The explosive chorus may have been the most attention-grabbing part of the song, but that core riff was a novel moment in hard rock–Staley’s acidic yawp doubling guitarist Jerry Cantrell’s serpentine melody to conjure the pained moan of a beaten creature.
“So I went home and wrote about government censorship and eating meat as seen through the eyes of a doomed calf,” Staley explained. The lyrics to “Man in the Box” came to Staley after dining with some vegetarian Columbia Records executives who explained how veal was derived from calves raised in tiny enclosures. They were both participating in a heated cultural moment when it felt like pop music was under direct threat of censorship by an ascendant cadre of cultural conservatives.įive years and a handful of band changes later, Staley’s first hit single with Alice in Chains stuck to that topic. “Our lyrics are all positive-we don’t use bad language or sing about drugs and sex,” he said, “but I just want the freedom to write about what I want.” Wearing blue-tinted aviators with his hair teased several inches above his head-the glam-metal look of the moment-Staley wasn’t nearly as high-profile as Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, but his brief take echoed Snider’s PMRC testimony. At one point, the host gave the floor to an 18-year-old audience member named Layne Staley, who at the time was fronting a local glam-metal band called Sleze, and offered a personal take on the manufactured controversy. A few weeks after the notorious 1985 Parents Music Resource Center hearings, where the so-called “ porn rock” lyrics of musicians like W.A.S.P., Prince, and Cyndi Lauper were debated before a Senate committee, the Seattle talk show “Town Meeting” devoted an episode to the issue of “obscene” pop lyrics.
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