They weren’t nearly metal enough for the fans of godheads Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax, who threw all manner of shit at the band during their opening set they weren’t pop enough for Van Halen fans, whom Staley constantly trolled during Alice’s opening slot on the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge tour.
At the same time, Alice in Chains never really thought of themselves as a “Seattle band,” however ill-defined that term was, and their first national tours for their debut LP, Facelift, predictably came on some ill-fitting bills. While Seattle-area bands Screaming Trees, Mother Love Bone, and Soundgarden had already garnered national interest, Alice in Chains were the first Buzz Bin band to sport flannel on MTV, introducing the world to the guttural grunge yowl that Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder would soon come to personify. It's become a standard part of the grunge origin story that “Man in the Box” was the first national hit to come from the region that would soon re-define American music and popular culture in its own image. By mid-1991, Alice in Chains weren’t just a promising new metal band, but had been programmed into the nascent “alternative” landscape populated by fellow Buzz-worthy acts like EMF, Jesus Jones, and P.M. It was eye- and-ear-catching enough for MTV to grant the video its prized “Buzz Bin” designation, concocted a few years earlier to grant “next big thing” status to lesser-known or genre-agnostic artists. Though Cantrell looked very much the metal guitarist-long straight hair, shirtless under a leather jacket-Staley’s ratty blond dreads, goatee, and sad-eyed gaze didn’t fit neatly into any genre. Director Paul Rachman set the song’s video at an abandoned farmhouse and shot it with a low-budget art-horror vibe that distinguished it from its Headbangers Ball contemporaries. There was nothing quite like “Man in the Box” on the radio or MTV at the time. The explosive chorus may have been the most attention-grabbing part of the song, but that core riff was a novel moment in hard rock–Staley’s acidic yawp doubling guitarist Jerry Cantrell’s serpentine melody to conjure the pained moan of a beaten creature.
“So I went home and wrote about government censorship and eating meat as seen through the eyes of a doomed calf,” Staley explained. The lyrics to “Man in the Box” came to Staley after dining with some vegetarian Columbia Records executives who explained how veal was derived from calves raised in tiny enclosures. They were both participating in a heated cultural moment when it felt like pop music was under direct threat of censorship by an ascendant cadre of cultural conservatives.įive years and a handful of band changes later, Staley’s first hit single with Alice in Chains stuck to that topic.
“Our lyrics are all positive-we don’t use bad language or sing about drugs and sex,” he said, “but I just want the freedom to write about what I want.” Wearing blue-tinted aviators with his hair teased several inches above his head-the glam-metal look of the moment-Staley wasn’t nearly as high-profile as Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, but his brief take echoed Snider’s PMRC testimony. At one point, the host gave the floor to an 18-year-old audience member named Layne Staley, who at the time was fronting a local glam-metal band called Sleze, and offered a personal take on the manufactured controversy. A few weeks after the notorious 1985 Parents Music Resource Center hearings, where the so-called “ porn rock” lyrics of musicians like W.A.S.P., Prince, and Cyndi Lauper were debated before a Senate committee, the Seattle talk show “Town Meeting” devoted an episode to the issue of “obscene” pop lyrics.
0 kommentar(er)
