Spandex, Hairspray, and Hubris: A Eulogy for the Era That Inserted its own Tube of Lipstick
Forget everything you think you know. The documentaries are bullshit. The reunion tours are a tax write-off for geriatric vampires who can’t afford new hips.
This isn’t nostalgia. Nostalgia is for your mom’s photo album and the faint, safe memory of your first kiss. This is an autopsy. A glitter-dusted, whiskey-soaked, cocaine-fueled autopsy performed on the corpse of a god I wanted to be, and these lyrics are the coroner’s report. A corpse of a god we built with Aqua Net and audacity, set to a power ballad that’s been stuck in your head for thirty-five years. You think you know 80’s rock? You know the greatest hits compilation. You know the radio-safe version.
They’re not playing our song on the classic rock station. If you heard those opening chords, you’d smirk, maybe air-guitar for a second at a red light. But you don’t hear it. Not really. Let me, the ghost in the machine, the writer behind the spandex, tell you what those lyrics actually mean. Strap in, kids. Uncle Dusty’s gonna tell you a story, and it doesn’t have a happy ending, just a really, really sticky one. Let’s break it down with the maturity of a backstage pass holder who absolutely should not have been allowed backstage.
I wrote this song not as a tribute, but as a coroner’s report. The patient? The 1980’s rock scene. Cause of death? Autoerotic asphyxiation by its own leather strap. You see spandex and hairspray, a cartoonish parody of excess. You see the punchline before you hear the joke. But you didn’t write them. I did. And from where I’m sitting, in a condo that smells of lemon polish and regret, not stale beer and groupies, every line is a scar.
Verse One: The Mating Call of the Glam Beast. The Uniform Was Half the Battle (and ALL of the Bulge)
“We lived in extra tight acid-washed jeans / My hirsute chest for the screaming teens”
This was not art. It was a hunting strategy. The jeans were a codpiece. The chest hair was a patch of primal turf laid bare to signal virility to the young and impressionable. We were not musicians; we were carnivores, and the audience was a buffet of raw, screaming need. And the teens weren’t just screaming for us; they were screaming at the establishment through us. We were their release valve. The “hirsute chest” was a primal, animalistic badge of honor in a world not yet sanitized by metrosexuality. It was a testosterone-powered welcome mat, a jungle of chest hair and puka shells meant to signal one thing: I am a real man, and I may cry during power ballads.
“With that fire alight, you can feed the senses”
Stop blushing. This wasn’t subtle. It was biological warfare. The "fire" was the sheer, undiluted id of a man hopped up on cheap speed and cheaper ego and it’s the fire in the hearts of the screaming teens, burning with desire. We weren’t just musicians; we were shamanic idols, and our bodies were the altar. We were here to feed every sense, to overwhelm, to provoke. It was glorious, predatory, and utterly, utterly honest.
“My bulge in your sight when I wear tight spandex”
The "bulge" was our mission statement. It wasn’t just anatomy; it was a promise. A promise of what, exactly, no one was sure, but it was outlined in terrifying detail and often accessorized with a strategically placed bandana. The goal was simple: to create a visible reaction in the audience that was one part awe, one part horror, and, if we did our jobs right, entirely hormonal. We weren’t selling music; we were moving units, and the primary unit was… us. This wasn’t fashion; it was weaponized sexuality. The spandex was so tight they served as a natural contraceptive, cutting off circulation to the very equipment we were so proudly showcasing.
Spare me your pearl-clutching. This wasn’t subtle. It was the entire point. It was raw, unapologetic, and gloriously vulgar sexuality. It was a promise and a threat rolled into one lycra-clad package. In an era before curated Instagram thirst traps, this was our direct marketing campaign. And business was booming.
Verse Two: The Fall and The Tools of the Trade
“My bag is packed with hairspray and gel”
This wasn’t a grooming kit. This was a construction site. Our hair wasn’t styled; it was engineered. We used enough hairspray to single-handedly burn a new hole in the ozone layer. That hair didn’t move in a hurricane. It was a helmet, a weapon, a monument to our own magnificence.
“But my visa got banned on my ticket to hell”
There it is. The entire era is summarized in ten words. We knew exactly where we were headed. We bought the ticket, we took the ride with a gleeful, middle-finger salute. Translation: The fun stopped when the lawyers showed up. We weren’t banned; we were evicted. For the groupies, the “ticket to hell” was a complimentary backstage pass.
“The money, the fame, the girls to repel”
The “girls to repel” is the most honest line I’ve ever written. It wasn’t about love or even lust after a while. It was a numbing ritual. A haze of hairspray, vodka, and anonymous bodies to repel the terrifying silence that came when the amps were off. The drugs weren’t the cause; they were the faulty fuel we poured into a machine already red-lining. They weren’t the goal; they were the collateral damage. We didn’t “repel” them; we required a goddamn manifest and a groupie wrangler to avoid traffic jams at the buffet.
“Drugs were to blame when we trashed the hotel”
The drugs weren’t for inspiration; they were industrial-grade solvents meant to dissolve the shame of realizing your entire artistic output was based around a keytar solo. The “money, the fame, the girls to repel” is a masterclass in revisionist history.
And “drugs were to blame when we trashed the hotel”? Please. The drugs were the catering. We’d have trashed it sober out of sheer, mind-numbing boredom. To blame the drugs when we trashed the hotel” is the most pathetic cop-out in rock history. Trashing the hotel wasn’t a rebellion; it was the only form of interior design we understood
The Chorus: The Delusion (The Prayer)
“80's rock – hold on to the dream / 80's rock - my hair is so clean / 80's rock - never gonna die”
The “dream” was a fever dream induced by cheap cocaine and cheaper champagne. And the hair? It was always clean. It had to be. You couldn’t risk a single strand falling out of place and revealing the desperate, sweating man beneath the facade. The hair was the star. In a world of moral filth, emotional grime, and physical decay, the hair was the one pristine monument. It was the lie we could see in the mirror. If the hair was perfect, the rot underneath couldn’t be that bad. We were just the roadies for our own egos. Looking back, the dream was never the music. The dream was the perpetual high. The “clean hair” is the most important line. In a world of smeared mascara, questionable life choices, and even more questionable hotel hygiene, the hair was the one immutable truth. That towering, teetering monument of hair was our Sistine Chapel. It was architecture. It was defiance. It was the one thing we could control in the swirling chaos. It defied gravity, logic, and basic fire codes. To say “my hair is so clean” was to say, “I am a god, and my temple is pristine, even if the foundation is rotting.” “Never gonna die” was the mantra we screamed into the mirror, drowning out the whispers of the coming dawn.
“End up in the news for groomin’ a minor”
And then, the kicker that would get us canceled faster than you can say “authorized biography”: the line that makes modern A&R guys break out in a cold sweat:
This is the cracked mirror. This is where the cartoon becomes a true-crime documentary. It was the looming specter of the groupie culture. 17-year-old groupies saying they were 18 or 19, getting the backstage pass. Just having them backstage was taboo, not that anything inappropriate went down but we wrapped ourselves in the flag of rebellion so tightly we thought the rules of decency didn’t apply. The line between rock god and predator became as blurred as our eyeliner. It was the ultimate, ugly cost of the scene we built…. a scene that often confused youth with innocence and fame with impunity. There is nothing to confess; I’m stating a fact of the ecosystem. Some of the glam rockers in other bands swam in those murky waters. It’s the part of the dream no one talks about at the reunion concerts.
As the writer, looking back from an age of consequence and realizing how deeply, criminally fucked up it all was and acknowledging how dangerously close to the abyss we all danced. It’s the shudder of a man who knows he skateboarded over a thin line that wasn’t a line at all back then, but a canyon of moral neglect.
It was a different time, with a different rulebook, written in eyeliner on a bathroom stall.
The Final Countdown to the Ugly Truth
“Now the kids don’t know our songs by heart / The world moved on, and we fell apart”
The world didn’t just move on. It vomited us out. The ‘90s arrived wearing ripped jeans and a sincere frown. They didn’t have time for our bulges and ballads. They had real problems, like existential dread and the crushing weight of irony, things our hairspray couldn’t hold up against.
The kids with their ripped jeans, the ones they buy pre-ripped at the mall, have no concept of the cost. They see the rebellion without the bankruptcy, the sex without the STDs, the cool without the crushing emptiness of a Tuesday afternoon in a soulless Holiday Inn, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the next hit to make you feel like the god your poster said you were.
The world moved on to flannel and clinical depression, which felt like a cheap imitation of our own brand of despair, just with better chord progressions and worse hair.
“The make-up cracked and the nineties kicked in”
Grunge didn’t kill us. We were already dead. Grunge was just the coroner, signing the certificate with flannel sleeves and a disdain for shampoo. They were the necessary, brutal dose of reality. They replaced our spandex with flannel, our solos with three chords, and our hairspray with… well, just not washing your hair. Our world was a stage, and they turned on the house lights. And there we were; not gods, not legends, but bloated, broke, middle-aged men with liver damage and a closet full of leather that didn’t fit anymore, exposed: middle-aged men in smeared eyeliner, with receding hairlines and nothing to say.
“The lights faded, the music was old / A new era dawned, and grunge took hold”
It was the intervention we all needed. Grunge was the designated driver who showed up at 6am, saw the passed-out bodies, the questionable stains on the furniture, and the drummer trying to microwave a boot, and just said, “Nope.” Then they turned off the lights, handed us a glass of water, and told us to sleep it off. Forever.
The world moved on. It always does.
“80's rock, it’s never gonna die / 80's rock, it died in ‘89”
Both are true. It died in ’89. The hair was cut, the spandex was packed away, the hangover began. But it will never die because you can’t kill a dream that potent, that stupid, that beautifully, tragically shallow. It’s fossilized in the vinyl, trapped in the radio waves, forever screaming its mantra into a hot mic for a crowd that’s already left the building.
“Never gonna die” is the lie we scream into the void.
“It died in ‘89” is the truth we whisper to our reflection.
The dream is eternal. The music is immortal. But the era? It flatlined the second the first chord of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the airwaves. We’re ghosts, haunting the nostalgia circuit, our hair still perfect, our spandex a lot tighter, forever holding on to a dream that officially expired with the decade.
We were glorious. We were ridiculous. We were prophets and clowns. We sold a million dreams and paid for it in soul. So the next time you hear a power chord from 1987, don’t just laugh. Listen closer. Beneath the reverb, you can still hear it: the sound of a beautiful, monstrous, utterly unsustainable dream crashing into the side of a mountain in a ball of fire.
So, raise your lighters, not your phones, you goddamn heathens, for a time when rock was big, dumb, beautiful, and blissfully, gloriously shallow. It was obscene, ridiculous, and we all knew it. And it was the most fun you could have with your pants on. Even if they were spandex.
It’s never gonna die, we all said it, we all thought it, we all were wrong.
It’s dead. It’s a fossil. It’s a cautionary tale we tell our kids (while secretly hoping they never find the box in the attic). But it also never dies. It lives on in every middle-aged man who hears a riff and gets a twinkle in his eye, a stirring in his loins, and a sudden, profound concern for the structural integrity of his lower back.
It’s perhaps a ghost that haunts every chord of rock music that followed. It’s the impulse that every band since has tried to either emulate or suppress. It’s the beautiful, horrible, undeniable truth that sometimes the best art comes from the worst fucking people.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go tease my hair for a county fair gig. The dream, after all, must go on.
Yours in leather and regret,
A Ghost of the Sunset Strip
