Hard Rock has long been obsessed with hard-ons––so much so that it’s tough to tell the difference sometimes between the raunchy and the ridiculous, the shocking and the silly. Indeed, as David St. Hubbins observes in the glam metal mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, “It’s such a fine line between stupid, and uh … clever.” For the rest of us, such crotch-centric anthems as Aerosmith’s “Big Ten Inch Record,” AC/DC’s “Big Balls,” or Kiss’s “Love Gun” are rarely subtle and usually humorous—whether they’re going for laughs or not. In 1978 Angela McRobbie and Simon Frith defined so-called “Cock Rock” as a form of music whose “performance is an explicit, crude and often aggressive expression of male sexuality.” Of course, Chuck Klosterman argues as late as 2001 that “cock rock” is “one of the many negative synonyms for ’80s metal … thrown around whenever someone wants to attack any masculine genre of music”—even if that means defending such tracks as Vinnie Vincent Invasion’s “Shoot U Full of Love,” W.A.S.P.’s “Shoot from the Hip,” or Dangerous Toys’ “Sport’n a Woody,” among dozens of similarly graphic and gratuitous (and goofy) songs. This presentation will explore the sexy/sexist paradox built into the self-fashioning and marketing of Cock Rock that was responsible for its popularity, as well as its ultimate obsolescence.
About the presenterMichael Stamps
Michael Stamps teaches writing and literature at Delaware Valley University in Doylestown, PA. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he specialized in Renaissance Literature. His pop culture research interests include gender/sexuality in film, horror films, and heavy metal music.