Out of touch, out of reach, yeah, you could try to get closer to me
A puffy ginger mullet, braces, freckles and acne, garish Jams shorts, a Quicksilver T-shirt, high-top white Reeboks, a stonewashed jean jacket, loitering the aisles of Kemp Mill music at Tysons Corner mall. Mooning over Karin D., my first unrequited love, calling up DC101 and requesting “Love Bites.” Googling her now, over 25 years later, it appears she is teaching kindergarten in the same town, perhaps corralling children down the same hallways of the same school where we (I) first fell in love. I’ve moved probably fifteen times since then: five countries, as many states. When I move on I often wonder what I leave behind: a sense of connection, the slow establishment of relations, resources, comfort; each stop chalking up a few new acquaintances to have them drift away after the next move or the next next. I’ll see you when I see you. A fading cipher in suburban DC, Denver, New York, Baltimore, Tuscaloosa, Chicago, Rome, Saigon, Colombo, Hong Kong.
This album is not holding up at all. When I’ve listened to Def Leppard in the past ten or twenty years, I’ve opted for Pyromania, the album previous to this and possessed of a drummer with two arms and a full band unaware of danger, unconcerned with coming drug overdoses, not yet ensconced in Bible study, just ready to fucking rock. “Photograph,” off Pyromania, is the only Def Leppard song that still seems to have any value to me; its paean to longing, the impossibility of the woman in the picture; the cliché of a preteen boy and a lingerie catalog. While Hysteria’s “Women,” couched in Christian creation myth, is a disassembling of the woman into hair, eyes, legs, thighs; a KFC orgy, the photograph cut apart and reassembled in a cubist collage. Ahead of its time I suppose, “Women” is “Photograph” as Photoshop.
Oh, I get hysterical, hysteria, oh can you feel it? (Oh can you feel it?) Do you believe it? (Do you believe it?)