Image Bands and their Discontents

it's true, wall-bursting was totally his thing, though he seemed pretty careful abt bursting through in a manner that wouldn't squash babies or w/e, at least not on camera. along with the hawaiian punch guy (who lived only to sock people in the face and may actually have been named "hawaiian punch"), it was a dark time for powdered children's beverages.

as well as discussing what in certain cultures encourages self-as-image play, we might look at it from the other direction. what is it about american culture that sometimes seems to discourage (or at least constrain) that sort of thing? residual puritanism? homophobia?

without wishhing further derailment here's an awesome Peter Bagge Kool-Aid Man comic: http://www.againwiththecomics.com/2008/07/alan-moore-peter-bagge-and-kool-aid-man.html

oh shit it's Alan Moore too, I never realised that!

Think it's p obvious why White American culture doesn't do it. The horror of being scene as effeminate, the policing of masculinity. But also the terror that dressing up, being a Dandy is fey and foppish and European and contrary to the Frontier Mythos. In the 20th Century, fear of Black culture, fear of the Other.

The connection of English + theatre is an interesting one. Because of the whole "women not allowed onstage" thing, there was a longstanding tradition of men dressing as women without it reading as a *homosexual* thing to be doing. Plus, the origins of British Theatre - spent last semester reading Cornish passion plays, which are some of the last surviving remnants of Cornish (late Medieval) and there is some *fantastical* stuff in there, about appearances being deceptive (never trust The English), world turned upside down, men as women, women as men stuff in there.

Think it's p obvious why White American culture doesn't do it.

why is say New York different to the rest of the USA then?

But also the terror that dressing up, being a Dandy is fey and foppish and European

pretty funny when so many like to boast of their euro roots!

Though I guess Scots/Irish tend to be very non-dandy so its acceptable to them.

every bands that make music videos presents an image. moneyfornothing.mp3 and when i am interested in a song i often care what the band looks like , mainly for the singer's visual performance, their "acting", because some emotions invested in the song may not come across strictly in audio, or differently than i imagined. many artists say that it doesn't really matter what the song is about, the fans can make it theirs and invest the meaning they want into it, or variations of this, and i am fine with this, but i also like to see how some lyrics are delivered to have a better understanding of the meaning / complexity of the emotion/humour/and what not.

1) NYC is way more like a European city than an American one; for much of the US's history it was the point of entry for many, many immigrants and it has still retained that flavour

2) Because of the boundary constraints of being located on (2 or 3?) tiny island(s) (where the rest of the US is so far flung apart) I think that historically, races were able to mix and cultures rub up against one another more freely. That happens more easily in a constrained space than in deliberately segregated neighbourhoods, which dominate much of the US.

Feel like there's a lot that could be said about "natty dressing" in Black music whether that's jazz dudes in suits, or the deliberate ostentatious competitive dressing of hiphop acts and "GucciGucciGucci"

in college, i took time out from my normal pursuit of punk and indie bands to see a show by the spinners. my friend peter and i dressed the way we normally did for concerts: jeans, t-shirts, whatever. we get there, and every single person in the theater is dressed either in suits -- nice suits! -- or dresses. we felt like party-crashing drunk assholes. (and yet we were treated great by everyone around us, totally welcomed, never made to feel the slightest bit out of place.)

Think it's p obvious why White American culture doesn't do it. The horror of being scene as effeminate, the policing of masculinity. But also the terror that dressing up, being a Dandy is fey and foppish and European and contrary to the Frontier Mythos.

the entire histories of hair metal, new wave and of course steven tyler may choose to disagree with you on this.

I'm guessing Sigue Sigue Sputnik belong here? Tony James called them a 'fantasy band', iirc.

One thing I kind of regret about my band years is not giving more thought to how both I and the rest of the band dressed. "Just about the music" seems like a bullshit posture when you're playing a live show, given that a big part of people's experience in a live show is WATCHING you play. I think the mere idea of suggesting to my bandmate dudes that we give more thought to our clothes probably seemed too embarrassing to even occur to me to bring up. I mean not that we were playing relax-fit jeans and rockports or anything, but we could have put more effort into it.

the entire histories of hair metal, new wave and of course steven tyler may choose to disagree with you on this

Not to mention those tiny cult acts beloved solely of rock critic nerds: Kiss, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson...

I want to respond to something way upthread, though:

I don't know that "image bands" are solely the province of The Young; the continued careers of Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Madonna, Prince, Suede etc seem to suggest that they are not.

Bowie's current image is very much about being old, though; where his personae used to be in some way built around sexual desirability (up to you whether you want to fuck an alien or not), since re-emerging he's become Cool Artist Dad and is about as dressed-down as he's ever been. Ferry, on the other hand, seems to be playing the role of rich bored hobbyist making music to amuse himself - he's the Roger Sterling of pop, or something. And Madonna isn't so much an image as a collage of increasingly poorly chosen signifiers. I'm posting from the US, so as far as I'm concerned Suede never had a career to continue. And Prince, I think, is managing to stay relevant only in that he continues to fascinate music critics. The general public could give a fuck, is my impression, and I think the charts bear that out.

in this bullshit world the more someone's image gets trashed the more i respect them

the entire histories of hair metal, new wave and of course steven tyler may choose to disagree with you on this.

Look, the whole premise of this line of questioning was "why is it so much rarer in the US than the UK" not "why does it not exist in the US at all" which would be absurd, because we've discussed many examples from the US.

Yes but an entire decade of bands topping the charts, selling out arena concert tours, etc. doesn't exactly scream "rare."

It kind of seems like you're just starting from your conclusion here Branwell

The subgenre of "hair metal" is still a tiny subsection of "metal" which is a tiny subsection of "rock music" which, although I know it looks like the whole world to some people, still, really isn't.

And hair metal bands are kind of a weird area to start with, because they were the rare image band subculture which came out of LA rather than NYC (I suppose that's fitting, Hollywood "glamour" etc, but it's still curious.)

you mean like Kiss?

I get that you're from England, BB, but are you really gonna posit that the whole lineage from Kiss to Bon Jovi, Poison, Mötley Crüe, Guns N' Roses et al. are somehow less important in the global pop culture scheme of things than David Bowie and Bryan fucking Ferry?

No, I place Kiss in first wave glam. I mean, like, Motley Crue, Poison, LA Guns, GNR, classic hair metal.

I mean, I do not argue that there have never been image bands in the States. I just think that e.g. the per capita number of members of Image Bands in the UK or Japan per general population, vs per general population in the US. Yes, you have Aerosmith and hair metal, but it's really nothing like on the same scale.

I am NOT arguing that they don't exist, FFS!

now too many x-posts and you guys are just being silly

What I'm arguing here is that while we may have fewer "Image Bands" as a percentage of total bands in the US, they (largely by virtue of being from America) are more culturally influential on a global scale than their UK equivalents. And forget about the Japanese acts, which have virtually no presence outside Japan.

(BTW, I reviewed a concert by Japanese band L'Arc-en-Ciel for the Village Voice in 2012; here's my review, and here are some photos I took.)

Actually, on second thought, one of the biggest instigators of my impression of "WAAAAAAYYYY more Image Bands in the UK than in the US" may be because for many years, the UK had a functioning weekly music press, which the US never really had. More space to parade and represent your Image, much quicker turnover of bands and music micro-scenes = more Image.

Key paragraph from that Voice review, my description of L'Arc's lead singer:

hyde has to be the single most androgynous frontman I've ever seen—he makes Antony Hegarty look like Henry Rollins. He wore a waist-length black blazer with shoulder pads over a black tank top, pants baggy enough to hold a spare microphone or two, and his hair was in blond cornrows, dangling loose for better whipping. His primary stage move (other than sticking his tongue out at the audience) is a version of Axl Rose's snake-hips dance, but with added twirls and what can only be described as flouncing. Oh, and five songs or so into the set, he donned a floppy, wide-brimmed hat Alicia Keys would envy, making him look like a '90s R&B diva having a rock moment.

more culturally influential on a global scale than their UK equivalents.

...Americans always over-stating the effect of their ~cultural influence~ on the rest of the world... pfffftttt

You're bigger. That's about it. Now go wave your flag somewhere else, unless you're going to do it like the New York Dolls. :-P

for many years, the UK had a functioning weekly music press, which the US never really had. More space to parade and represent your Image, much quicker turnover of bands and music micro-scenes = more Image

This is related to a crucial difference between how the US and UK music industries function, I think. The US music industry, at least where rock is concerned, has always played a long game, signing bands to multi-album deals with the intention of building a years-long career for them. The UK industry is, I think, much more singles- and quick-hit-oriented, not so much worried about five - or even two - years down the road. I doubt the majority of UK bands plan a two-year touring cycle when they release an album, but that's pretty much standard practice, at least where I work.

Yeah, this is the thing I'm trying to get at, when I talk about "Image Bands in the UK" and why it's so different from the States.

Because we are a country whose entire landmass and population could fit inside just *one* of your 50 states (OK maybe not Delaware or Rhode Island?) and yet for a significant period of the late 20th Century, we somehow supported 2, sometimes 3 weekly music papers, and a dozen monthlies. That's a lot of pages to fill.

And when I was trying to express why I did not think Kiss or Bon Jovi or "hair metal" compares, is that, during the "golden era" of that music press, it wasn't just one or two Image Bands or even one or two Movements. During the course of a decade it went, like: Glam, Bay City Rollers style teeny bop, Punk, Classic Long Grey Overcoat Post-Punk, Romo, Goth, Blue-Eyed Soul, Synth-Pop and on and on and on. I could draw you a recognisable cartoon of a musician or fan of any one of those "styles". And probably any British person who obsessively read the music press between 1980 and whenever Melody Maker folded, could do you a similar (probably expanded, because my memory is poor) list, and similar cartoons.

We have a *ton* of stylistic churn, because of our music press, because of our shorter cycle. To stand out in that churn, "Image" is one of the ways to get column space. I'm not saying this is better or worse than the US, it's just different. I was looking for *why* we were different, and there's probably a host of reasons why, including the ones I touched on above. But this stuff is definitely the *how*.

(And I've been thinking about the steady parade of US bands from Nirvana Pixies onwards, who came over to the UK to "break" first in the UK press, then sell themselves back to the US on the strength of that success. But I'm tired, and if anyone wants me I'l be in my bunk with my £3 Interpol CDs...)

i've been reading bits of the svenonius supernatural rock strategies book and one of the chapters makes the point that whereas actors and such can take off their makeup and personas at home, bands are expected to be the bands all the time, so in that sense maybe what it means to be an image band is to be more on the actor side of the equation. dee snider takes off the makeup at home but slash and buckethead wear those bucket hats all the time.

when i brought up hair metal and steven tyler, i wasn't trying to argue that the US is or isn't better than the UK at this. rather, i was trying to offer a counter-argument to this...

Think it's p obvious why White American culture doesn't do it. The horror of being scene as effeminate, the policing of masculinity.

...which i don't think is true at all. the founding fathers of american rock and roll -- little richard, elvis,, all those guys -- were very effeminate. or, more to the point, they were SEEN as effeminate. and white american culture completely embraced them. and this was in the '50s. you might also have noticed that all those macho, beer-swigging, denim-clad southern rockers like lynyrd skynyrd -- maybe the epitome of white american masculine music culture -- all had long, completely feminine hair.

i admit i had never actually heard the phrase "image band" before this thread, but if there is such a thing, lynyrd skynyrd are just as much of an image band as duran duran are. different image, though, obviously.

another way to look at the question, which may well have something to do with the UK weekly music press as well as the general UK tabloid culture, may be to ask not why the UK has more image bands but rather why the UK press spends so much more time talking about it. and even then, i think any answer would be quite complicated. because it may also be that the UK press and the US press tend to talk about different aspects of image, and they tend to talk about it in different ways.

The US has plenty of "image bands" but maybe they get overshadowed by, you know, the actual music. Whereas the UK seems to be great at churning out bands that are pure image.

I love when a guy starts reciting arguments that you and other people have made, yourself, and discussed up thread, as if he is trying to score points against you. And by "love" I mean "roll my eyes and move on".

(Maybe it wasn't actually this thread, but I can't even remember what thread it was at this point, I'm tired and there's no milk to have tea. But the whole "Long Hair = Feminine" thing is one of the quickest things to get me to roll my eyes and move on.)

But, y'know, talking of haircuts. I was thinking this over this morning, and thinking about other aspects of "Image Band" and whether that means having a strong, defined image that does not change, but then thinking that many of the bands I think of as "Image Bands" are actually bands that have had fairly lengthy careers, but, if you look at a photo of them, you can tell *exactly* what album they're promoting, or at least, what era.

I probably wouldn't call Radiohead an "Image Band" (though yes, they are obviously a band that cares hugely about image and presentation) per se, but Thom Yorke is very definitely part of the Image Band trope because of this. (They would be an "Image Band" if all of the band behaved like Thom, but the rest of them dress like History Professors and p much always have. Then again, "Oxford History Professor" is also an image?) But if you look at a photo of Radiohead, you can tell instantly, are they promoting Pablo Honey or The Bends or OKC or HTTT or TKOL based solely on Thom's clothes and haircut.

And all of the bands that I think of as "my" Image Bands (Duran Duran, Blur, I'm starting to be able to do this with Interpol now) you can do that, you can instantly tell not just "This is Blur" but you can tell which album they're promoting based on haircuts, even while presenting a strong image of *Blur*-ness.

I'm not sure you can do that with Kiss (not counting "Unmasked") or Aerosmith? Maybe a ~real fan~ could? Which doesn't make them Not Image Bands, just, a different kind of image band than the kind I tend to go for.

I love when a guy starts reciting arguments that you and other people have made, yourself, and discussed up thread, as if he is trying to score points against you. And by "love" I mean "roll my eyes and move on".

and i love when someone assumes that because he or she has already discussed something, sometime before, on some thread or other, that the argument is now closed.

i don't think long hair equals feminine anymore than short hair equals whatever short hair equals, but i do think there have been many eras, and many corners, of the US (and no doubt some other countries) , where hair lengths have been PERCEIVED as such. "the policing of masculinity," as you yourself put it. and if a longhaired male walked into a bar in one of those corners in one of those eras (for example, large swaths of the american south in the not-too-distant past), assumptions were very likely being made about him. that's all i was saying.

i am NOT asking you or anyone to re-argue something you've argued extensively elsewhere. i am just letting you know where i'm coming from.

i could look at any photo of bruce springsteen, based solely on clothes and haircut, and tell you exactly what album he was promoting (at least through the first 20 years of his career, when he truly mattered from a pop standpoint).

Aw, BOOM! Perfect example, like, *textbook* example, of an American image band! Bruce Springsteen! Thank you for that.

Because Springsteen has long irritated me on that level, that this is a guy who has spent decades carefully constructing and changing and working with Images, specifically of images of Working Class American Masculinity (whether that's messing with beards and biker chic or clean shaven with the American flag and Levis 501s) but it's like this elephant in the room, of everyone (well, especially British people who fetishise Springsteen) going on about how AUTHENTIC and how ANTITHESIS OF IMAGE BAND he is, when he is an ARCHETYPICAL IMAGE BAND, but somehow read as "not image" because white American male is so "default".

(Sorry, I hate Springsteen, but he is a pitch perfect example, and I'm super-glad you raised him.)

And I don't want to pick this scab, but it's not that the argument is *closed*, it's that this is a discussion I've been having for weeks now (across the 22 Listens thread, across the Men With Long Hair thread, across all 8 billion of the gender threads, which means it's actually more like 14 years now, but this specific argument has been going over this thread and 22 listens) and you pick one sentence out of a 2-week argument of going back and forth and considering one side and then the other and argue like *that* is my whole position, which needs to be debunked. American and European conceptions of masculinity are different. (And there are myriad conceptions of masculinity within "american" and "european" as well as between.) I do think that stereotypical American masculine views of European men as "sophisticated and metrosexual, therefore suspect" is still a valid point. (But English men have similar views about "European men" and French men probably have similar views about "decadent English men" so it's probably about being "other" within masculinity, rather than specifically US/UK, but the US can never really seem to get over its rugged frontier masculinity schtick.)

The whole dance of "long hair on men = rugged and masculine" swinging back and forth with "short hair on men = rugged and masculine" is a dance that has been going on way, way, waaaaaayyyyy longer than even "bands in suits" swinging back and forth with "bands in jeans and t-shirts" in terms of fashions in masculinity. Because most of us grew up in the 20th Century, we have absorbed 20th Century mores about "long hair on men" and what it means. "Policing of Masculinity" is the point; hair length is incidental. Lynyrd Skynyrd wearing their hair long were them coding as masculine as fuck because Civil War Generals of the Deep South wore their hair longer than The Beatles. It's an image.

springsteen is absolutely an image guy, who spends an awful lot of time thinking about this stuff. spend any time in asbury park, and you will hear stories, to take one silly example, of springsteen employees who were paid to wear his jeans to properly break them in for him. everything about how he presents himself is calculated. i'm a fan 'cause i like the music and i like the way he says what he has to say and i like his guitar playing and i think a lot of those looks were damn good looks. i tend to tune out all those people who go on about his authenticity and whatnot because -- if you want to know what i've been ranting about since the beginning of ILM time -- i don't believe authenticity exists in any music of any type by anybody.

(singular exception to the above: the lifers group, a hip-hop group consisting of guys serving life sentences at rahway, released a song called "let me out." that was an authentic moment.)

specifically of images of Working Class American Masculinity (whether that's messing with beards and biker chic or clean shaven with the American flag and Levis 501s)

it's perhaps not surprising that a lot of ILMers' fave springsteen album is the one where he tried something else. for tunnel of love, he switched to sport jackets and bolo ties, suggesting something more like American Man on a Date.

If it weren't for Nicky Wire, I'd be tempted to put late doors Manic Street Preachers down as the ultimate non-image band - not one of the albums when they're trying to recapture their, ahem, punk rock roots, but one of the Q magazine-friendly ones when the lyrics are just collections of bland signifiers and they're standing there looking like they've just been shopping in BHS. It's not even a kind of ostentatious everybloke look it's just plain half-arsedness.

Obviously the Manics up to a point are pretty much the ultimate image band.

The band that first sprung to mind as an 'anti-image band' was The Chameleons but that's purely because I once watched a YouTube clip of some live TV performance where the singer was wearing a really horrible jumper.

Going back to the hair metal thing, I think in defining 'image bands' I'd want to differentiate somehow between bands who adopted a standard hair metal look (though obviously there were those who defined it in the first place - I'm not sure who, it's not a genre I really know anything about) and those with a distinctive look that is unique to them. For example re: Soref's point about garage bands, from our point of view lots of bands do look like '1964' whereas The Who looked like The Who (albeit in a '1964' way). Obviously there's a huge grey area here, fans of a genre will notice differences in style that might not be apparent to non-fans, just as their would be with the music.

xp Well that Everything Must Go/This Is My Truth period was a deliberate anti-image to make a clean break with the Richey period. They explained it at the time and it wasn't half-arsed at all. It was a decision.

I don't think Wire's lyrics are ever close to being bland signifiers btw but that's for a different thread.

i won't be able to think about this properly today because I have to work hard but i am getting tangled up in passing in the dialectic of innovation and correctness in image-bands and their followers - are there distinctions between kinds of image bands that generate a 'be marvellous, be spectacular' culture, and those that generate principles that that are more 'your trousers must have n inch bottoms and break exactly here; your shoes should be brand y', or does one degenerate or harden into the other? I feel like there are distinctions between dress-up and aestheticism drifting around in this somewhere. Anyway, work!

Oh, Woof, don't work; talk to us instead. Some really great posts itt at the moment!

But need lunch right now.

"'Authenticity' is a Construct" is one of those basic level ideas that has been printed on cards and handed out to new ILM-ers since 2000. Or, rather.. *should* be. But hey.

still caused outrage on the post-fahey thread a while back vis-a-vis porches, checked shirts & mountain men

Yeah, I mean, ppl who have a hissy-fit when you suggest that, y'know... those flannel shirts, those deliberately square-tailored, plaid, in bold masculine colours, modelled in the LL Bean catalogue by rugged dudes with beards flannel shirts just, like grow on trees or something. But whatevs.