Two weeks I wrote about how Ratt’s “Dance” is an excellent stripping song, and jested about trying it out myself. Jokes aside, I’ve always been fascinated by strip clubs and strippers and the whole shebang. It’s just so weird to me. The way it all functions and how lucrative it really is. When I was in college, we affectionately called the street right next to us “Stripper Alley” because of the cluster of clubs situated two steps from the dorms. You’d be hard-pressed to find worse houses of “burlesque” in the country.

Unfortunately, any fantasies or visions of naked grandeur were put to rest when I attended one innocent evening and an enthusiastic and obviously pregnant girl started raving about how much she loved my name. ‘Cause my real name was her stage name. Thanks, mom and dad.

It’s hard to deny that there’s some connection between metal, especially hair metal, and stripping. They go hand in hand like… syphilis and crazy. But I really don’t like the “stripping songs” that everyone always seems to go with. “Pour Some Sugar On Me”… like, really? There are so many underrated bands from that era and even more underrated songs. Some just had bad timing and some were plain ignored. But it got me thinking.

So here are the top underrated bands (note: “underrated” does not necessarily mean “unpopular”) of the 80s and early 90s, along with their corresponding strip songs. Now, these aren’t my choices, mind you — I just think they’d get the job done. I really hope no family members are reading this but if they are: HEY YOU GAVE ME A STRIPPER NAME, THIS WAS INEVITABLE.

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I love reading groupie biographies. It’s sort of a hobby of mine. I’ve read everyone’s, from Pamela Des Barres to Catherine James to Marianne Faithfull (she counts), and am eagerly awaiting the memoirs of Cherry Vanilla, the woman who heroically blew half of New York to get David Bowie on the radio. Some women go sexually apeshit on rock stars, others enjoy reading about it while maintaining a happily gonorrhea-free existence. It’s just how it goes.

When I first heard of The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage, I was rather intrigued. Mind you, I had some preconceptions because of the key words: “slut” and “Iran.” It’s one thing to fuck everyone from Autograph to Winger and write about it, but controversy for the sake of controversy is quite another beast (with two backs, har har).

Though I tried to brush off the combination of these topics as calculated edginess, I couldn’t help but soften to Ms. Roxana Shirazi. Her story runs the gamut from depressingly sad (getting bullied in middle school for being a foreigner) to hilarious (watching as Matt Sorum interrupts himself during a threesome to do push-ups because he’s in ‘such good shape”) to horrifying (falling in love with Dizzy Reed and having to abort his baby). Everything aside, she’s just a girl who loves her rock’n’roll. Naked or otherwise.

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One day mankind will go extinct and the remains of our civilization will later be picked over by aliens. Though they can speedily assemble collections of most homo erectus artifacts for their alien museums, their super-brains will struggle to grasp and group the arts of Earth, y’know, for their encyclopedias and stuff. So it’s in the interest of preserving and defining Glam Metal across the cosmos that we at MetalSucks have counted down the Ten Best Must-Have Glam Metal Albums. We even tapped in to the genius of Bring Back Glam‘s Allyson B. Crawford to give it that “definitive text” feel. (Read part one, part two, part three)

Thanks to Allyson and our Anso DF, Glam Metal will live on in other worlds long after our planet has become a barren hellscape. That’s comforting. Here’s the number one Best Must-Have Glam Metal Album! So, come now children of the beast, be strong and …

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Read Leyla’s list of The Top Ten Worst Hair Metal Band Names here.

All right, this was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be and for a while I considered just doing a part two of bad names. But, like hair metal itself, there are always some gems floating amidst the crap, and with a little borrowing from other overlapping genres, ten candidates were found for the best of hair band names. So you’re safe for now, Trixter, Tora, Tora, Kix, and Stryper…

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So Rocklahoma, the once cock-rockalicious festival, may be a wash this year, but it seems that there’s already a new fest to grab ahold of the Aquanet and let us relive our youth gone wile: Rock N America, which take place from July 23 to July 25 in – get this – Oklahoma. Huh.

The line-up basically plays like a who’s who of who shoulda been playing Rocklahoma this year: Scorpions, Twisted Sister, Ratt, Warrant, Dokken, Great White, Enuff Z’Nuff, Bullet Boys, Faster Pussycat, and the Tracii Guns/Jizzy Pearl version of L.A. Guns are all the bill. More bands will be announced soon; in my imagination that will include whatever is passing for Skid Row these days, Vince Neil, Adler’s Appetite, Beautiful Creatures and/or Bang Tango, and the other version of L.A. Guns. But who knows.

It is worth noting that the fest will take place at the Zoo Amphitheatre, which a) has a smaller capacity than the giant open fields of Rocklahoma and b) isn’t just a cool name from some venue, but, rather, is called the “Zoo Amphitheatre” because it’s actually at the fucking zoo. So unless it’s always been Chip Z’Nuff’s dream to play for a crowd of zebras, this isn’t going to be quite the event that Rocklahoma was for these bands.

Still, you should visit the Rock N America website, even if you’re not really interested in attending the show, because, well, it’s like the shittiest website of 1994 and is consequently pretty hilarious.

-AR

[via Bring Back Glam]

I really wanted to like this book. I really did.

As an old school Hanoi Rocks fan, I assumed this would be an eye-opening tell-all by the man behind the band that spawned sleaze rock which was later ripped off by Guns N’ Roses and lesser lights such as L.A. Guns and Faster Pussycat. Instead, it’s just a big ol’ mess of discombobulated anecdotes that do not enlighten the uninitiated, enthrall those already on board the Hanoi train, nor excite undiscerning lovers of rock ‘n roll.

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What do Twisted Sister, Great White, Kix, Nelson, Danger Danger and Anthrax all have in common?

They’re all playing this year’s Rocklahoma Festival.

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At the risk of sounding melodramatic, some days I do have to stop and ask the big question – “Where the fucking fuck is my fucking life going?” And often, the answer would seem to “nowhere.”

Then I remember that Vince and I started this totally rad website and all is right with the world.

ANYWAY, running with the theme of “Where is my life going?”, here’s five cock rock videos that address that very issue in some way or another. Why cock rock and not death metal or grindcore or whatever, you ask? Fairly simple: none cock rock bands rarely seem to waste their time dealing with such clichéd bullshit.

My picks after the jump.

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I’m no expert on folk metal band Moonsorrow, but I do this know much: their latest release, last year’s V – Hävitetty, is killer (read my mini-review here – the album is only two dollars on iTunes!), and they’re a Nazi band like this site is a polka blog.

But I guess some people actually do think Moonsorrow are a bunch of fascist fuckheads, ’cause front man Ville Sorvali just released the following statement:

“We, Moonsorrow, have come across news that Antifa wishes to prevent our concert in Berlin on April 17th. We hereby announce that we are not a Nazi band… Some have said that Moonsorrow have an SS rune in their logo… The S in the logo is not intended to look like an SS rune, it has been drawn in an angular manner to suit the logos other letters.”

This is just plain ri-fucking-diculous. Does the letter “s” in the Moonsorrow logo (above) look any more or less like the SS logo than the double-S in the Kiss logo? (I understand that we know Kiss isn’t a Nazi band because its two most prominent members are Jews – hel-lo, Mr. Chaim Witz – but sheesh.) For that matter, how come no one made a stink when other bands – like Marilyn Manson and Faster Pussycat – appropriated the SS font for their own logos?

This is just dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. And I strongly encourage Moonsorrow fans everywhere – especially German ones – make the biggest stink about it possible.

-AR

Folks, it’s finally happened. We’ve often lampooned the hilarity that there are currently two touring bands calling themselves L.A. Guns and two touring bands calling themselves Faster Pussycat, each featuring various combinations of ex-members of those groups. And we suppose that the eventual tour featuring both bands was completely inevitable; but it’s newsworthy (and funny) nonetheless. Just goes to prove that down and out musicians will do pretty much anything to make a buck and avoid having to get an actual 9-5 job. Bang Tango will round out the bill for the tour, which extends from early July to August and looks like it will cover most of the U.S.

For anyone actually keeping track, this is the Tracii Guns version of L.A. Guns (touting the “original” lineup that never got anywhere) and the Taime Down version of Faster Pussycat (lacking the group’s namesake guitarist Brent Muscat).

We’re just waiting for the announcement that both version of L.A. Guns will team up for a supertour with both versions of Faster Pussycat. Never say never…

-VN

According to a press release, the lineup for the 2008 incarnation of Rocklahoma, inarguably the most important metal festival in the U.S., will be announced on March 4th. So far the whopping lineup consists of Krokus and Vixen… but we’re positive some slam dunks will be announced for the follow-up to last year’s wildly successful first annual Rocklahoma which featured various incarnations of every ’80s band, ever.

We’ve got our fingers crossed for a main stage steel-cage match between both touring versions of L.A. Guns with a match between both touring versions of Faster Pussycat as an encore.

-VN

A band — US 66 — whose members consist of Tracii Guns (L.A. Guns) on guitar, Joe LeSte (Bang Tango, Beautiful Creatures) on vocals, Steven Adler (Adler’s Appetite, ex-Guns N’ Roses) on drums, Chip Z’Nuff (Enuff Z’nuff) on bass, and Michael Thomas (Faster Pussycat) on guitar ought to be able to perform a somewhat decent version of the Guns N’ Roses classic “Welcome to the Jungle,” right? Wrong.

What probably started as a fun, drunken idea (“Hey duuuudez! Let’s play Welcome to the Jungle” tonight! It’ll be awesome!”) ended as a trainwreck at last summer’s Rocklahoma festival. What with Tracii Guns proclaiming “We started Guns N’ Roses together” after introducing Steven Adler — which, while technically the truth he had NOTHING to do with “Welcome to the Jungle” — then the band members guessing when to come in after the intro, flubbing notes, and some of the sloppiest guitar playing I’ve ever heard, the result is downright embarrassing. Have a looksie.

-VN

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