Kings Of Leon and rock's uneasy post-decadence period 

But while The Artist feels like the potential starting point of a new fad, inspiring well-intentioned fans to add Chaplin films that they’ll feel bad about not watching to their Netflix queues, Talihina Sky looks like the unceremonious end to a certain kind of rock tradition. Surveying the current rock landscape, it’s clear we are firmly entrenched in a post-decadent period. It’s difficult to imagine Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, or any of the other big, new indie-rock bands from the past several years having misadventures with drugs or even feigning an interest in sex, much less having it indiscriminately with many partners. It is no longer hip to exude drunkenness and/or horniness; acting like a rock band is now discouraged among rock bands.

For decades, “dark side of fame” mythology was a core part of rock music. Like so many things in pop, it boiled down to a gross display of power. This power—signified by ready access to money, intoxicants, and young women willing to do nasty things on airplanes, even (nay, especially) in the company of camera crews—was so tremendous that even the wildest fantasies of the audience became mundane, boring, and finally deadening to our favorite rock stars. Which only made that power more enticing to the audience. It can be traced back to the 1967 film Don’t Look Back, which follows Bob Dylan on a British tour as he struggles to tolerate so many beautiful women and fawning journalists calling him a genius all the goddamn time. (He also appears to be on speed for much of the film, though it curiously makes him even less elated.) It’s possible to watch Don’t Look Back and believe that Dylan was a real dick in the mid-’60s—but he’s a glamorous dick, and his lifestyle of flitting from one show to the next with a coterie of hangers-on looks like the opposite of a drag from the perspective of mere mortals.

As rock music became big corporate business in the ’70s, The Eagles offered up Hotel California, a concept album that introduced the phrase “life in the fast lane” into the lexicon. It was presented as a warning and—in the manner of all “dark side of fame” mythology—was perceived as an invitation. A few years later, The Eagles’ enormously successful SoCal peers Fleetwood Mac took the “show, don’t tell” approach with Tusk, where Stevie Nicks tried to sing the cocaine out of her nostrils, and did it so alluringly that it made people like Courtney Love want to follow in her footsteps. (Judging by the narrow criterion of effectively discouraging people against pursuing stardom, “warning” songs have an alarmingly high failure rate.)

By the ’80s, bands started making “dark side of fame” records before they were actually famous. Like Appetite For Destruction, which opens with the greatest warning song of all-time, “Welcome To The Jungle,” which Guns N’ Roses pulled together when they were still eating discarded pizza slices out of Dumpsters. Then there’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” from Bon Jovi’s 1986 breakthrough Slippery When Wet, a song that would sound totally ridiculous (in a bad way) if Jon Bon Jovi hadn’t gone on to actually become wanted, dead or alive, once the album became a hit. (He certainly hadn’t seen a million faces, much less rocked them, before Slippery When Wet.)

The irony in “dark side of fame” mythology was unavoidable up until the ’90s, a time when warning songs suddenly became the only media products that weren’t ironic. In the wake of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, only Kid Rock dared to bring it all back home with 1998’s “Only God Knows Why,” a rewrite of “Turn The Page” where the self-proclaimed American Bad-Ass sang ruefully of “outstretched hands and one-night stands/still I can’t find love,” presumably between doing lines off of a stripper’s tits.

A few years later, Kings Of Leon emerged as part of the so-called “return of rock” generation ushered in by The Strokes. To date, the early-’00s class of skinny, immaculately wasted retro-rockers—Fever To Tell-era Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Vines, The Darkness, Jet, and several other progressively cheesier bands—remains the most recent remnant of anything resembling (or aspiring to resemble) old-world rock-star cool.

The Strokes’ underrated 2011 album Angles sort of seems like a late-period “dark side of fame” rock record, given the much-publicized infighting that plagued the album’s creation. Except that Angles was widely ignored upon release; at present, The Strokes are seriously lacking in power to grossly display. In the meantime, “dark side of fame” mythology has found a new home in contemporary hip-hop. One of last year’s best-selling rap albums, Drake’s Take Care, is a grim depiction of a fabulously wealthy young man’s existence; like Dylan, Drake could do without all you people constantly admiring him. Another monster album rap record from 2011, Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch The Throne, includes a song called “Welcome To The Jungle” (where Jay calls himself “black Axl Rose”) and opens with “No Church In The Wild,” which has Kanye sniffing coke off of a black groupie and belligerently directing the positions of his sex partners like Axl in Appetite’s “It’s So Easy.” And then there’s critically acclaimed R&B singer Frank Ocean, who sings the hook on “No Church” and repurposed the melody of Hotel California’s title track for last year’s Nostalgia, Ultra. He’s since passed Don Henley in the fast lane.

Where does this leave Kings Of Leon? After Talihina Sky, I’m more interested in them than I have been in a while. I admit it: I want rock music to be a little decadent. It’s supposed to be decadent, and suck you into a sleazy, skeezy, escapist wormhole every once in a while. Also, this was a pretty good band once; the first two albums approximate the feeling of sex on fire without having to state it explicitly. I’m curious whether the album that rises from the ashes of Kings Of Leon’s disastrous 2011 will recapture that old decadent feeling. I’d even be happy with a tribute to the great acts of decadence of rock’s distant past.