Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media by Nick Bentley Beth Johnson & Andrzej Zieleniec

Author:Nick Bentley, Beth Johnson & Andrzej Zieleniec
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

“We’re Not Worthy”: The Satirical Relationship of Wayne’s World to Heavy Metal Culture

‘Let me bring you up to speed. My name is Wayne Campbell. I live in Aurora, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago—excellent. I’ve had plenty of joe-jobs; nothing I’d call a career. Let me put it this way: I have an extensive collection of nametags and hairnets. Ok, so I still live with my parents, which I admit is bogus and sad. However, I do have a cable access show, and I still know how to party. But what I’d really like is to do Wayne’s World for a living. It might happen. Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt’ (Wayne’s World, 1992).

Drawing on the character of Wayne, the fast-talking, wise-cracking, heavy metal kidult, who with his ‘excellent’ friend, Garth, hosts his own ‘open access’ cable television show from his mum’s basement, this hugely successful mainstream film, and it sequel, offers an insight into heavy metal fandom and its subcultural tropes, which is both celebratory of the guitar-gods and bands that define the genre, while poking fun at big business and ‘lame’ male figures of authority who fail to respect its integrity or seek to exploit it. So strikingly original was this characterisation of North American, male-teen suburban culture in the mid-1980s that it has found its way into rock iconography and You Tube fandom, particularly the synchronised head-banging that accompanies that riff from Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, when Wayne, Garth and partied-out friends, ‘head-bang’ in unison, from the seats of their car, in the famous opening sequence of the movie.

Mike Myers, who created the comedy skit for Saturday Night Live and co-wrote and starred in the film, observes: ‘Wayne’s world is the suburban, adolescent, North American, heavy metal experience as I knew it in the mid-70s, growing up in Scarborough, Ontario, which is a suburb of Toronto, Canada’.7 Rob Lowe, who plays the ‘sleazy TV exec’ (Benjamin Kane), who wants to transform Wayne and Garth’s public-access cable show into a commercially sponsored TV show in order to steal Wayne’s musician girlfriend, has observed: Wayne’s World takes place in Aurora, Illinois, and I grew up in Dayton, Ohio. So, it’s basically the same place. I grew up in downstairs, naugahyde-panelled basements with bean bag chairs and really bad shag carpeting with a TV that had four legs, and that gold mesh over the speaker […] so I related to Wayne’s World. Wayne’s World was real to me’.8

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.