Welcome to the Jungle and Glam’s Return to Dionysian Romanticism

Everyone knows that there has always been a deep affinity between the working class and the aristocracy. Fundamentally aspirational, working class culture is foreign to the levelling impulse of bourgeois culture — and of course this can be politically ambivalent, since if aspiration is about the pursuit of status and authority, it will confirm and vindicate the bourgeois world.

• Mark Fisher, “K-Punk, or the Glampunk Art Pop Discontinuum”

In “K-Punk, or the Glampunk Art Pop Discontinuum,” Mark Fisher argues that glam was pop music’s return to a working class and away from the middle class hippies of the 60s and 70s. In this transition, the music shed its pretentious musings on Dionysian sensuality and Nietzschean anti-moralism, and moved into a more classical interpretation of love as a sadistic play on pleasure. This inhabited the other side of Nietzsche’s erotic project, that of a functional power produced by a master-slave dichotomy.

By the 1980s, Glam had turned into “Hair Metal,” which continued the functional spectacle of sex and gender. There was feminized masculinity in service to male domination, and there was a masculinized femininity (or de-feminization) idealizing “women” primarily as sex workers who function in service to men’s desires (for a price). With this reinforcement of gender-roles and the transactional role of sexuality came the new aesthetic of subverting the Christian working class reactionary: vulgarity and hypersexuality. This hypersexuality and varied gender expression was an understandable reaction to the repression of sex and sexuality under a conservative political turn.

What were the material conditions for this shift in sex and sexuality? The destruction of a working class political relationship to the bourgeois. A lot is made of sexual liberation and women entering the workplace for the first time during the 70s and 80s, which provoked a reaction by an economic rightward turn, but the rightward turn was not just at the individual level, but at the structural level between the working class, the (new) professional middle class, and the bourgeois class. Previously, the working class had a well-defined relationship to the bourgeois who guided their hand, but this new professional working class muddied those waters and invoked the contradictions of neoliberalism: free market austerity, anti-communism, American exceptionalism, free speech, and unionism sat next to Christianized moralization about pornography, Satanism, drug use, and racial (in)equality.

Hair Metal subverted this ruling ideology by targeting the sexual and drug taboos and its relationship to gender performance. Hair Metal inherited the BDSM aesthetic of leather, whips, fishnets and black leather boots from Glam while taking the hedonistic sex and drugs from hippies. The shift mirrored a shift in drug choice, which reflected a destructive element to the emergent Capitalist Realism: an expansion of social consciousness was replaced by an individual pleasure-drive; the socially conscious art and sex as old-God was replaced by self-pleasure as the new-God. The kids went from dropping acid and reflecting on existence for twelve hours, to doing cocaine in bathroom stalls every twenty minutes in a nightly search for pleasure.

By the late 80s, Guns N’ Roses came onto the scene as a synthesis of the two sides of Nietzsche. On one hand, the rugged individualism and aestheticization of Glam: Slash tipping the hat to Marc Bolan, Steven Adler’s hairspray, Izzy Stradlin’s scarf and velvet combination, and Duff McKagan’s punk leather outfit. On the other hand, they returned Pop and Rock music to the Dionysus Romanticism of the 60s and 70s. They borrowed musically from AC/DC, Aerosmith, Queen, Elton John, and the Rolling Stones as much as they did from Hair Metal favorites.

“When I was a kid, I was told rock n’ roll wasn’t music. It wasn’t art. Queen was my proof, my evidence, that these people were wrong — and they meant everything to me,” Rose would say in an interview.

Vulgarity replaced niceties. Vulgarity is an essential part to the Romanticism of Dionysus. As Fisher quotes music reviewer Simon Reynolds in his article: the Dionysian is essentially “democratic vulgar, levelling, abolishing rank; about creating crowds, turbulence, a rude commotion, a rowdy communion.” Axl Rose was infamous for his democratic vulgarity, which was catalogued by the tabloid news media throughout the 80s and 90s. His uncompromising lyrical style, rough scratchy vocals, and explosive anger on stage made him an archetypical Gen-X rebel-against-conformity and hero-against-hero-worship. In the news, he was constantly striking out against people and levelling his words against theirs. Famously, Axl jumped off stage at a show in St. Louis because someone was filming it, left the show, and the whole place turned into a riot. What is more Dionysian than that?

This Romanticism, according to Reynolds, is opposed to Glam’s “monumentalism”: “Glam being about monumentalism, turning yourself into a statue, a stone idol.” Axl Rose was not a monument, even if he had monumental aspirations. His romantic vulgarities placed sensitive musings next to paranoid rants and BDSM sex fantasies. On Appetite for Destruction, these fantasies are laid bare, even performed on tape. “Rocket Queen” had audio clips of Axl having sex with the then-girlfriend of drummer Steven Adler in the recording studio and had lyrics like “I’ve got a tongue like a razor / A sweet switchblade knife / And I can do you favors but then you’ll do whatever I like.” “Anything Goes,” an early song from Hollywood Rose years, relish the BDSM performativity: “Tied up, tied down / Up against the wall / Be my rubbermade baby / And we can do it all.” On Use Your Illusions II (1991), the song “Pretty Tied Up (The Perils of Rock and Roll Decadence)” was more of a reflection on those themes than a performance of it.

Appetite for Destruction wasn’t the embodiment of an Oedipal id, but the effects of an eroticism-of-the-moment. This urge wanted to end sex as an end-unto-itself, and viewed vulgarity and sex as a way to democratize the world, to assert power, to move mountains and to influence political culture. Ultimately, the question posed and answered by Appetite for Destruction is: “is it possible to take over the world by fucking as many women as possible and doing all the drugs?” The worldwide success of the album seemed to suggest that the answer was “yes.”

One song that makes clear Glam’s return to Dionysus Romanticism is the hit single and music video “Welcome to the Jungle.” Rose claimed that the song was inspired after getting off a bus in New York City and a man trying to scare the new runaway yelled “You know where you are? You’re in the jungle baby, you’re going to die!” It has an iconic introductory one note riff that has been played in sports arenas ad nauseum and an atmosphere of echoing danger. The riff transitions into an incredulous Rose who barely audibly says “Oh My God” as if seeing the city lights for the first time. The tension breaks and Rose lets out a howling scream that penetrates the suspension allowing for the guitar to finally flesh out a spidery riff that crescendos with the drums into a muscle-y Aerosmith strut-swagger.

In the music video, a clean cut William Bailey (Axl Rose is an anagram for Oral Sex, adding another level of the transformation of human into innuendo) is shown getting off a bus with wheatgrass in his mouth to meet a drug dealer (played by Izzy Stradlin’). Refusing the initial drugs, Bailey is portrayed as innocent and naïve, The video follows Axl’s biography of moving from Midwest Indiana to Los Angeles with hopes for an artistic future. Trickle-down Reaganomics and austerity had gutted the coastal cities of welfare systems and produced urban conditions rampant with drugs, sex, and prostitution. “Jungle” was, if nothing else, about surviving the Hollywood strip, as Stradlin’ once said in an interview.

The music video cuts to the band playing in the club, a rag-tag group of disconnected fashion choices: Izzy Stradlin’ mixed the sleaze of post-hippy rockers like Steve Perry and Keith Richards; Slash in tight leather pants and signature Bolan hat with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Duff took on the persona of Iggy Pop and Sex Pistols punk rock. Finally, Axl, already transformed into the glam persona with mascara, tight pants, teased red hair, and a snarl through lipstick, swivels around the stage snake-like and diabolical. The effect is an effeminate Glam aesthetic mixed with a dangerous masculinity on the brink of its own accelerated implosion. There is nothing that linked this group together other than drugged-out indulgence and music.

“If you’ve got the money, honey, we got your disease.” The “disease” is drugs, at least in the initial logic of the video, but the disease develops into a projection of what the disease means in the larger context of the jungle: conformity and the end of individualism. The transaction of individuality in the face of conformity has destructive ends, the destruction that the street imposes on the protagonist, once William Bailey, now transformed into Axl Rose. This transformation is a destructive force, one of hedonistic indulgence and mindful consciousness of the destruction as its happening — an appetite for destruction. This appetite implies consumption, the consumption, a force of habit, the consequence of a transaction — “if you’ve got the money.”

This sets up a universalism to the paranoia and fear. It’s not one person subjecting another the monumentalism that comes with conformity, but the entire world transforming the individual against their will (will is used intentionally to make the connection once again to Nietzsche, it’s not a political will or the will of a nation, but the will of an individual that is curbed and conformed/transformed). This is a vulgar and middle class fear inherited from the hippies. The result is a William Bailey is then seen tied to a chair and subjected to the Ludovico technique from A Clockwork Orange. Images of terrorist plots, riots, news media, war, and fetishistic sexuality penetrate Bailey’s mind and transform him into the full glam rocker Axl Rose.

The reference to the 1971 Kubrick film (and 1962 Burgess book) completes the turn away from the sadism of the Glam dominance of the male-over-female, and back to the vulgar masochism of world-over-man. This, therefore, synthesizes the two opposing sides of Nietzsche’s erotic project: the foretelling of man’s struggle with the domination of man-over-woman, and the struggle of world-over-man in his attempt to know all. These two opposing struggles are both attempting to wrestle with the question: What if God is dead and Man becomes God? In this moral-less vacuum, Dionysus fills us with destructive impulses, a conformity to dogma, and romanticism for creation.

Guns N’ Roses was a return for Pop music to the middle class, outside the realm of cold eternal timeliness, and back to the realm of tacky high-production anti-punk, which appeared more in common with the hippies of the 60s and 70s than it did with the Glam and Hair bands of the 70s and 80s. They reflected a new horizon of musical accomplishments — longer tours, bigger gimmicks, larger record sales — but in other ways, they were at the end of History, and certainly at the zenith of rock music’s appeal to popular audiences. This was accomplished, not only by being music just for the working class, it was music for the working class looking towards a middle class. The suburban sprawl feared the jungle, and Axl voyeuristically commented on its reported back on its mechanical confines.

The band, and Rose himself, inhabits the space between the sexually charged city and the chaste middle class suburbs. There is a racial component to this spatial division, and the relative diversity of the band (racial, not sexual or gender diversity) produced the effect of democratization. Democratization of vulgarity, democratization of sexuality, democratization of who is being fucked by whom and for what reasons. The other — whether that’s a racial, immigration, sexual minority, or gender minority — is always being fucked by someone else, and Axl Rose, the “small town white boy,” has been transformed by its controlling panopticon and alienated by its spectacle. Rose taps into right wing middle-class grievances about the inner city and signals to working class vulgarity about authority and power to become Niezsche’s dumb and awakened Übermensch.

Are we still in love with this figure in popular culture? I would argue that we are, though the landscape has shifted to a more decentralized model for celebrity culture — relegated to the social media spheres and alternative media. However, we are, in many ways, living in the shadow of what Axl Rose has come to embody. We live in an era of dumb truth-tellers and mystical chauvinists like Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, or Jordan Peterson who all promote a message of radical individualism and self-determination in decentralized economic precarity. This type of individualism argues against collectivization and any structural influence that might have an effect on the individual — either positive or negative. By sticking the middle finger up at the aristocracy, these mystics wrapped in victimhood reinforce a new, renewed drive for exploitation, precarity, and economic inequality. These forces must be reckoned with if we are ever to imagine an alternative to capitalism.

Transformation and individual determinism are essential to capitalism’s grip on the entirety of our social fabric. The final scene of the video shows William Bailey is fully transformed into Axl Rose. He stands, with tons of hairspray, a tight fitted tee-shirt, leather pants, and arms full of tattoos now completely the product of the urban jungle and Hollywood Strip. Rose stares at a television shaking his head, wondering not what he had done to the world, but what the world had done to him. This shift of responsibility away from self-reflection and back towards a Dionysus worldliness spells a new age for pop and rock music as it lies plastic and deformed on its deathbed.