Free Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman Page B

be more willing to accept a DUI conviction than the mere rumor that you have a drug problem. Consequently, drug users will absorb these perceptions and recognize that they are now in a different societal class: They have a secret that makes them both vulnerable and dangerous—and it probably makes their lives a lot more interesting (at least for a while).
    Talk to people who do a lot of drugs (or regularly drink to excess), and they will tell you they love it for at least two reasons. One is the physical effect of getting fucked up. The other is the actual process. It’s not just fun to be high; it’s fun to smoke pot. It’s fun to score dope and put ice cubes in the bong and put on boring reggae records and talk with other stoners about idiotic stoner topics. It’s fun to browse through liquor stores and mix drinks on the coffee table and tell memorable puke stories. There is an appeal to the Abuse Lifestyle that exists outside of the product.
    Glam metal had the same kind of appeal: It was all about an unspoken lifestyle. It’s a feeling that can’t be quantified or easily explained, but it absolutely exists.
    One of the interesting things about ’80s metal is that it was the first dominant pop genre to exist in a readily available multimedia context. What that means is that you could copiously consume heavy metal without listening to heavy metal albums. Pop metal was a mainstay of album-oriented FM outlets, so metalcould be heard over the populist medium of radio; unlike punk or late ’60s psychedelia, it was not trapped underground. There were also the wide array of tours and concerts, so you might be able to see a few big acts every summer (assuming you lived near a big enough community and your parents felt you were old enough to go to rock concerts).
    But just as importantly, the 1980s saw the dawn of what I call the Golden Age of Periodicals. Suddenly, young metal fans could choose from a glut of easy-to-find metal magazines. There was a time when reading about rock ’n’ roll was limited to reading Rolling Stone or maybe Creem, and its distribution was sketchy (unless you lived in New York, or San Francisco, or some kind of a collegiate culture). By 1985, that problem no longer existed. In fact, you did not even need to purchase rock literature; I can fondly remember loitering at the magazine racks in supermarkets while my mom shopped for groceries, paging through Hit Parader and Circus and Kerrang! and Metal Edge. And by this point, Rolling Stone was so mainstream that it was in my high school library.
    And this new explosion in rock journalism wasn’t teen idol coverage either. Hit Parader and Circus were driven by interviews and considered to be “news” publications (at least to its readership). The interviews were always horrible and the information was often fabricated, but these updates were still the main objects of interest. I always felt magazines that primarily delivered posters or pinups were rip-offs.
    A third component came in 1981 with the introduction of MTV. Its significance was obvious (especially in retrospect), but people tend to forget that it came with an undercurrent. It would take several years before MTV became a cultural universal. A well-known irony about the network is that it was not broadcast in the city limits of New York until 1983—even though that’s where it was produced. Moreover, few rural communities had access to any cable channels. I did not watch two consecutive hours of MTV until August of 1990.
    However, videos still had a massive effect, especially on peopleborn after 1970. For (ahem) “Generation X” kids, videos were not seen as promotional gimmicks or special treats: Videos were expected. Since I was a farm kid, I couldn’t spend six hours a night staring at Martha Quinn and MTV—but I could spend ninety minutes a week watching Friday Night Videos, NBC’s attempt at a knockoff. Meanwhile,