Heavy metal was supposedly apolitical, escapist. But was it? Some of it reveled in images of violence and the occult. Other offshoots—glam, the retroactively named “hair metal”—reveled in, well, revelry. It was about partying, nothin’ but a good time. Both represent different kinds of adolescent fantasies—but it was anything but apolitical, and there was plenty that was not a good time. In the same way in which literature is bound to its time period, the music under consideration in this book is a distinct product of the 1980s and the Cold War, as close readings of Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne, and Bon Jovi will attest. And, in the end, even escapism turned out to be political after all.
Breakin’ the Chains
In 1985, when I first fell in love with heavy metal, the only time I could hear it on the radio was once a week, at midnight, on a syndicated show called “Metal Shop”: “M-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-metal shop,” for those who know. The only place I could watch the videos was on the UHF3 station U68 and the occasional clip on the more mainstream, nationally broadcast “Friday Night Videos,” network TV’s attempt to be MTV, at least for an hour or so. Both were on late at night and became the first reasons for 13-year-old me to stay up late. No one had cable television yet in Brooklyn, New York. I wanted my MTV, but I couldn’t have it. This was also, obviously, pre-DVD, pre-DVR, pre-Internet, pre-streaming, pre-all-the-ways-people-watch-and-hear-anything now.
Decades later, in the 2000s, the cable station VH1, what I’d formerly thought of as the adult version of MTV, and not in the good way, started leaning heavily on metal, which I could have taken as a clue that I was now an adult. I didn’t. At least I had cable now: “Metal Mania,” “That Metal Show,” the multi-part documentary “Metal Evolution” by metal anthropologist Sam Dunn, the preponderance of Iron Maiden and Metallica and other documentary metal movies, and Megadeth and Mötley Crüe and more “Behind the Music” episodes.
And then, even more recently, with cable in its last throes, all those specials, and all of those music videos from the 1980s, became available, for instant, easy access, online. This was my chance to go back and re-watch them. And what I found, delightedly rifing through the thousand or so that made it onto MTV’s Headbangers Ball, surprised me, defying my memory. Metallica sang, “Te memory remains,” in a different context. But does it? Nothing. But: A Good Time?
A huge number of the 1980s metal videos, it turns out, featured futuristic, post-apocalyptic sets reminiscent of The Road Warrior and Escape From NewYork. Dust, battle-scarred ground, burned-out cityscapes. Ripped clothes, leather, and boots—on the bands, and on the women who, inevitably, surround them—are somehow right at home in this desolate environment. Sometimes, these wastelands were accompanied by laser guns and robotics. My favorite is Queensrÿche’s “Queen of the Reich” video, which even opens with a Star-Wars-like crawl, something about a crystal, a queen, a computer, and “five freedom fighters.” The video introduces the band members by name as they rock on, even while they fight the queen in a dystopian, or maybe outer-space, future. Her face is covered with a visor like Cyclops from the X-Men. Most of her body is not covered with much of anything.
At other times, they were throwbacks, with faux-Renaissance Faire swords and scepters—where the only remnants of the present-day to survive are guitars, and, fortunately, hairspray. Like the Queensrÿche video, “Screaming in the Night” by Krokus has some kind of fantasy plot, also involving women whose faces are covered, plus an amalgam of pyramids, lightning, dungeons, fags, and singer Marc Storace in a loincloth.
Some videos seemed both in the future and the past, yet somehow neither, like Dio’s “Last in Line,” another mini-movie starring the kid from the popular-at-the-time TV series “Voyagers,” riding a cursed elevator to the underworld. This version is a dystopian combination of ancient Egypt, replete with slaves, along with a scary cyborg and video games that electrocute the losing players.
Kiss, in their big make-up-of reveal video, decided to make “Lick It Up” the one-stop-shopping for dystopia: junked out cars, dirty puddles, women emerging from manholes with amazing ’80s curls intact, women washing manhole covers for some reason. The street is littered with human skulls as the band, their faces still concealed, strut by in excellent boots given the economic circumstances. The guys sing; the girls jump; fires burn everywhere. Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” is similar—more fires, more masks—but with big cats, bigger cages, and better editing.
Welcome (back) to the 1980s. The collective memory and retrospectives have turned the era into a neon-hued, pink party-palooza, bright and bubbly, festooned with tiger stripes and red bandannas. And there is some truth to those images—the effervescent Van Halen, in the early ’80s, and the fringe-jacketed, acid-washed denim of Bon Jovi, a little later, both of whom I’ll discuss in this chapter. But along with the fun, flying high-wire acts in both the “Panama” and “Livin’ on a Prayer” videos, the endgame of the Cold War created a backdrop for thinking about the end of the world, and The Day After. That TV movie, from 1983, was one of many Gen X childhood media traumas, showing kids not just the horror of a nuclear strike—almost everyone will die—but something worse: what happens to those who survive. At the box office, we could choose from WarGames (1983), Red Dawn (1984), The Hunt for Red October (a little later, 1990), Mad Max (1979) and its sequel, The Road Warrior (1981), and Escape from New York (also 1981).
On the news, live every morning and twice in the evening—and to kids, it seemed all adults were watching—a litany of new domestic horrors was entering the cultural lexicon: crack cocaine and the War on Drugs; HIV and AIDS; eating disorders and McDonald’s’ introduction of Supersizing; the worst decade for American cars and drive-by shootings. As Stranger Things chronicles, in its look back on ’80s media, American parents become obsessed with missing and kidnapped children after several high-profle incidents. The famous milk carton kids were introduced, and “stranger danger” became integrated into public education.
It’s easy to poke fun now, but these early metal videos helped convey Cold War fears, a kind of trickle-down dystopia to match the idea of trickle-down economics taking hold in the Reagan administration. Kids and teens had no control over what they saw on the news, and these videos chronicled the pervasive sense of danger. But it was more than fear.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Sigmund Freud wrote that, in dreams, wishes and fears can be intertwined, related to or even flip sides of each other. And so, along with the fears—of disaster, of the end, of powerlessness—these videos represented wishes as well. REM was singing about the end of the world as we know it at the same time, in 1987, but that was irony, not metal. Let college rock feel fine about the end of the world as we know it. To metal bands and fans, the apocalypse would be awesome. No rules, no clothes, and guitars everywhere.
Crucially, the videos mentioned above, and many more, also featured some kind of bondage: chains for Krokus and the gamers in Dio’s underworld; a big cage for Scorpions, although it’s hard to tell whether it’s keeping them in or the girls out; turning to stone, or something, for Queensrÿche; and other imprisonment scenarios. Sometimes women in strategically ripped clothing are detained as well. Yes, Def Leppard’s “Photograph” video director David Mallet said facetiously, “Why did I put the girls in a cage? Girls belong in cages, come on.” But more often, it was the band members themselves restrained or incarcerated. The members of Dokken are chained in a fiery dungeon in, not surprisingly, “Breakin’ the Chains.” Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott is quasi-crucifed, in chains, on a triangle(?), with morefire, in “Foolin’,” not to mention something that looks closer to an actual crucifixion, on a cross, but with chains, in “Bringin’ On the Heartbreak.” Metallica’s imagery featured electric chairs and hospital beds. Quiet Riot’s Kevin DuBrow is locked in an iron mask, locked further in a padded cell. Everyone is trapped, confined, restricted, or in somebody else’s power.
From a narrative perspective, these scenarios represent the oldest and most reliable story of all time, the master plot of master plots: tension, then release. Conflict, then resolution. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud describes the child’s game of throwing an object out of sight—tension—and the joy of its return—release—in an imitation, or even rehearsal, of the mother herself leaving and returning. Fort and Da, in German—”Gone!” and “Tere!” In three- to four-minute music videos, viewers get the full narrative ride of rising action, climax, and denouement. Paradise lost, Paradise regained. Gone, there. By the end, usually, the band—or the kid from Voyagers—breaks free. (The girls in cages aren’t usually so lucky.) Dokken let us know it would work out in their song title. And while Marc Storace doesn’t look like he’s having much fun, Kiss certainly does. Chains are meant to be broken. Gone, there. Trapped, freed. But first, someone needs to be tied up or tied down.
There were some now-obvious (but at the time, to me, anyway, entirely unrecognized) fetishes at work. At least, they were obvious to the Parents Music Resource Center, who seemed disturbed by the imagery: Tipper Gore objected to what she called “bondage” in Twisted Sister’s “Under the Blade” (more on that coming up), even as it seemed to be one of the few videos that didn’t actually display bondage. But she was not concerned by the underlying problem of powerlessness that the imagery implied, only its surface-level appearance. For me, these emotional metaphors trump the sexual ones. In retrospect, there is the inescapable sense of the inescapable, despite the fact that the bands—and many of the fans, including me—were white, straight, male, irresponsible in the best sense, and at the height of youth, strength, and beauty. Yet in the metal videos, all anyone felt were the metal restraints. All they saw were the bars of their metal cages.
The images can seem kitschy now, and Dokken and many of the artists feel sheepish about them, but at the time, I, and millions of others, identified with the music in a visceral, animal way. Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran said, “I don’t think videos have to make sense. They only have to be really cool-looking.” They are cool-looking. Many are playful, especially given how grim these descriptions sound in print. But they were much more than cool-looking, and they made Freudian and artistic sense—not literal sense as much as literary sense, symbolic sense. These pop apocalypses, and all the chains and cages, make these videos into pop art and historical artifacts of the Cold War, when this supposedly escapist entertainment was busy depicting the opposite of escape: confinement. The prospect of dystopia and detention was pervasive. In their loving parody decades later, in 2014, Steel Panther sum up the ethos most clearly in their song, “Party Like Tomorrow is the End of the World.” The videos were ultimately not ridiculous at all—they were impressionistic and surreal artistic renderings of what it felt like to be a certain teen at a certain time. In keeping with the breakin’ the chains imagery, the videos were a release, a catharsis, a defiance of power, and a relief from pain and powerlessness. Prometheus unbound—there, then gone, in the mythological imagery and Percy Shelley poem of the same name.
What more can we ask of art?
Like the videos, the term “heavy metal” can be understood here in a Cold War context. After all, the phrase appeared in Beat writer William Burroughs’s novel The Soft Machine (1961), published the same year as the Bay of Pigs invasion. “Heavy metal” wasn’t a musical coinage, not yet. That would come later in Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” and “heavy metal thunder,” although it seems to refer to motorcycles, not music. In The Soft Machine, the term suggests drugs—not surprising, from the author of Junky: “What we call opium or junk is a very much diluted form of heavy metal addiction.” But the novel is too strange, too elusive, to take a single line at face value. With Burroughs, “heavy metal” as a drug extrapolates outwardly from the real danger of poisoning by actual heavy metals. But it also seems like more.
One of those heavy metals from the Periodic Table, uranium (or an isotope, specifically uranium-235), also powered the atomic bomb and fueled the entire atomic age. Burroughs uses “Heavy Metal” most frequently in conjunction with the character “Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid,” and the other “blue heavy metal boys.” They seem to be aliens whose bodies stand in contrast to Earthlings’ softness—hence the book’s title, which refers to the human body. “Uranian”—as in, from the planet Uranus, the god of the underworld for which uranium is also named. Heavy metal, literature, and the Cold War were bonded from the beginning.
The Soft Machine is arguably the grandfather of these post-apocalyptic heavy metal videos. (The parents are Escape from New York and The Road Warrior.). In keeping with videos’ frequent camera cuts, the novel was written using the avant-garde cut-up technique, borrowed from the great-grandfather of videos, the Dadaist movement. Here, the author or artist isn’t writing as much as assembling and reassembling text from other texts that have literally been cut up. The result is a dystopian novel in sensibility, with some recognizable elements of science fiction and pulp fiction, but imagistic and weird, with an uncertain and fragmented narrative—much like those Road Warrior-inspired videos. Here, for example, is the paragraph that refers to heavy metal the most frequently. It’s easy to see why readers associated the novel with drugs, even aside from actual drug references. It’s not about making sense as much as it is about conveying the strangeness of the moment:
“Citizens of Gravity we are converting all out to Heavy Metal. Carbonic Plague of the Vegetable People threatens our Heavy Metal State. Report to your nearest Plating Station. It’s fun to be plated,” says this well-known radio and TV personality who is now engraved forever in gags of metal. “Do not believe the calumny that our metal fallout will turn the planet into a slag heap. And in any case, is that worse than a compost heap? Heavy Metal is our program and we are prepared to sink through it . . .”
Despite the novel’s fear of a slag-heap planet and the Cuban Missile Crisis just the year after The Soft Machine was published, the world didn’t end in the 1960s. And despite popular culture and the Cold War seeming to suggest otherwise, the world didn’t end in the 1980s either. For metal fans, and maybe William Burroughs, something more surprising happened: it went on. But how did it get to that point? Some metal bands were acutely aware of the Cold War, like the aptly named Nuclear Assault, the equally aptly named Megadeth, and, of course, Metallica, among others. Even Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” video opens with an image of a newspaper headline declaring “A Nuclear Accident” before becoming a version of Firestarter, the 1981 Stephen King novel released as a film in the same year as the video, in 1984. And yet, the many memoirs, biographies, and oral histories eschew this social context. It’s understandable. Social context is for literature. So let’s get literary.
Excerpt courtesy of Bloomsbury (footnotes omitted). Copyright ©Jesse Kavadlo, 2026. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be: i) reproduced or transmitted in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by means of any information storage or retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the publishers; or ii) used or reproduced in any way for the training, development or operation of artifcial intelligence (AI) technologies, including generative AI technologies. The rights holders expressly reserve this publication from the text and data mining exception as per Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive (EU) 2019/790.