play-in game
(14) bulletboys, "smooth up in ya"
defeats
(14) tesla, "love song"
84-69
and will play in march shredness
 

Read the essays, watch the videos, listen to the songs, feel free to argue below in the comments or tweet at us, and consider. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchshredness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on Feb 2, 2018. 

The MTV night belonged to Headbanger’s Ball. Now say you were given to rock, and the rock you made was pretty hard, even owed a debt to Zep or Aerosmith, but—no reason to be ashamed of it— perhaps your rock just didn’t aspire to be King Diamond demonic enough for the Ball. There was still a 5:00 PM half-hour slot for you on Music Television: Hard 30. Tesla of Sacramento were a Hard 30 band. After all, didn’t the late afternoon suit them best? That sacred space in which the school-age rocker and their 9 to 5 parent-rockers might cross paths in front of the CRT television, swaying sweetly like stems of Sacramento alfalfa, in tandem to “Love Song,” its anthemic chorus offering the reassurance that “love will find a way?” The music video is a celebration of the touring life. These things always emphasize the sweat, the sacrifice, and the logistics of putting on a show. At one point, the camera focuses on the unrolling of a giant rug, and you can’t tell if it’s roadies or the actual band doing it, that’s how down to earth these guys are. The rug unrolling, the teamwork that goes into it—it’s just wholesome. They might as well be pounding spikes down on a big top. In The Cure’s video for their similarly titled “Lovesong,” which came out the same year, the band can’t even be bothered to stand, instead they laze amid these weird stalagmites. Now Tesla on the other hand, these are farm-country fellas who drink large gulps of milk out of the gallon jug.

Gabriel Palacios is a poet and musician from Tucson, where he is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arizona. His poems study how the violence of the Spanish Colonial era might surface in the present-day Southwest, like ghostly superimpositions in spirit photography. 

At ten he begged his parents to buy him a Skid Row T-shirt bearing a cartoon image of the Mona Lisa in tattoos and a nose-chain. “IT AIN’T ART IT’S ROCK ’N’ ROLL,” the shirt declared. 

KATIE MOULTON ON BULLETBOYS' "SMOOTH UP IN YA"

Powerful. Aggressive. Sleazy. Putrid yet pleasant.
     That’s how original bassist Lonnie Vencent described BulletBoys’ music in 1989, when the band was riding highest, at the crest of its popularity. “Putrid yet pleasant” sums up “Smooth Up In Ya”: Marq Torien’s snakey spandex, the thrumming bassline, the fat kick-and-snare, the guitar solo that lasts one very long minute yet never seems to resolve. The chorus lyric is a-sensical, yet the riff stays with you like a crusty stain. “Putrid yet pleasant” is the epitome of Shredness, which succeeds when it teases new heights of moronic, phallo-centric farce. “Smooth Up In Ya” is the platonic ideal of anti-intellectual, anti-human cock rock. It’s cock-a-doodle-douchebaggery! What more is there to think about?
     Yet I did think harder. Listen deeper. And what I found up in “Smooth Up In Ya”—with its excess of style and dearth of critical thought and shirts—was a more expansive, even feminist, performance of desire and sexual negotiation.
     “Smooth Up In Ya” squealed and thumped onto the airwaves in 1988. Back then, my family lived in a Missouri development of split-level homes, all middle-class linoleum and fake wood-grain. The backyards were tessellated chainlink. All the other moms on the block looked like they were auditioning for an off-brand Whitesnake video. A few of them looked like they would have been cast—rolling across the hood of a car or leaping off their front porch like “Daddy’s little cutie” to chase Steven Tyler down the street (barf). They dyed and teased and sprayed their hair. Their eyelashes were thick with mascara, their lipstick red and immoveable. They wore tied-up tank tops and acid-wash cut-offs. They looked nothing like my mom. I rejected them outright. I was a scared and therefore judgmental kid. These other moms swatted my fellow kids in public, but also ignored them totally, letting them run around screaming into the night and giving them sips off their Busch Light cans when they were thirsty. The other moms were all named Karen.
     But they were hot. They could be ditzy and sharp, kind and loud, but never as loud as the men. Still, at countless driveway parties, they made known their preferred sex symbols: Dwight Yoakam in painted-on leather pants, Billy Ray Cyrus minus sleeves, and the wild-maned men of hair metal. So I tried to listen to “Smooth Up In Ya” as the other moms would have.
     While “Smooth Up In Ya” appears to be another utterly crass hair-metal come-on, the song breaks the mold in its concern for the partner’s pleasure. Marq Torien addresses a woman under the assumption that she’s playing hard-to-get, but who may simply be uninterested in his serpentine preening. He flicks his hair and promises to “send shivers/ smooth up in ya (smooth up in ya) in ya.” The syntax is critical: It’s not Torien’s hypothetical cock that will be dispatched “smooth up in ya”; instead, it is “shivers” of pleasure! Whose pleasure? Not Torien’s, and not Mick Sweda’s, wanking off the guitar in the corner. It’s the subject’s pleasure! "Don’t let your lovin’ go to waste," he sings, "All it takes is just one taste"—which we must assume is his offer to apply his mouth to wherever his partner wishes. And just how are shivers sent, not down but up? The associative leap echoes Rilke: And we, who always think of happiness as a rising, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us— Because poetic association is required to describe the complex magic of the orgasm not only of the female, but of any person other than oneself! That shit requires an attuned empathy, brosef.
     The other element that sets “Smooth Up In Ya” apart: While most of these frizzy peacocks must insist on their conquests, bang you over the head with claims that she totally wants it, there’s no confirmation that this lust is requited. There are two ways I like to imagine the song’s scenario playing out: First, the potential partner does not accept Torien’s invitation, and the extended guitar solo, its diddling and wailing, is a sonic metaphor for the speaker tending to his desire in the privacy of his tour-bus shower.
     The second scenario I imagine is that the agent of desire decides to give the speaker and his shivers a chance, and the guitar solo is describing the length and intricacy of the oral sex he is performing. And maybe the partner is enjoying themself, and maybe their desires, like those of the moms on my block, are a little sleazy, putrid even—but pleasant.
     Okay, I admit this is mostly bullshit. Dear reader, I listened to BulletBoys so you don’t have to. I researched this certified-platinum garbage. I know things I can’t un-know. For example, “Smooth Up In Ya” may be the least problematic original track the band recorded. Consider "Kissin' Kitty" and its admiration for "a pretty with a titty kissin' every dude in sight." (Dude just can't resist that internal rhyme!) Or "Hard As a Rock," which includes the very special lyrics "Give me the g-string shivers/ She's always in heat." In a 1988 live video of that song, even Marq Torien looks a little desperate in his kneepads and crop-top, belly rolling through every chorus as it develops its thesis (read this slowly): "Hard as a rock/ Hard as a rock/ You get me baby, hard as a rock/ Hard as a rock/ Hard as a rock…" Et cetera. 
     I know Marq Torien still tours as BulletBoys and has cycled through more than 30 band members. The band (with the exception of Torien’s voice) sounds just awful live, no matter its incarnation. I know Torien was an early Trump supporter and attempted to sell a pair of his own pants—worn—online for $7,000. Perhaps this was to raise funds for the child support he didn’t pay, and for which Torien was arrested in 2015—shirtless, naturally. No one even knows whether it’s The Bulletboys or just Bulletboys or BulletBoys. “Smooth Up In Ya” has zero annotations in Genius because it’s just that vapid. Mostly putrid.
     No, this is probably not art worth examining. No, this analysis is not what (the) BulletBoys intended. But this is about fantasy as empowerment, as control. And hey, fuck Bulletboys! I want to argue for this song not just in spite of Bulletboys but to spite Bulletboys.
     One night, our old block woke to squealing tires. One of the Karens and her husband Wally ran an unruly household at the bottom of the hill, and that night it burst out onto the street. There was shouting, slamming doors, honking, and a peel-out. Whatever Wally did, Karen wasn’t taking it. Maybe he pleaded, maybe he negged her, bluffed and blustered, maybe he tried to stop her going. Maybe he just didn’t get her off. The peel-out seemed to last forever, but really it lasted the length of an extended guitar solo: the time it took Karen to screech out of her driveway and burn rubber all the way up the block—dragging Wally behind her, flailing from the tailgate of her pickup.
     I don’t know what happened to most of the other moms. There were divorces and deaths and babies having babies; there were happily-ever-afters, whatever that means. But I want to believe that these women were loved, but not only loved. I want to believe that they were sexually fulfilled. That they were listened to. That they got their shivers on their own terms.

Katie Moulton is a writer and music critic from St. Louis. She is currently the Hub City Writer-in-Residence working on a book called Dad Rock, and you can find more of her work here.