Poison, and Ratt

Here’s the thing: Hair rock is a lot cooler now that it’s become ironic. Every year, band after band that used to be something somebody once cared about sometime in the ’70s reunites and hits the road together to milk whatever celebrity they have left for a few more dollars. These bands are not ironic because they were once cool, and are, for the most part, kind of sad. Now, hair rock bands from the ’80s, like, say, Poison and Ratt, are not sad when they insist upon touring because, well, they weren’t genuinely cool in the ’80s anyway. We all thought they were cool, sure, but it was just a trend and an embarrassing one at that. It was like London’s glam rock and punk movements, but the lame-o versions. Twenty years later and, voilà! The bands themselves — not their music (which was always fun) — are suddenly cool, thanks to the irony that we were all once collectively swept up in a cool trend that was, as stated, anything but. So, don’t worry about your friends losing respect for you; buy tickets to see Bret Michaels on Botox still fronting Poison and that other band playing with them, Ratt, that was always, at best, a second-tier hair rock band — which makes its participation in this tour doubly ironic.