Royal Monaco: Paper Covers Rock
And how 90's music foreshadowed the country's thirst for blood.
I spent the 80’s as a kid with a looming sense of death percolating my cosmos, forced to watch christian rapture videos on the 19-inch RCA color TV, rolled in on a tall metal cart with the VCR on the middle shelf; the kind of metal cart with jagged, bare-metal edges that would crack a coconut open with gravitational force, if said coconut was the head of a four-year old running through hell, fire, and brimstone bootcamp who accidentally tipped over the top-heavy guillotine, adding a more realistic decapitating effect for the fifteen youngins circled around the massacre, while the adults went outside to smoke Marlboro reds and Camel non-filtered cigarettes to talk about how music, anything other than the ‘56 Baptist Hymnal and Loretta Lynn, was ruining the country. If that sentence didn’t resonate with you, then you didn’t grow up in the bible belt, where we were taught that devil worship was bad, abusing kids was mostly ok (bless his heart, the lord just made him that way; poor thing). I was an impressionable 10-year old when the nation all but capitalized its campaign against the perceived use of devil worship in commercial music, mainly metal, ‘bout the same year we gathered on Hwy 70 to Hold Hands Across America singing along with Michael Jackson and “We Are The World" in public and blatant hypocrisy.
Just after the 90’s began, three teenage kids were arrested in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993, and the media exploded. The southern, conservative, religiously extreme media, fanned by trash TV like Current Affair, Geraldo, and Hugh Downs from 20/20. They arrested, and later convicted, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelly Jr in the mutilating and killing of three little boys in a drainage ditch, in the deep south, claiming it was a satanic sacrifice. I moved out of my parents house that year at 18, but I went to school with kids just like the three accused of murder and it absolutely made no damn sense to me. I grew up just down the road from West Memphis and my southern, metalhead generation was being hauled away to prison based on their music preference and adolescent behaviors.
Metal was rebellious and the communities hated it (oh the irony). Many don’t remember the battle we fought in the 80’s/90’s music industry, but I grew up smack in the middle of the “satanic scare” horror show. I was a low-key metalhead, coming out of the hair-metal craze, but many of my friends were hardcore Sabbath, Judas Priest, and AC/DC freaks and the murders simply did not make sense to me as all of my “devil worshiping” friends were some of the best people I knew; far more so than the bigots that forced fear into my life as a kid. I moved away from Arkansas soon after, but our national pop culture often forgets the looming, low-grade fear of growing up in the 90s’s. (Those three boys went to prison for the next 18 years, until Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder launched a massive legal campaign to get them released in 2011.) Eighteen years in prison for being a kid, in the south, doing things that didn’t align with another group’s moral standards, with no irrefutable evidence to support the public's claims, based on a system of beliefs and opinions, not observable facts.
I painted my 90’s story with an ominous edge to set a scene of media-fanned fear, complete with organized witch hunts, and atrocities in the music industry based on ignorance and a fear-based belief system. I want readers to know that living the 90’s was a stone cold trip, and eventually, the 1990's pop culture (and musicians) said screw it, we're doing this however we want! We grew up on horror movies, video game violence, and the nation’s first modern-day mass school shooting: Columbine. As young Americans, we saw death. Up close and personal and we saw it in our neighborhoods, not in some foreign land in southeast Asia. I painted the grim side of the 90’s so that when I say Royal Monaco plays music produced in, and inspired by the 90’s, I want the reader to know the fortitude and the magnitude of cultural influence planted into the genomes that established their DNA, radiating remarkably clear in their music, nearly 25 years later. I want the world to know the 90’s was a self-induced, pre-apocalypse generation, instilled by a nation of idiots, scared out of its wits, waiting to either die, be cast into hell, or for computers to stop working on 1 Jan 2000 (Y2K), crashing the economy and lowering our imaginary bubble defenses to the world. We had the most fun analog humans could have, took the biggest risks, but always with that distant death cloud looming in the backs of our minds. Looking back, it was incredibly bizarre and I think the 90’s rock movement accurately portrayed the cynical and foreboding times. (I can always tell someone lived through the 90’s by the acute application of sarcasm in their humor, the hallmark of Gen X’ers.)
Royal Monaco capture it better than most because they are four dudes who lived it, in their own way, and survived, who went on to make relatable and authentic music about it while covering their fair share of memorable tunes. They are not replicating the 90’s, they are a product of it; survivors of the looming apocalypse that we are sort of enduring still today. The 90’s was more than a musical genre; it quite observably molded the often sick human nature within it and their equally sick approach to life, comedy, cynicism, and the sheer shock that we are still alive and breathing on this planet they told us was doomed.
That’s why their song “Cemetery Bang Bang” is so brilliantly inspired and written. It stems from a twisted, Fox TV psycho-drama culture that we lived through in the 90’s. The listener gets a heavy dose of cynicism wrapped in a fast, west-coast inspired tempo and escalation, that was the 90’s perception and approach to heartbreak, rejection, and the NON ability to resolve conflict in human relationships. Even the lyrics have a “death” undertone with “I gotta keep alive the will to be your man.” It's a fun song with eerie 90's roots that perhaps could have been (back then) the foreshadowing to the exponential increase in gun violence in teens and young adults (within last 5-10 years). I dunno. Something to ponder, I reckon (not the music, but the human nature of adolescence back then).
"B Grade" is a high-octane race car, with a nostalgic beat and rhythm production that is fun and motivating! “Feel like dyin’” see y'all thought I was making this shit up. Nope. Nearly every song from the genre has an underpinning of death, or at least the indifference to it. At some point, just like in a B-rated horror flick, the main character has to figure out whether to let anger get the best of them or kill ‘em with kindness (or humor)....laughing off the potential of death in everything we do. This song screams: fuck it, we're here….gonna have some damn fun now; get in loser, we're going flying! "Don’t try to rewind, you’ll unwind the whole thing.” This song goes hard and the beat pounds you merciless into their world with the tires burning and motor revving in the red.
"Paper Airplanes" - This song may be the pinnacle of attitude some of us young men had back then. Writing down your dreams on scratch notes, then making paper airplanes are not merely physical actions, but a mindset we had during an analog world of dreaming. Sure, we had mix tapes, cable TV, and magazines, but we had to share our dreams in some way with the world (and our significant others) and we did it by promising each other we would one day, grow up, or get our shit together enough, to be rich enough, or awesome enough to do what we dreamed. Maybe it’s a nod to a high school fling or to the dreamer that lives inside us, mixed with that iconic 90’s imagination with undertones of cynicism and the apocalypse they promised would hit in the 80’s with metal. We didn’t know it at the time, but analog dreams were made of equal parts longing, fear of rejection, and a healthy dose of sarcastic optimism.
As a music writer, I like the anticipation of going to a show to see not if the band plays a cover, but which cover they chose. The cover song says a lot about the band, and for a show where they played mostly originals, I must talk about their Steve Earle cover, "I Feel Alright." It was one of my favorite anthems from the 90’s because Steve wrote music that hit hard like rock and roll, but skirted the edges of folk or country. Released in 1996, Steve Earle wasn’t the first to write hard hitting folk songs that resembled country, but he was likely the most influential. It was a song that captured the 90’s southern rock vibe, and certainly my mid-20's perfectly. Royal Monaco did the damn thing with their version of it and it was a blast to hear live!
Royal Monaco are a group of dudes, long since grown out of their peg-legged Bugle Boy jeans, turbo high-tops, and their tucked-in white t-shirts, who lived through one of the most bizarre, yet influential music generations of our lifetime, to make modern music with underpinnings of cynical horror and a false sense of doom, which works exceptionally well, sadly, now in the twenty-first century. The shopping mall craze is over, Blockbuster is dead, and here we are in 2023, living our best life, with fresh memories of past generational absurdities still warm in our minds as we organize, yet again, to target, attack, and murder humans based on their gender, sexual preference, skin color and religious (non) beliefs.
Royal Monaco, through their music, produced and performed in 2023, a quarter century later, has perhaps proven the theory there is no progress in society. Only a faster, more efficient method of instilling fear. In the meantime, Royal Monaco, just as the industry did in the 90's, said screw it, may as well have fun doing what we love, while we wield the cynical sword through the heartless masses of idiots while writing music based on the absurdity of it all.
Get in losers, I’ll take you there in my paper airplane!
Stringer
(Originally published on June 11, 2023 on author’s website)
Special Thanks to Joey Sullivan for chatting with me at Marble Brewing on that fine afternoon of music!!!
Highly recommend following Royal Monaco on social media and absolutely gotta catch their live performance!! They have the best memes on social media, and they have a lot of fun during performances with fans!
Lastly, Royal Monaco also inspired the way I wrote this experience piece; it won't make sense to everyone, but it will make perfect sense to those who lived it or to those who have a cynical approach to life. It will be fun for me to discover who resonates with it.
Like Napster, all images in this music experience were stolen from the internet or the band's myspace page.