This is the official music video for Life Sex & Death’s School is For Fools.  Their album The Silent Majority was released around the peak of the hair-metal era in the early 90’s.

There’s a gold mine of information here, but I’ll focus just on the band’s look.

We have short-haired Stanley out front, hamming up his homeless front man gimmick with a perfectly dirty thrift-store suit that would look at home on Cosmo Kramer if you gave it a dry clean. In back, we have three long-hairs doing a standard hair-fling, jump-around routine.

The feeling for me is one of extreme disconnect between the front man and the band. It feels like we’re looking at either (a) three metal guys who got sick of looking for a good match and finally let Stanley in the band to move forward, or (b) a band-leader front man who picked up three metal guys off the street as a backing band. Ultimately there is no Band As A Gang vibe. I think what the band members are wearing plays a big role in creating (or at least not reducing) this disconnect. I remember when the album was released, a few of the songs really resonated with me, but I never took to the band itself. I think I just couldn’t relate to any of the band members as avatars for the projection of my own ego.

LSD could be the basis for a case study in gimmickry, namely Stanley’s homeless drifter shtick. The broad questions, perhaps addressed in the future, would be (a) was the gimmick a good one, and (b) was it properly executed. Lots of great ideas perfectly executed fall flat in the marketplace. Was LSD’s gimmick a great idea executed well, or was it doomed from the start for improper conception and/or execution? Did it ultimately give the band more attention than they otherwise would have gotten, or did it ultimately box them in and hurt their career? As I said, here’s a little seam of gold waiting to be mined.

Principles:

• Band As  A Gang
• Band Needs A Uniform
• The fine line between manifested personality and gimmick
• Superfluous, exaggerated physicality