The author engages in plenty of sociologizing and philosophizing as he takes an amiable, booze-soaked ramble through the genre, listing favorite albums and musing on the merits of big-hair bands like Cinderella and Whitesnake and the relative status of guitarists like Eddie Van Halen-who regularly earns top honors in magazine lists of the greatest guitar players of all time. Characterized by a “beautiful combination of virtuosity and imbecility,” 1980s-era heavy metal was guaranteed to polarize critics hated it, but the kids (who lived and breathed for albums like Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil and Ozzy Osborne’s Diary of a Madman) were as confident of the righteousness of their cause as was any old-hippie fan of the Grateful Dead or the Beatles. For Klosterman and a few of his beer-chugging pals, that music was heavy metal: the guaranteed-to-drive-parents-insane, bottom-heavy fuel of the rural dispossessed. Klosterman, now a music critic for the Akron Beacon Journal, grew up in a farm town in North Dakota whose 500 residents included dozens of teenagers who categorized themselves on the basis of the music they liked. A witty journey into the demimonde of 1980s heavy-metal music by way of the High Plains.
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