1984: Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight

Spinal Tap: Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight

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This is Spinal Tap is a truly great achievement of film, transcending its own trappings (being both a mockumentary and affiliated with Rob Reiner) to be recognized as not just an all-time great comedy, but an all-time great in and of itself. The songs that comprise the backbone of the fictional band’s celluloid glory (in the meta-world, not on their ill-fated American tour supporting Smell the Glove) deserve substantial credit for the film’s place in the canon of American pop culture.

Yet it seems that the Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest’s in-character sojourns as a real life incarnation have been filed by most of us somewhere between the Monkees (claims to legitimacy, drowned in TV-manufactured hysteria) and Hannah Montana (phenomenally popular with a specific audience, totally irrelevant to the world at large.) The best we were ever willing to offer the men who are the Tap was they wrote some pretty decent songs, for a bunch of actor/comedians. The worst was that, well… they wrote merely jokes.

But doesn’t this reveal a double standard when applied to “real” musicians and their works? The masses didn’t demand the retraction of “genius” as descriptive of the Beatles’ legacy just because of Yellow Submarine. And it’s not like anybody was clamoring for the definitive Smile because those totally killer versions of “Vega-Tables” and “Barnyard” were tearing up the internets. But to consider these pieces of bigger pictures without any respect for their ultimate contexts is unfairly and unrewardingly limiting (seriously, take iTunes off shuffle and start listening to music like a grown-up.)

It’s easy to say that the unappreciated dimension of such “novelties” as the music of Spinal Tap is that good parody reaps amusement from dedicated research and mastery of a form, but this a something of a backhanded compliment. It implies a measure of inorganic artifice, reducing the talented and capable writing and playing of Guest, McKean, Shearer and collaborators. And, hidden in such discussions of the Tap’s 1984 opus, is the suggestion that the music is good for being an imitation of bad music.

In truth, This is Spinal Tap is a fantastically sharp lesson in the history of hard rock, making comic fodder of the twin phenomena of career reinvention and revisionism, and in the process, offering a convincingly earnest homage to hallowed countrymen and the music we all love. The fictional development of Spinal Tap could have ended at Blue Cheer By playing in the periphery of reality, they put a finger to the ever-beating pulse of the genre-developing intersections of pop, rock, folk and blues. That they also managed to blur the lines of satire and tribute while generating a true touchstone of modern music and film is even more a reason for praise. Nearly three decades later, “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” is still blaring- without irony- in countless living rooms worldwide courtesy of the Guitar Hero franchise. To anyone who still thinks the music of Spinal Tap remains a novelty: “mere jokes” aren’t supposed to hold up this well.