He's so sozzled that we keep thinking the next sentence will be interrupted by an eruption of vomit. In the film’s most notorious scene, Spheeris interviews Chris Holmes, of the more recently popular W.A.S.P., as he floats on an inflatable chair in his pool. “Do you have a more stable life now?” Spheeris asks Osbourne. There, he soberly discusses the drug-induced burnout he and his fellow Black Sabbathers experienced after their initial rise, and how they still haven't finished recovering. (He analogizes the progression of one’s music career to masturbation: if you try to keep up with what you were doing when you were young and eager when you’re middle-aged, you’re going to find yourself worn out.) Spiky-haired Osbourne, bustling about with his body cloaked in a silky cheetah-print bathrobe, cooks up scrambled eggs and bacon in a kitchen later revealed not to be his. Perry and Tyler, visibly worn out, chalk up their recent comeback to a need for money - most of which, Tyler says, had gone up his nose. “Established” artists are notionally featured in The Metal Years to show the toll an extravagant rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle can take on the incautious. The sense one gets, watching many of the subjects included in The Metal Years, is that in this milieu, the sexism and varying degrees of exploitation long rampant in disparate rock-music scenes were exceptionally noisy and troubling when related to glam metal. Almost the whole of the time spent with the band London, which is best known for acting as a launching pad for musicians who would go on to bigger and better things, is overloaded with over-the-top misogyny so casual it astounds. (A method that seems to have worked: audiences there sometimes resemble a lingerie fashion show's afterparty.) Before introducing an act one night, said manager encourages female attendees to flash the stage. An owner of a popular venue proudly reveals that he purposely turns its air conditioning off so that women patrons take off their clothes. Groupies as if they were one and the same as accent pillows he seems caught off guard when Spheeris asks questions tacitly seeking to humanize them. (The latter make an appearance in the documentary, and are one of the few acts to come off well.) Then arrived the grunge music that would become unexpectedly ubiquitous in the early 1990s, as embodied by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, among others. First came the acrobatic thrash metal perfected in the late-1980s by acts like Metallica and Megadeth. The music style would soon enough (perhaps inevitably, given its overexcited and as such foredoomed fixation on excess) be swallowed. The second is noted for being so effectively damning of the subgenre’s acts that many claim it was among the primary forces kickstarting the American consumer’s disillusionment with hair metal. The first entry in the Decline series is widely agreed to have helped buttress the rises of most of its stars. Their music and attitudes, from the vantage point of the feature, are almost interchangeable. It’s the hedonism they’ve taken after most. The progeny seen in the L.A.-set film - among them a mixture of semi-established acts (Faster Pussycat, W.A.S.P.) and unsigned groups (London, Seduce) - seem not to have ingested any of the musicality of any of those people. Though featuring interviews with metal bigwigs like Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath, and Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, it's mostly focused on the rising glam-metal figures they’ve influenced. Our skepticism concurrently lingered.Ī “sequel” to the movie, 1988’s The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, which is also directed by Spheeris, in contrast mostly arouses skepticism, if not outright disdain. Provocation, are not romanticized, but the warts-and-all documentary ultimately mostly flattered the punk personae and artistry of its subjects.
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