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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, July 22, 2002

ABOUT MEN
Heavy-metal sellout pathetic and disheartening to Gen-Xers

 •  Previous 'About Men/Women'

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

Ted Nugent doing cooking demos on the Today Show.

Wang dang sweet meringue, Matt!

Alice Cooper accosting tourists in a Marriott commercial.

School's out, kids. Let's go to a Residence Inn!

And Ozzy.

Oh, Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy. Wither Mr. Crawley, you blithering, incomprehensible arse!

Back when my buddy Dave Chung and I used to spend summer afternoons sneaking Jack Daniels from the liquor cabinet and trying to play "Hellbent for Leather" on Dave's miked-up 'ukulele, we never imagined the heroes of Heavy F'in Metal would grow up to be so, well, lame.

It's gotten so that I'm afraid to turn on the TV for fear of seeing, say, Slayer on HGTV.

What's next? Blue Oyster Cult Night at Red Lobster? (Red and Blue, we're burning, we're burning, we're burning for you!)

Hell, maybe KISS crooning that insipid Pepsi song with Hallie Eisenberg?

(Oh, dammit, that one actually happened.)

This isn't funny. For certain elder-Xer males like myself, heavy metal was supposed to be immune to this kind of thing. Yes, the music was mostly piggy, adolescent nonsense, but there was also presumed integrity to it all.

If the clothes were ridiculous and the hair even worse, the artists themselves — and I use the term only semi-ironically — were at least supposed to take their disdain for the establishment as seriously as their boozing and misogyny.

But turn on the TV now, and there's Gonzo Nugent, once as gloriously obnoxious as James Traficant's melting-snowcone hair, pimping copies of his "Kill It and Grill It" cookbook up and down the dial.

Or pick up People magazine — any one from the past year — and read about the latest goings-on of loveable loon Ozzy and that wacky TV family of his.

I remember standing on my seat in the 10th row of the Blaisdell Arena in 1980-something, listening to a completely bombed Ozzy butcher the lyrics to "Nativity in Black." I loved every atonal moment of it, and then I was deaf for a week. Now, oy, we're left with his daughter singing Madonna covers.

The sad thing about all of this is that Nuge, Oz and the rest of their aging ilk are cashing in as the punchline to a joke that just isn't funny.

The Marriott commercial ends with Alice Cooper skipping rope with a couple of little girls. Get it? Mr. Welcome to My Nightmare skipping rope — hilarious, yes?

No, pathetic. And that's because we know that beneath all that leather and make-up is a golf-playing (the guy never misses a pro-am) has-been, willing to sell out his almost-forgotten image for big bucks and cheap chuckles.

Or look at Ozzy (just, ick, not too long). His hit MTV series, "The Osbournes," was little more than a one-note goof on the original Ozzie (Nelson) paradigm. After more than 30 years of recording, the guy with more greatest-hits CDs than great hits is re-imagined as a Saturday Night Live skit.

Look, Ozzy's swearing at the kids! How irreverent, how subversive! How obvious.

Pass the Jack, Dave.