How anybody can look back at those glam rock hair bands and not see that they were sexually ambiguous at best and be surprised now that any of them were homosexual is a mystery, almost as big of a mystery as not seeing it when these bands were in their heyday.
I don’t miss arena rock and Top 40, most of it was pap. “Rock” was just as formulaic and insipid as the autotune pop of today, just louder. However, there has always been great music, then and now. But, again then as now, very little of it makes its way into mass channels of distribution. People who grew up under the old “push” model of the big recording studios and their captive network of radio playlists reinforced by the big concert tour schedules relied upon that as a gauge of what was popular, and what was popular was de facto “good” because they didn’t know any better.
That’s fading away now, and so they’re deprived of their yardstick and are stuck thinking that the music of their own heydays was the best because it’s all that they really know. Rolling around town in a ‘79 Trans Am with the t-tops out, mullet ruffling in the breeze with Foreigner or Boston or Loverboy or some other insipid hair band turned up to 11.
There’s plenty of great, innovative music being made now, you’ve just got to go find it and trust your own judgment, something that never formed in most rock fans forty or more years ago.
What is your definition of plenty?
I knew Freddie Mercury was gay when I first heard "Killer Queen."
Useful if you know how to sublimate.
Coheed and Cambria is my favorite band of today, not that new, but good music.
Well, if the lead members of the girly hair bands came out of the closet (Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Cinderella, Def Leppard, Guns ‘N Roses, etc.) it certainly would have been more surprising - but Judas Priest seemed more about rock music than the whole girl scene. I don’t recall teeny boppers buying posters with them striking poses in the same way the others were marketed.
The sexual ambiguity was just marketing - and it sold well as those rock bands morphed into girl bands.