“Rock Of Love” Pits Groupies Aganist Rockers
Rock of Love, VH1’s latest attempt to create an emotional equivalent to the Faces of Death series, consists of once and future Poison lead singer Bret Michaels and the women competing for his affections. It’s the rock remix of and follow-up to Flavor of Love, on which Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav tried to find someone to marry, sorta. But the genre switch has also changed something about the ladies participating (well, in addition to the racial inversion): this time, there are groupies, and there are rockers.
Which are which? Well, go to the Web site and look at the pictures; the ones where you can see more tattoos or tongue are rockers. This didn’t seem to be the case with Flavor of Love, where none of the contestants claimed to be, say, a big fan of Nas. But in the rock version, quite a few of the participants are at least presenting themselves as true music fans who just happen to have gigantic bazoombas. This seems to mark a significant change from the hair-metal glory days, when acts like Poison were dismissed for being “bands that girls like,” the only female musician seemed to be Lita Ford, and the only role female fans played in the iconography were as groupies. Of course, this was a distorted picture, as there were lots of female metal fans who were just as dedicated and knowledgeable as any male fan. (At least two of my friends fell into this category.) But of the many, many women who showed up in metal videos and were mentioned in interviews by metal bands, almost none qualified as pure fans.
Of course, you can understand why band members might have been more interested in the groupie side of the equation. But today, women seem to have achieved something like parity in hard rock. Bands such as Kittie make albums noisier and more intense than anything released in the ’80s, ladies who can hold forth on what rocks and what doesn’t with some authority are welcomed members of the community, and now you’ve got essentially a groupielympics with a sizable contingent of girls who are at least trying to appeal on the basis of their being like Bret Michaels, rather than different from and dumber than him.
Still, is this really a difference, or just a stylistic shift? And what does it mean for the younger genre of hip-hop, given the absence of fangirls on Flavor of Love–will girls who can quote Lil’ Wayne one day be competing for the heart of Lloyd Banks? Also, how funny is it that Bret Michaels doesn’t even seem to be making any pretensions of finding someone to actually marry? They might as well call it Rock of Love: The Quest To Touch Bret Michaels’ Herpetic Male Member.
Rock of Love [VH1]
