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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

Last week we asked you, oh beloved readers, to suggest some QOTW, and there were actually a number of good queries posited. So we kinda just picked one at random, and then we’ll do some others in the coming weeks. In the meantime, this week’s question, from Tim, is:

WHAT ALBUM ORIGINALLY GOT YOU INTO METAL?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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When the Key Club in West Hollywood closed its doors in December 2009, the eight-legged party beast Steel Panther had to find a new hair rock habitat for their weekly shows. At first, it was a relief when Michael Starr and crew cock-strutted a few blocks down Sunset to the House of Whites Blues: admission got cheaper, the room bigger, and sound better. But, for the sleaze of hair rock, a music venue/shopping mall/tourist trap isn’t the preferred setting. So sometime around March, I started to long for a return to the safety of a drug-friendly sweat hole with dark corners and unpolice-able bathrooms. After all, the Key Club was once the site of Ben Gazzari’s eponymous rock club, where the sleaze don once proudly showcased his barely-legal harem and, for VIPs, his somewhat prescient home video skills; meanwhile, HoB has a freakin’ gift shop.

You’d want maximum possible sleaze, too, once you survey the crowd. It’s mostly tourists (literally and figuratively), but filled out with solitary guys like me, unaccompanied and dead serious, fidgeting through extended bouts of boob-flashing  (our sighs seem to say “Just show ‘em already and let’s get on with the Whitesnake covers!”) and secretaries-gone-wild sing-alongs (not to be a sandy vagina, but I submit that “Don’t Stop Believin’” is not hair rock). Our visual mating call is a non-ironic hair metal shirt and a general vibe of impatience for the super hits.

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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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It’s a little known fact that MetalSucks co-jefe Vince Neilstein (pictured here with partner Axl Rosenberg) is a power-mad tyrant who controls the MS writer corps with manipulation and implicit threats of violence. Yeah, he seems like a cool guy, really, but would you believe that he can intercept my brainwaves via mobile phone? Or that I’m certain he is responsible for the invisible helicopter that’s been following me since St. Patty’s? Oh, you think I’m crazy? And paranoid? So, okay, I see you’d have me believe it’s just coincidence that my favorite toothpaste went on sale the day after I bought a tube. Wake the fuck up, dude. It’s all Neilstein. He’s everywhere and nowhere, an evil puppet master always wanting more, more, MORE from the once-mighty writers whom he has enslaved. Cross him and pay the price.

Well, mind control must be draining Neilstein’s lifeforce lately because the usual neighborhood dogs haven’t accosted me and barked his commands since last month, when an unleashed great dane warned me to “rop riting arout rAerosmith ror relse.” No, now he’s keeping it simple, all casually mentioning The Apex Theory in MetalSucks last week as though he had no knowledge of my secret, shameful plans to revive print discussion of that very band on this very site. Sure, an unsuspecting reader will see his Apex piece as an innocent bit of pithy writing, oblivious to the coded messages within that order us MS underlings to forgo rest and hygiene to write endlessly about stuff like the impact of Steve Vai-era Whitesnake and The Top 10 Worst Metal Bands Whose Cumulative Age is 95. How can you all be so blind?

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The Austerity Program play this Sunday January 31, in Brooklyn at Public Assembly (70 N 6th St) with White Suns, Immanent Voiceless, Daniel Malinsky. You should go, goddammit!!!

I did not get into metal until relatively late in life. My teenage years were spent buying everything that came out on Touch & Go and Amphetamine Reptile. I’d see long-haired wasteoids hanging out in suburban playgrounds and think “Look at those chumps who’ve got it so bad for Reign in Blood while I know that Atomizer is really where it’s at. (Actually, I still pretty much feel this way.) At that point, MetalSucks was not a website, it was a personal belief.

Still, I was not unaware of what the metal kids were up to, even around fourth grade. A few of them that I invited to my birthday that year party chipped in and bought “Shout at the Devil;” since I only had about twelve records at that point, I figured that I’d listen to the record once a day because what else are you going to do? And it kind of freaked my parents out, and that was cool. And it had a pentagram on the cover which I spent a lot of time trying not to look at because I was worried something might happen to me.

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I’ve been meaning to mention this for a week. But I can already tell it’s gonna be a slow news day, so now seems like a good time to bring it up.

The lovely ladies at Reign in Blonde discovered that McSweeney’s has has a list of Heavy Metal Board Games. They have also added a few suggestions of their own. Here are a few that tickled me:

• Whitesnakes and Ladders
• Motley Clue
• Twister Sister
• Black Scrabbleth
• Crytopoly
• Dio’s and Dragons

Check out the rest of the list here. And, of course, I’m dying to see if y’all can come with s’more.

And if you really are bored, don’t forget that actually is a Heavy Metal Fun Time Activity Book.

-AR

Less than a year ago Judas Priest were threatening to pull an Iron Maiden and play their most recent, snooze-inducing album, Nostradamus, live in its entirety; either the band’s handlers told them that was really, really shitty idea, or the band just realized that they like making money, because now they’ve announced that they’ll “celebrate the 30th anniversary” of their classic release British Steel by playing it live from start to finish on their summer headlining tour.

Of course, no one seems to have told them that they’ll actually be celebrating the 29th anniversary of the release of British Steel, which came out in the Spring of 1980. But, hey, they’re old and my dad can’t remember what year it is either, so I sympathize.

ANYWAY, British Steel isn’t my favorite Priest record, but it’s obviously a damn fine one and Halford and company can still bring it live. So this should be a good time.

Here’s Priest performing “Living After Midnight” live in 1982. Announced tour dates thus far are after the jump; support will come from Whitesnake, which means I might actually be able to talk my woman into coming with. Rad.

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First Maynard, now this.

Look: I fucking love Vegas. I was there for New Year’s once and I think I had pretty much the best fucking night of my life.

But part of what’s so fun about that town is how friggin’ ridiculous everything is; it can’t be taken seriously at all, and if you try to take it seriously, you’ll probably just give yourself an aneurysm. As a place to go spend a couple of days drunk and act like a total dip shit, I think Las Vegas is just swell – but I think if I had to live in there, I’d kill myself.

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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 love YouTube so much. From one of the best singers of all time (and pro gum chewers) to complete trainwrecks, YouTube’s got ‘em. And fortunately today it’s the latter. In response to yesterday’s claim that Whitesnake’s “In The Still of the Night” was a fine choice for drunken karaoke, die-hard MetalSucks Maniac TedTedPoleyPoley posted quite possibly the worst karaoke version of anything in the history of forever, sending my theory straight to the shitter.

-VN

Because sometimes a little Whitesnake is just what your day needs.

Let it be said that this is one of the best karaoke songs EVAR. Especially at the end of a long night of drinking when everyone is about to fall over. Not that I would know anything about that.

-VN

[Welcome to our new column Hair Metal Happy Hour, which will be manned by the fine writer Michael S. Robinson. Things have been admittedly less hairy around here lately, but we hope to rectify that situation with this semi-regular column. Huh huh, he said "rectum-fry." - Ed.]

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost twenty years since glorious hair metal ruled the charts and MTV. Once the crispy, crunchity sounds of the Pacific northwest took over, many of our cock-rocking heroes from the 80s faded into oblivion, while others continued to record sporadically, enjoying varying degrees of success, or lack thereof.

Now it’s 2008, almost 20 years to the day since Stryper released In God We Trust, and we find ourselves in the midst of unarguably the greatest year for hair metal releases since the 1980s. I’m not sure what any of us have done to bring about this incredible turn of good fortune, but it’s worth pausing to analyze, and give thanks for the bounty of hair metal we have been given, and are about to receive, in 2008.

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