Generation Swine

I never really dug Motley Crue. I was aware of them, thanks to MTV’s saturation (well in full swing already) and kids at my school who were freshmen when I was a sophomore. As I observed in art class, they were often unabashed Crue fanatics. But for whatever reason, the appeal of Motley Crue completely passed me by. Maybe I wasn’t part of the proper generation.

Years later, in 1997, I Nineties nineties nineties the nineties, by which I mean I was working in a Media Play’s CD department as a glorified stockboy. This was the time during which I consumed so much of the now-extinct 90’s soft drink SURGE that a sore the size of a dime opened up at the back of my throat, and where I learned to channel my anger by discreetly smashing merchandise with a rubber mallet. Much of the Media Play era has been depicted in Bands I Useta Like strips, like the Squirrel Nut Zippers one. There’s still enough left to fill a book on its own.

Media Play even came to install “listening stations”- diabolical contraptions that required employees to rip open and play any CD a customer requested- the #1 reason I’d defected from Blockbuster Music (aside from resultant donnybrooks with said customers). Get a load of this: at Blockbuster, the corporate mandate was that you had to open and play as many CDs as a customer requested, them being always right and all. I guess the idea was that customers would immediately fall in love with the music, pull out their wallet and buy.

In reality, any asshole could (and would) sweep up an armload of rap CDs, stride over to the listening bar, and demand that each one be opened while they kill their lunch hour before leaving, purchasing nothing. During shifts where one was working alone, this was an excellent way for shoplifters to go bananas. And the CDs that were torn from their factory-applied shrink wrap, but not bought? We were issued special gum-lipped baggies to place them in, before clacking them back into their plastic anti-theft shells and placing them back on the shelves. Sporting their original mid-1990s price of $17.99, of course. Can you believe Blockbuster went out of business?

This practice was so abhorrent, so ludicrous, yet god forbid management caught us bitching about it in the back room. We were made to put on a happy face through it all, just like a couple of years earlier, when they made us tear open every single CD that came packed in a cardboard “longbox”, the original way compact discs were sold. Then we were told to commit the astonishing ecological sin of hurling all that cardboard and shrink wrap into the trash dumpster. This was the first appearance of the gum-lipped baggies, which fit the “jewel box” about as snugly as wet toast in an off-brand Ziploc.

This was one of the numerous reasons I jumped the Blockbuster ship for a lesser position at Media Play. As a bonus, they stocked candy and soda (like the aforementioned Surge, and the mythical literally-ball-gargling Orbitz), two major staples of my diet as a twenty-something. During this Media Play era, I bore witness to many debacles of marketing that I now recognize as hilariously ironic.

In 1997, Motley Crue released a new album. It initially came with a special soda, branded “Motley Brue”. We received a case of them, and the instructions were to give one away to each customer who bought the new Motley Crue album. I correctly predicted that no one would buy the album, and popped the cap off a bottle with an obligatory “OOPS” gesture so I could sample it.

It tasted like Blue Dye #1 and pickle juice.

The label said “Carbonated Drink”. It was clearly carbonated, so at least half of that was true. But no one would voluntarily drink this. We actually debated amongst ourselves whether it was a drink at all, or purely a display piece never intended for human consumption. It had ingredients listed, as you can see in the picture. But the taste was so acrid I still remember it almost twenty years later- like something kids would mix from stuff in the fridge to drink on a dare.

Motley Crue reminds me of that taste, and of the smell of that awful swill, too. They remind me of the contempt-filled Generation Swine “pig” logo, and the irony of Vince Neil’s increasingly swinish appearance on VH1. They remind me of the Tragedy of Pamela Anderson Lee, and the most boring sex tape in the universe. They don’t remind me of any good songs.

I did get a call from Tommy Lee a few years ago though.