A Time Before Nirvana

Every rose has its thorn, just like every night has its dawn. Just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song....

I was in the Government Center T station, racing to catch a blue line train to the airport on my way home for Christmas break, when I caught these few lyrics of Poison's classic 1988 power ballad. I hadn't heard the song in at least five years, and memories of the turn of the decade came flooding back--memories of the transition from the carefree days of elementary school to the real world of junior high, from the trusty '80s to the blank slate of the '90s.

It's unlikely history will forget the period, thanks to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf War. But in music, you'd think there was a jump from the upbeat Top 40 of Reagan's America--epitomized in Madonna's "Material Girl" (1984)--to the brooding alternative explosion of Clinton's '90s, marked by Nirvana's breakthrough hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (1991). In making that leap you'd skip both the George Bush years and the apex of a key musical genre: the power ballad.

The power ballad of the late '80s was a creation of arena rock. In large, suburban arenas, so-called "hair metal" bands would take the stage amid lights and mist and hordes of adoring fans waving lighters. But though it may have been linked with the arena, the power ballad came through just fine on the car radio or on the boom box at the beach. The power ballad relied on strong, clear vocals, on lyrics that were simple and trite but always direct and plainly emotional, on the electric guitar and, most of all, on sheer volume. This wasn't the kind of music you'd hear in an elevator or in a smoky club in a college town. This was music that demanded your attention, that drew you in, that was at home only when listened to by thousands simultaneously. These were big songs.

Yet, though they were big, they weren't scary. You didn't need to be a tattooed 16-year-old with long, stringy hair living in central New Jersey to like them. These songs were loud but not threatening, performed by bands with names like Journey, not Megadeth. They were about finding love, mending relationships and, in Bon Jovi's words, keeping the faith. Most importantly, you'd see them on the charts and hear them on Top 40 radio. For a short time, this convergence of pop and metal was America's music.

The power ballad emerged out of the male rock of the '70s, from the heavy metal of Alice Cooper to the classic rock of Styx. The first power ballads to make it big in the '80s were hits like "Faithfully" (1983) by the five-man band Journey. But the genre didn't gain mass-market success until the mid-'80s. In 1985, REO Speedwagon recorded the classic "Can't Fight This Feeling." In 1986, Bon Jovi--with their big hair, rugged but soft looks and ordinary-guy sensibility--hit No. 1 with "Livin' on a Prayer." And a year later, Starship hit the top of the charts with the melodic "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now."

In 1988, old hands Cheap Trick came out with "The Flame," which soared to No. 1; Chicago topped the charts with "Look Away" and Bon Jovi was back with assertive hits like "I'll Be There for You." Meanwhile, Guns N' Roses added some sin to the power ballad with the more violent "Sweet Child O' Mine" though keeping the music loud and clear. In 1989, Bad English, led by a former Journey member, gave us the masterful "When I See You Smile," and Roxette released the shallow yet potent "Listen to Your Heart."

The last big year for the power ballad was 1990, when big-haired Warrant hit it big with the brash "Cherry Pie"; Poison returned with the sadder "Something to Believe In"; Heart, one of few female bands in the power ballad business, released "Stranded"; Ted Nugent's Damn Yankees proved they had the genre down with the top 10 hit "High Enough"; Winger's second album sold millions on the strength of the forgotten "Miles Away," and the Nelson twins teamed up to bring us "Love and Affection" and "After the Rain."

Yet just as soon as Bush's popularity dove with the post-war recession of the early '90s, so too did arena rock fall off the map. Nirvana stormed the music scene in 1991, bringing Seattle grunge to the rest of the country and making alternative suddenly mainstream. By 1993, Winger, Damn Yankees and Bad English had disbanded, and Warrant, Poison and Nelson had fallen off the map entirely. Pushing them aside were bands like Pearl Jam, the Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden and the Smashing Pumpkins, turning the airwaves from a place of possibility and power--where our average triumphs were transformed into something greater--into one of alienation and anger. As Ann Powers put it in a Feb. 1 article in The New York Times, "Arena rockers gave their male working-class fans a way to believe in themselves when others degraded them; today's alternative rockers express the doubts of young middle-class men about the power they inherit."

Powers has it only partly right. Some of us young middle-class males could surely share Nirvana's frustrations; being 15 only made the alternative explosion more relevant. But at the same time, arena rock had held out the possibility of transcendence--of rising above confusion and bleakness to a more emotionally simple plane. Its disappearance was thus as much a loss for us as for the working-class men who identified with Jon Bon Jovi.

The biggest problem with Powers' analysis of the power ballad, however, is that she thinks it is still alive, in the form of recent songs such as The Verve's "The Freshmen," Matchbox 20's "Push" and the Ben Folds Five's "Brick." Powers writes: "Recently...the meaning of the power ballad has changed as the age of heroes gives way to more conflicted protagonists." But these mid-'90s songs do not belong in the same category as the ballads of the turn-of-the-decade. In content, they are too angst-ridden, too mad, too sad to fly as the power ballad must. In style, they are too soft, too cloying and too repetitive to claim a place in music history--in short, they are too small to be power ballads.

A few older bands did manage to outlive the alternative craze. Aerosmith's "Crazy," "Cryin''' and "Amazing" (1993) may be more remembered for featuring Alicia Silverstone in their videos, but these hits also kept the power ballad alive in the '90s. The soaring melody and shamelessly hackneyed lyrics of Bon Jovi's 1994 hit "Always" made it one of the most perfect power ballads ever. And in 1995, Van Halen chipped in with the confident "Can't Stop Lovin' You." Still, with Steven Tyler headed for membership in the American Association of Retired Persons and with Jon Bon Jovi headed nowhere, given his quiet 1997 solo single "Midnight in Chelsea," arena rock is rapidly nearing extinction. In its absence--if recent Grammy Awards are any indication--we face pop airwaves dominated by the mushy background music of Jewel, Celine Dion, Hootie and the Blowfish, Shawn Colvin and Paula Cole.

The power ballads of the late '80s and early '90s were too full of life to die so suddenly. Yet it's not only a shame in the musical sense that arena rock is near-dead. Every other musical genre of the last 50 years seems to have its place on the radio today. But those of us who did some major growing up in this period must now rely on the tunes in our head or on our dusty tape collections to bring back those bus rides to camp when we sang along to "Paradise City," or those hours camped out in our rooms with "Bad Medicine" blaring. For those of us who were just tuning in for real when arena rock hit it big, our memory is missing its soundtrack.

Geoffrey C. Upton '99 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.