One person’s view: “‘Grunge killed hair metal!’ No, it didn’t. Shit like this did.” – TheBigWhatever @ Reddit
The public’s view: 2.18 / 5.00
Hair metal. The phrase evokes memories of a happier time when the sweet scent of freedom wafted through the air. Although hair metal is easy to mock, it has endured longer than most of the other music of the late 1980s. Miami freestyle and sophisti-pop came and went, and Stock-Aitken-Waterman survives only through Rickrolling, but grandmas everywhere are still banging their heads to “Pour Some Sugar on Me”. Nonetheless, the Danish-American hair band White Lion – which once played stadiums and sold millions of records – has not withstood the test of time. Its primary Facebook fan page has dwindled to only 3,100 followers. You are now 33 times more likely to encounter an endangered Bornean orangutan than you are to meet a White Lion fan.
White Lion doesn’t deserve its decline into obscurity. Vito Bratta’s guitar skills were universally praised and Mike Tramp’s singing drew comparisons to Jon Bon Jovi (though not always positive comparisons). All four members had hair worthy of a Silkience commercial, and in Tramp’s case, at least, that hair was layered on top of a powerful brain that could assemble thought-provoking lyrics. While the group’s peers were making music for strip clubs, White Lion was pontificating on social problems. Its biggest single, “When the Children Cry”, asked metalheads to stifle their partying for a few minutes and feign concern for the weighty issue of worldwide governance.
“When the Children Cry” proposes that all national boundaries be erased in a quest for unity and peace. It’s the hard rock equivalent of “Imagine”, but with little of the optimism that John Lennon brought to the endeavor. White Lion depicts the planet as a war-ravaged wasteland that will require a Herculean rebuilding effort by the next generation. Children are expected to somehow create a conflict-free utopia out of the ashes that their elders have left behind, right after they clean their rooms and do their homework and dry their crying eyes. No pressure.
You would never know it from the bleak imagery, but the song was released in the glasnost era in which peace was actually breaking out all over. Reagan and Gorbachev had long ago dropped their angry rhetoric and were exchanging love letters. More importantly, the Rock-and-Roller Cola Wars were finally cooling off after several years of violence. Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson agreed to amicably mediate their beverage differences and disarm the nuclear missiles that they had pointed at each other. White Lion doesn’t acknowledge these promising developments and the negotiators who brought them about. The band prefers to invest its hopes in the “little child” to whom the lyrics are addressed, but we have since discovered that the kids born in the 1980s are neither wiser nor more ethical than their parents and grandparents. I have yet to hear of anyone from that cohort becoming a great diplomat or humanitarian. The most capable millennials have instead dedicated their talents to Silicon Valley grifts and financial engineering schemes. The young lad (or lass) in the song probably grew up to launch a meme coin or create a dating app for white supremacists. He never had any interest in ending a cola war, as long as he wasn’t drafted to fight in it.
The most memorable line in “When the Children Cry” takes direct aim at the U.S. Constitution: “No more presidents.” Mike Tramp has said that he was thinking specifically of Ronald Reagan when he wrote this lyric. While I have made fun of Reagan many times myself, I question whether his presidency was disastrous enough to justify dismantling our entire republic. There was only so much damage that one befuddled old man could do to the country. (It isn’t like the American people would ever be stupid enough to vote for two senile octogenarians in a row.) Instead of just waiting out Reagan for another few months, White Lion implied that we should subjugate ourselves to an unelected global cabal of children. The solution seemed worse than the problem. If your elderly doctor started babbling about putting lasers in outer space to burn off that suspicious growth on your neck, you would quietly seek a second opinion. You wouldn’t blow up the hospital where he works and then hire a 9-year-old neighbor to give you a pocketknife surgery in his tree house.
“When the Children Cry” lands a little differently now that the world is finally becoming the hellscape that White Lion described. Maybe Mike Tramp was ahead of his time in some ways. However, the song’s expectations for the future sound just as naïve as ever. Does anyone think that the kids who lean on ChatGPT for every challenge will someday be capable of reopening the Strait of Hormuz or repairing the toxic U.S.-Canadian relationship? If you would like to immerse yourself in the politics (and snazzy guitar work) of White Lion, I instead recommend the pro-Greenpeace anthem “Little Fighter”. And if you’re going to a “No Kings” rally, I suggest leaving your “No More Presidents” sign at home.
My rating: 4 / 10