out like a sore thumb alongside Numero Group’s box sets showcasing artists like Unwound, Blonde Redhead, Blondie, and Pastor T.L. Barrett, Bound For Hell makes sense when you consider that the music it documents has taken-on a veneer of coolness. Hair metal is no longer a punchline, but a cultural artifact to be appraised—even savored. On the same day that Extreme’s Six came out, in fact, BMG released the 5-album Ratt box set The Atlantic Years 1984-1990. More quietly, Metal Blade records reissued the 1990 live album Yesterday And Today Live by Y&T—the band Motley Crue opened for at their first two gigs (which took place at the famed Sunset-adjacent club The Starwood).
Much like Extreme, it’s somewhat unfair to tag Y&T as hair metal in the most pejorative sense. Although both bands fit the bill in terms of their appearance, we have to remember that bands at the time ranging from Soundgarden to Anthrax didn’t do their hair all that differently than the bands their music stood in opposition to. And, as Yesterday And Today Live shows, Y&T did an admirable job of bridging the divide between ‘70s arena rock and the heavier strains of thrash. Y&T didn’t reach Extreme’s level of visibility, but they certainly haven’t been forgotten either. The reissued Yesterday And Today Live has garnered a smaller share of YouTube reviews, but the album is bound to be noticed by a niche demographic consisting of longtime fans, younger fans, and vinyl collectors.
It’s a fact of life these days that virtually no events register on a wide enough scale that we experience them en masse. By the same token, though, fans of a particular artist—no matter how small—get to experience whatever that artist does as if it were a cultural earthquake within the sphere of that artist’s following. And while the truism still holds strong that outdated trends inevitably come back into vogue, there’s something distinctly modern about the way bands like Extreme, Y&T, and countless other bands across a host of genres have achieved a kind of small-scale immortality.
In such a climate, media commentators function less as tastemakers and more as observers. And if you feel like your tastes separate you from other people because they don’t align with current sensibilities, you’re more likely than ever to find your tribe. Cool, in a sense, no longer exists now because nothing is universally uncool. Undoubtedly, there are people who’d complain about this, but it’s hard to imagine why. It’s nice to see musicians enjoying recognition at a manageable level, as opposed to the superstardom that routinely upended lives. And it’s hard not to rally behind bands who hang in there long enough to re-claim their relevance, as the alt-industrial outfit Filter are in the process of doing once again with their new album The Algorithm, due in late August.
As the ‘90s progressed, Filter were among the bands that stepped in to fill the gap vacated by old-guard groups like Extreme. By the time Filter came out of the gate with their platinum-selling debut Short Bus in 1995, Extreme’s cachet had almost completely waned. Another platinum Filter effort, 1999’s Title of Record, followed. But if Filter and Extreme didn’t appear to have much in common back then, hindsight has highlighted some key similarities. Both groups ostensibly played heavy music, but both hit paydirt by softening their attack and maximizing their commercial appeal, leaving behind a legacy of mostly-heavy albums spiked with a handful of lighter-waving anthems that are way more broadly remembered. In a sense, Filter’s ultra-melodic “Take A Picture” was the “Hole Hearted” of its day.
The Algorithm’s latest single/video, titled “Obliteration,” is an electro-metal number with a verse hook so catchy, melodic, and sublime it’s bound to evoke powerful memories of the days when gnashing nu metal anthems just like it dominated terrestrial “modern rock” radio. “Obliteration” may as well be a gift from heaven for people who were in their teens and twenties during the ‘90s—fans who’ve come to sound an awful lot like Boomers as they wax rhapsodic about how great music was in their day. (I don’t say that disparagingly—I’ve spent many a Friday night pouring feelings into YouTube comments filled with misty-eyed praise for various ‘90s bands.)
In the era that Filter emerged in, you could have bet your life savings that “Obliteration” was going to become a hit. You can still bet that Filter will move the needle over the next few months, but what’s most apparent listening to The Algorithm's singles from today’s perspective—aside from bandleader Richard Patrick’s prodigious songwriting skills—is how subliminally culture shifts over time, even as discarded fashions circle back around again. Indeed, Patrick’s ability to dial-in a quintessentially-‘90s production sheen is no less remarkable for how predictable it’s become. If you enjoyed Title Of Record and umpteen others of its ilk, The Algorithm is positioned to hit your ears like a strong dose of comfort-food.
On the other hand, even if you’d have recoiled back in the day from a song like “For The Beaten” on the grounds that it was too processed, too saccharine—too targeted for consumption via Hot Topic—you might just find yourself embracing those same qualities now. Whether or not Patrick is capable of deviating from his established formula, he has an uncanny understanding of how to play to his audience’s inherent yearning for the past. And his new songs reveal him to be a master of giving his audience what they want. Had he been left to the vagaries of the music industry as it once was, he likely wouldn’t have gotten as many chances to keep coming back to ply his skills. But, at least for the time being, yesteryear’s trash is now today’s gold, and on a seemingly permanent basis to boot.
It’s because our methods of consuming music have changed so drastically that artists like Filter, Extreme, and others are positioned to enjoy late-career surges and remain relevant in perpetuity. For all the havoc that the internet has wrought on society (and on artists), we would do well to take the good with the bad here. Releases like Six, Yesterday And Today Live, and The Algorithm are just three examples of all the good to be had. As more and more bands and albums avoid the dustbin of history, trends that refuse to die—and the enclaves of community that form around them—should be welcomed as rays of light shining down over a roiling ocean of strife.
Filter’s The Algorithm is out Aug. 25th via Golden Robot.
Extreme’s Six is out now via earMUSIC.
Y&T’s Yesterday And Today Live is out now via Metal Blade.
Ratt’s The Atlantic Years 1984-1990 is out now via BMG/Rhino Entertainment.
Bound For Hell: On The Sunset Strip is out now via Numero Group.
This essay also appeared in slightly different form on PopMatters.
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