A Man Of Many Interest

This afternoon as I was driving and listening to the radio the DJ read a news item about how Godsmack lead singer Sully Erna is training for a marathon, which he plans to run for charity. Now, I'm not about to crack jokes about anyone who can run a marathon, let alone someone who is going to do it for charity. That being said, I couldn't help but think telling people they can track your training progress on Nike.com is not very rock 'n roll. It got me to pondering: when did rock stars stop trying to be bad-asses? In the last few years I have notice that many former rock gods have gone all soft and cuddly on me. Whether it's Steven Tyler temporarily leaving Aerosmith to host the decidedly un-rock "American Idol" or Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich hosting gallery openings as a way to show off his art collection, it seems the rock stars of my youth are suddenly acting like they are one step away from banging on the ceiling to get their kids to turn it down. Hell, Ozzy Osbourne used to bite the heads off live bats and now he's doing commercials encouraging men to get a prostate exam. Not a move you would expect from a man who once wrote a song called "Suicide Solution."

At first I was going to point to Dee Snider testifying in front of Congress in full "Twisted Sister" regale to protest having warning labels put on the band's CDs by telling them he and his bandmates were normal guys who just happened to be entertainers as the moment the rock curtain started to slip open and reveal the wizard behind it. (Bad move on two fronts as they lost all their street cred and those warning labels were the easiest way to sell a million albums.) However, as I get older I'm slowing coming to realize that there is a chance that none of these bands were ever all that dangerous to begin with. Now that I have taken a few marketing classes, I am well aware that as long as there has been music there have been musicians who were only going to show the public as much of their personalities as the stylists and record label representatives were going to allow and that wasn't very much because they had so much to lose. They were selling the image even more than the sound. (A wise decision in a couple instances. KISS, I'm looking at you...) Alice Cooper is a scratch golfer, has been since he was still painting his face and dancing with snakes around his neck. But no one knew about that until about a decade ago, long after people stopped expecting him to actually walk around in black leather pants. The only difference now is that people aren't waiting as long to show that side of themselves.

Personally, I think this ability to separate the image from the person behind it is a sign of maturity in us all. After all, only stalkers expect celebrities to act like their persona at all times, so acknowledging that even rock musicians need a non-destructive hobby for balance does nothing more than make us all look like level-headed adults. In some respects I guess this level of open sharing should be seen as a good thing for the artists as well. It has to be kind of liberating to strip away everything but the music. (Admittedly, some of you should have stayed behind the fake persona.) Either way, at this point you have no one but yourself to blame for not knowing that between Twitter, camera phones and all the other forms of social media, news gets out whether you want it to or not. With that in mind you are better off being honest from the start because acting tough only to have the world find out your favorite room on your property is for yoga and quiet meditation could really lose you some musical credentials. Letting people know you collect wine won't win you much in the way of death metal fans, but at least you can't lose them if you never had them to begin with.

The only way this gets dangerous is that sometimes too much information is not good for anyone. For example, I enjoy some country music, so I should at least be a Taylor Swift listener if not a full-fledged fan. However, by this point I simply know too much about her personal life that I don't want to and she has begun to grate on my nerves (a phenomenon I call the 'sympathy boomerang'). She could probably stand to take a couple lessons from actors, because those guys seem to be the best at showing enough of their own personality to remind people they are not the character they are playing, but some of them have maintained very private lives. It's about balance. The funny thing is that you would think someone would have reminded these stars that no matter what they are going to do someone out there is going to be annoyed by them anyway. It's the law of averages - no one likes everyone all the time. I could write a post saying something as non-threatening as "I'm not a huge fan of cats because I am allergic to them" and if the wrong person stumbles onto this blog I'm going to get a tensely-worded letter outlining why the world would be a better place if it was filled with nothing but cats. With that in mind you may as well do what is going to make you happy because that is the only thing in this equation you can control. I mean, you could always right really good music which stands alone no matter what you wear, say or do in your free time, but considering some of the stuff coming out of my radio these days, I'll stick to encouraging artists to just be themselves and not get greedy.