When my mother's family left Sweden for the US, they settled in North Dakota,
on a stretch of farmland off a highway that served two main purposes: to
connect Hunter (pop. 350) to Arthur (pop. 400) and to help get farmers to
Fargo, the nearest big city, almost an hour away. They harvested row crops and
sunflowers, kept a barn full of Holstein cows and a stable full of pigs on the
road to slaughter.
In the '80s, I would visit my cousins during the summer, and the LA/North
Dakota split was always clear. They wore John Deere hats, faded denim, and
cowboy boots. I wore Ocean Pacific shorts, pink Lacoste shirts, and slip-on
checkerboard Vans. I brought my Thompson Twins and Human League tapes. They
listened to heavy metal while playing bumper pool in their wood-paneled,
tornado-safe basement that always smelled of air-conditioning and motorcycle
grease.
But like Chuck Klosterman, the author of Fargo Rock City (Scribner, 288
pages, $23), who is the product of another North Dakota farming town
(Wyndmere), my cousins didn't look like metalheads. Klosterman begins his
memoir, which argues for heavy metal as the official music of white Midwestern
masculinity during a Reagan era of social emptiness and showoff capitalism, by
confessing that he's never had long hair. That Klosterman never looked like
Ratt or Mötley Crüe and never lived the kinds of lives that they sang
about is part of the point of Fargo Rock City. In North Dakota, being a
metalhead in the '80s was about living a life not your own created by guys in
make-up and long hair who in most cases were more like you than anyone from LA,
guys from small Midwestern and Eastern towns who headed west for a fresh start
and ended up double-fisting Aquanet and Jack Daniel's and paying to play on the
Sunset Strip.
On the cover of their 1996 Look What the Cat Dragged In (Capitol),
Poison (from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) looked like beautiful Valley girls,
airbrushed and hairsprayed, eye-linered and lipsticked, and they became
synonymous with LA rock-and-roll glam. But their songs weren't LA at all. They
could sing "I want action tonight," but they looked for it in Mayberry, "down
the main street," where they would check out high-school girls. Their
glam-metal standard "Talk Dirty to Me" is remembered as pure LA sexcapade, but
Poison were bragging about being "at the drive-in in the old man's Ford." They
even howled about a "rock-and-roll rodeo" on "Let Me Go to the Show."
Metal's role as a cultural conduit between country and city, rural farm town
and urban circus, was the very premise of Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the
Jungle," which promoted LA as a disease ready to make small-town kids bleed.
The song's video showed Indiana native Axl Rose stepping off the bus onto the
LA streets with a twig of hay in his mouth. For Klosterman, Rose is the
archetypal small-town white boy and the embodiment of what he calls "the
redneck intellectual," a Midwesterner who is practical, not ponderous, who like
all of Klosterman's friends in North Dakota understood that "life is about
work" and not about "ideas." Klosterman saw more of himself in Rose than he did
in say, Vince Neil, because "He was the guy who took our small-town paradigm
and applied it to the real world -- a world that had once seemed glamorous and
now seemed like a twisted, sinister city."
Part of what changed, of course, was that the metal migrants discovered that LA
wasn't like Fargo, that "the real world" of LA was full of people who weren't
white and didn't speak English (a problem Rose famously summed up as
"immigrants and faggots" on GNR's "One in a Million"). Fargo Rock City
confirms that the most salient features of the metal era were its noxious
maleness -- which with the help of MTV coaxed women into mud-wrestling pits and
onto the hood of Whitesnake's cars -- and its blinding whiteness, which had no
clue when it came to hip-hop's simultaneous racial awakenings.
North Dakota is a white place, and Fargo Rock City ends up being about
how white kids learn how to experiment with their whiteness without ever having
to leave the comforts of their skin. One of my older cousins, who grew up on my
great-uncle's farm, recently told me that the only black person she met as a
kid was the Omaha saxophonist Preston Love, who had come through to play a gig
at one of the farm's legendary barn dances. At the Johnson Barn (where everyone
from Lem Hawkins to Count Basie played), music was at least one way for farm
folk to meet an outside world that didn't look or sound like them. In Fargo
Rock City, North Dakota white kids imagine other worlds, but they're worlds
that, after all the hair and make-up are gone, are really only one bus ride
away from the state fair.
Issue Date: August 31 - September 6, 2001
