Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman Read Free Book Online Page B

“Anything for My Baby,” and “Shandi”—all tunes where he longs to be with a woman he can’t necessarily have. Certainly, this is not a hard and fast rule (“I Stole Your Love” is an almost comical example of a sex harvest), but as a general precept, Paul Stanley pursues women through song and loses at least half the time.
    Simmons is the exact opposite. In “Calling Dr. Love,” Gene sings, “Baby, I know what your problem is.” And we all know what her problem is too: She wants Gene to fuck her. In fact, she needs Gene to fuck her (and evidently for medical reasons). Inthe context KISS uses these terms, it’s all a cartoon, but—if you’re looking for tangible examples of domination imagery in pop culture—it’s a good place to start. Sometimes it’s completely unveiled; on the mega-macho record Creatures of the Night, Simmons sings a song titled “War Machine,” where he claims his intention is to “Strike down the one who leads me / I’m gonna take his place / I’m gonna vindicate the human race.”
    There’s one glaring irony in the Paul-Gene power axis, however. Of all the songs in the KISS catalog, the one that stands out most clearly as a power anthem is “God of Thunder” from 1976’s Destroyer (it even surpasses “War Machine,” because “God of Thunder” is more epic and archetypal). Simmons carried the vocals, and it ultimately defined what his onstage persona was all about; he usually did his infamous blood-spitting routine during the song’s introduction. But what’s compelling is that it was written by Stanley, who fully intended to sing it. Simmons likes to insist that Paul was deliberately writing a “Gene song” and always knew he would eventually handle the lead, but Stanley says otherwise. “You want to hear the real story, or do you want to believe the rumor?” he told me in a 1997 interview. “That was totally [producer] Bob Ezrin’s idea. He thought it came across better with Gene handling the vocals.” In other words, Simmons’s powerful image was a better fit for the song’s powerful imagery; Paul’s androgynous Girl Power would not translate into menace. At least in this case, the tenuous connection between heavy metal and power was completely conscious in the minds of the people who made the record.
    But sometimes what seems obvious is not, particularly when you’re trying to categorize what an artist represents culturally. That certainly seems true with Ozzy Osbourne, who doesn’t seem obsessed with power at all. In fact, he seems more obsessed with weakness, particularly his own.
    As a public character, Osbourne is the wildest of wild men. During the height of his career, he was constantly chomping off the heads of birds, pissing on historical landmarks, and generally acting like the most berserk, fucked-up lunatic in the universe.It’s not an act, either; what’s unique about Osbourne is that many of the stories about his behavior are at least partially true. But as he’s grown older, another side of Ozzy has become more and more obvious: He is an incredibly vulnerable person who plainly lacks confidence. Rock writer Mick Wall talked about this in a VH1 Behind the Music special about Osbourne, and Ozzy made oblique references to his insecurities in his autobiographical video documentary Don’t Blame Me. I hate to resort to pop psychology, but it seems clear that Ozzy desperately needs people to like him, and—for a long time—the only way he knew how to do that was through drugs, alcohol, performing onstage, and acting like a complete idiot in public situations. And even though it probably wasn’t intentional, that insecurity always came across in his music.
    You can see this way back with his material as vocalist for Black Sabbath. Sonically, the music was very powerful—but those