The 8 Ball 01.09.12: The Top 8 Shock Rockers

Posted by Wyatt E. on 01.09.2012

From Ozzy Osbourne and Marilyn Manson to the Sex Pistols, Rammstein and more, 411's Wyatt E. takes a look at the top 8 shock rockers of all time!

Whattado, everybody!

Normally, I'm not too concerned with my content. I swear. I make filthy jokes. I imply terrible things about famous people, my mental state, my own self-esteem. I have never felt the need to do this. However, I do have some friends that may feel a little uneasy at some of the content here. So, with that in mind.....

NOTE: The following column may be disturbing, even triggering. Discretion is advised.

The 8 Ball

This Week's Topic: Top 8 Shock Rockers.

It's a common feeling amongst more exuberant fans of rock music - of most eras - that what makes rock & roll so... well, rock & roll, is its feeling of rebellion and challenge. So when some artists say they want to bring the genre "back to its roots" they usually go more than simply retro. They choose to carry an element of danger to their presentation, because after all, true art is rebellious right? Stick it to the man, right? Well, today we take a special look at those people who have taken this direction to its logical conclusions - the guys (it's usually guys) who like nothing better than to freak the living shit out of us, the hapless viewer.



You kids think Lady Gaga is scandalous? Yeah, if you're eight years old. We're talking stuff that would make the Catholic church's collective skull rupture. I'm not even talking about bands that have committed isolated acts, like when that chick from L7 threw her used tampon into a crowd (which was, admittedly, a level of disgusting I have to admire), or the Prodigy's infamous "Smack My Bitch Up" video. I mean artists that have consistently unnerved us, repulsed us and generally freaked us the hell out. The kind of folks that briefly rattle your sense of human decency. That's what I'm talking about.

I must admit that compiling this particular list was a bit tricky. Who is more shocking than whom? And should who came before whom be an issue? How about long-term impact in general? It was awfully tricky to balance these factors, but I'm pretty confident in how it turned out.

Please note that this is shock rock. So NWA, Madonna, Gaga and Eminem don't count.

Honorable Mentions:

Ack. There was a lot of candidates here, and I didn't want to make a multiple-week list out of it. So here's just a few other names I considered: Rob Zombie, The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Nashville Pussy, The Doors, The Residents, Dayglo Abortions, Anal Cunt, The Plasmatics, The Mentors, Mindless Self Indulgence, The Germs, The Dwarves, Cannibal Corpse, Gwar.

8. Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

The OG of shock rock; this guy was a lock for this list just by testing the waters in the 1950s. Jalacy Hawkins, as he was known by his family, originally envisioned himself as an opera singer, but switched to blues, maybe since he didn't fit the refined poise that opera singers are known for. By the time he made the switch, blues had taken a much more lively turn; certainly artists like Muddy Waters brought out the inherent sexuality and raw power of the form. And then, there was Screamin' Jay, whose friends got him absolutely shitfaced drunk and let him loose to record... well, you know the song. It's his calling card to this day.



God, listen to him. It's hard to believe he envisioned "I Put A Spell On You" as a straight-faced ballad, because with the resulting vocal, he pushes every last lecherous theme to the surface. It should be noted once again that this guy emerged in the 1950s. Elvis' hips and Jerry Lee's come-ons were scaring enough parents, who certainly didn't need a guy with a stage act presenting him as a voodoo master, complete with a smoking skull and a bone through his nose complete with SPEAKING IN TONGUES. Oh, that probably didn't go over well. By the way, Jay would achieve some more notoriety posthumously, with a website devoted to finding all 75 of his illegitimate children. I'm not kidding.



7. Rammstein.

Yeah, I'll relish any chance to spotlight these guys. Rammstein? Shocking? Oh, let's take a look. Gratuitous shirtlessness? Check. Creepy fashion sense? Bondage gear galore. Banned video? "Pussy" is essentially a porno set to German metal. Frightening image? People still think they're all Nazis. Dark imagery? Not only did they name the band after an air show disaster, but they have songs about brother/brother incest, cannibalism, rape, necrophilia and, most recently, sadomasochism. The over-the-top live show? Okay, that's gonna need the second paragraph to do full justice.



Ah, there we go. Rammstein are masters of spectacle. Obviously, since they speak almost entirely German, they feel the need to up the ante on the visuals, which are universal. As such, they pack all performances - repeat, all performances - with enough fire to make Beavis splooge in his pants. The lead singer has even lit himself on fire specifically for a song the band named after themselves. And of course, I included the song about cannibalism as a fine showcase. On top of all this, they're probably the most sonically powerful band on the list, which can only count for bonus points if you ask me. They don't sound like the sinister snake here to disrupt the Garden of Eden. They sound like an army of winged demons here to enslave the human race.



6. Ozzy Osbourne.

The classic shock rocker. I mean, the guy bit the head off a dove. A DOVE. You don't think he's gonna show up here? Ozzy's scary monster face has earned him millions, as well as a reality show that promptly made him a few more (as well as completely dissecting his former image down to nothing). Thanks to exorbitant amounts of drug intake and alcoholism, which threatened his life as well as his relationships with most other people, Ozzy by all rights should have died in the 1980s, and yet to this day he survives just to make sure Keith Richards doesn't get a big head about things.



Ozzy courted a tremendous amount of controversy thanks to accusations of his music containing Satanism (and what's so wrong with Satanism, anyway?) and suggestions of suicide (actually born out of a misinterpretation of the song "Suicide Solution" which is as provocative a title as 80s metal could offer). Come to think of it, Judas Priest had similar problems, but a guy like Ozzy is the kind of guy who feeds off this kind of attention, and he had many years as the resident antichrist of rock music until his career cooled down a bit in the 90s. Even if the blueprint of a demonic figure in hard rock wasn't originated by Ozzy, he's the one who kept the tradition alive for his generation, and a couple afterward, as a matter of fact.



5. Marilyn Manson.

Oh sure, you make fun of him now. Go on, laugh. Okay, now stop, it's getting weird. But for a period of time in music history, dark satirist Marilyn Manson had media by the ballsack, scaring the everloving dog shit out of religious zealots of all shapes and sizes. Hey, what better place to attack American ideals than through religion? Mr. Manson (and let's face it, we're talking about the man, not the self-titled band) was really good at it, too, stealing Christian imagery, juxtaposing it with references to American media and twisting it around into something really creepy. It wasn't very long before angry phone calls from parents turned into angry protests outside his concerts. Of course, most infamously, the Columbine massacre was pretty much dumped in his lap (for some reason), but his many controversies, particularly the resulting interviews, have shown him to be a surprisingly articulate man capable of giving thought-provoking arguments.



The man's videos were something to see as well. One video, based on the short story "The Lottery," ends with Manson allowing himself to be stoned to death. In another, he's some kind of intersexed alien. Another is Manson's own patented rendition of the Kennedy assassination. One from 2003 saw him snorting coke off of a Bible. For some time, Manson kept audiences in a stunned awe with what he could get away with, but once Eminem set a new standard in the rap world, his star never shined quite as brightly again. It was all downhill from there. (I actually saw him in concert in 2009, and while his band was game, he spent most of the set drinking heavily, and it showed in a, uh, let's say rather unfortunate vocal performance.)



4. Alice Cooper.

"Why do we always have rock heroes? Why not a rock villain? I was more than happy to be rock's Darth Vader. I was more than happy to be Captain Hook."

In the 1970s, Alice Cooper set a brand new standard for freaky rock hijinks. Ghoulish presence? Honey, please. This guy was the boogeyman of rock at the time (the mythical figure, not the bad wrestler with the awesome gimmick). It wasn't so much the songs he sang, although they were good, primal rock and roll songs. It was how he put it across; adorned with dark makeup and costumes straight out of early horror movies, Alice made the archetypical rock concert into what Alex would call a "real horrorshow." Armed with guillotines, electric chairs, boa constrictors, baby dolls being executed by axe, daggers and much more, Alice wasn't there to be a good role model; he was the strutting, living, breathing incarnation of your parents' worst fears. In a way, it began by accident: a live chicken had found its way on stage during a Toronto show, and, not knowing chickens couldn't fly, Alice tossed it over the crowd, who proceeded to make that chicken not so live anymore. (And, of course, you know how tabloids can exaggerate things).



He was never a great vocalist, preferring to bleat out his vocals with a gravely snarl, which also grants you bonus points in my book. That's not even mentioning his twisted tales of lust, death, monsters, or in one case, necrophilia (all the best rockers sing about having the hots for the hereafter). To say that Alice's approach ruffled a few feathers would be a major understatement. Members of British Parliament made efforts to get Alice permanently banned from the country. Protesters came from far and wide to decry his behavior, with accusations of sex, violence and animal cruelty. All that good stuff. So why isn't Alice, who defines shock rock as well as anyone else, a little higher? Because I'll never forgive him for helping Kip Winger get famous.



3. Iggy Pop.

"We did really well with social deviants, high school dropouts, people with lousy jobs, alcoholics, drug addicts; we did great."

As a fan of the Stooges' early stuff, I would be heavily remiss if I didn't make a spot for Mr. Pop. In his prime, Iggy was a dangerous little man. For one, he was the first guy to do a stage dive, but he wouldn't stop there. He would expose his penis to audiences (would-be groupies would plant kisses on it), vomit, smear peanut butter all over himself and throw it at people, rub baby oil mixed with glitter all over his arms, and generally do everything in his power to antagonize crowds. By the way, did Iggy ever wear a shirt? The man rolled around on glass almost nightly. You may as well have given Sabu a microphone.



In one infamous incident in Detroit, Iggy spent a confrontational evening with an audience of bikers, who didn't cotton to his style of performance, and many beer bottles were thrown until Iggy ended the set abruptly by getting into a brawl (and this wound up spawning a live album). Midway through his original run with the Stooges, it was obvious that the band had become more or less a vehicle to get their hands on hard drugs, and when the thrill wasn't enough there, he resorted to bloodying his own chest. Iggy will look you in the eye to this day and say he regrets nothing he did on stage, which is a testament to what kind of a showman he is.




2. GG Allin.

The rock & roll terrorist. The highest power. The sickest rocker of all time. Quite the lofty titles, and GG Allin went out of his way to earn them all, with unquestionably the most psychotic, scatological stage show in rock history. Starting off as an oafish, snotty punk asshole, his mental instability (rumored to have been triggered by use of acid in his teenage years) would soon take the concept of "three chords and the truth," and push them to the most obscene limits you could possibly imagine. GG would threaten his audience, strip down to the nude, force female audience members to, uh, service him, defecate on stage, smear it all over his body, repeatedly slash his own skin open with broken glass left over from bottles he threw around, and still have the audacity to describe himself as some kind of god ("I created myself inside the womb from the fires of Hell. There are no separations between Jesus Christ, God and the Devil, because I am all of them. I am here to take Rock 'N' Roll back & prove to the world that I am the real king through the powers I have acquired").



His music was equally confrontational, with rough-sounding, cassette quality production (this was back in the 80s, at that) and titles like "Bite It You Scum," "Sleeping In My Piss," "Cock On The Loose," "Legalize Murder," "Shoot, Knife, Strangle, Beat & Crucify," "Antisocial Masterbator" (sic) and "Die When You Die." GG's most infamous boast was that he would take his own life on Halloween (rumored methods include dynamite and a shotgun), but the year he made this claim, he was in jail on that day. He insisted he would still do it and maybe even take some audience members with him, but instead, in June of 1993, GG succumbed to a heroin overdose in New York, which is as anticlimactic a death as there could possibly be by GG's standards. He remains a cult figure through his fans, and, despite the grotesque nature of his music, a fascinating specimen in punk rock. While he always had an eerie sense of philosophy and direction about his work, the fact remains that the only thing keeping him from the top spot is how over-the-top his music was, keeping it from being as offensive and dangerous as he wanted it to be.



1. The Sex Pistols.

"We're not into music. We're into chaos."

There's no other band in history with a backlash so huge that magazines would rather rub the #1 spot out in their listings to avoid giving them the satisfaction of claiming it. Such was the impact of the Sex Pistols, who rattled the fabric of society like no other band before or since. There's been a lot of talk about how manufactured the group was, and indeed, their public behavior was quite calculated, but it worked brilliantly. This was a group of nihilist jerkoffs who could barely be bothered to give two squirts of piss about moral standing, and lead singer Johnny Rotten was that special kind of asshole who was always willing to let everyone know exactly what was on his mind. This guy had the kind of mouth that could sell millions of tabloids all on its own.



The very sound of the Sex Pistols was a ramshackle deconstruction of rock music, taking things one step further than the Ramones by not even putting up the pretense of sounding like a unit. On the infamous Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols, they proceeded to sing some riotous songs about abortion ("Bodies"), their utter disdain for the working class' mistreatment by the British government ("God Save The Queen"), their original record label who quickly dropped them ("EMI"), and much, much more over the course of 38 minutes. Such a temperamental outfit were just too much to be contained, and the most famous lineup lasted but a couple years before Johnny Rotten got fed up and abandoned ship, leaving the rest to slowly collapse. Really, the whole story of the Sex Pistols needs to be read in a fuller capacity to be fully appreciated, as their brief time in the spotlight truly altered the course of popular music.



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