They’d already repurposed the mullet and the foam-mesh trucker hat, so it was clearly just a matter of time before hipsters sank their talons into heavy metal. The music’s camp value is well established: This Is Spinal Tap first mined hard rock’s excesses for laughs 20 years ago, and bands like Manowar, Gwar, and arguably Kiss have been lampooning them at least that long. As Jack Black has shown in his prog-metal goof Tenacious D and, more recently, while imparting rock wisdom to Generation Z in School of Rock, it’s certainly possible to send up the trappings of metal and get a genuine kick out of the music at the same time. But when the joy isn’t there, it’s a tired exercise.
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Of course W.K. insists that he means it, man, in interview after interview. “When you say something is just a joke it absolves you of all responsibility of being wrong,” he lectured a British writer. “If someone says ‘that sucks,’ then I say ‘Oh yeah, no big deal, I didn’t really work on it that hard anyway. It’s just a joke.’ Fuck that! I am giving it all I have and being completely one hundred thousand percent committed to something. It’s like I am committed to smiling.” But “Tear It Up” builds a preposterously grandiose arrangement of bullying guitar and meandering electric piano behind lyrics snatched from the mouths of fourth graders (“I met a lot of friends who were cool / But a lot of them were jerks”), and on “Your Rules” the wall of cheesy synths makes inane chants like “We will never listen to your rules / We will never do what others do / If you want to fight we’ll fight with you” feel less like a tribute to the teen anthems of Slade, Sweet, and Twisted Sister than a sub-SNL parody of them.
When I Get Wet, W.K.’s Island debut, appeared in late 2001, some suggested he was a hoax perpetrated by Dave Grohl. Prior to the album’s release, W.K. had opened a handful of Foo Fighters shows, dressed in tight white jeans, a sweat-stained white T-shirt, and white sneakers, dancing wildly and shouting hoarsely to prerecorded tracks. His aesthetic fit Grohl’s kitschy sense of humor (remember his spoof of the Mentos commercials in the “Big Me” video?) and well-documented interest in metal. But W.K.’s attraction to metal in fact predates his association with Grohl: as a youngster in Ann Arbor he played in Pterodactyls, a neo-no-wave-metal outfit whose output was more performance art than pop music. And it seems unlikely that a kid who used to hang with Magas and Wolf Eyes could write lyrics like “Hey you, let’s party! / Have a killer party and party!” (from “It’s Time to Party”) in earnest.
As Vanessa Grigoriadis pointed out in a recent New York Times feature on Vice magazine and white-trash chic, “hip taste is embraced by hipsters because the masses don’t get it.” This metal mini renaissance isn’t any sort of sincere embrace of blue-collar culture–it’s condescension masked as populism.
