It Could Rock Harder

When Time itself wants you to watch a made-for-TV movie on the job

I went back and forth on starting a Substack for a while, thinking I didn’t have much to say. And I’m still not sure I do. But I decided to conceive of it as the place where I could put all the random, useless (in the best, most artistic sense of that adjective) shit I post in Instagram stories, only in longer form, which I sometimes find I need. And given what’s going on in Chicago at the moment, it seems like the important, useful, and consequential actions are happening offline, which makes online spaces like this all the more appropriate for the following:

I was driving home from the grocery store and “Hysteria” by Def Leppard came on the radio and it reminded me of the time when I worked in an office tower in Manhattan, at a desk job that could be stressful at certain times, but that, at other moments, had enough built-in downtime that my office mate and I could close the door (we had a door!) and watch, in a series of 10 minute installments uploaded to YouTube, the entirety of Hysteria – the Def Leppard Story. (In the intervening years, someone has since uploaded the full movie).

We also watched some Bachelor-like reality TV shows and to this day I wonder if there was ever anyone auditing our work computer internet history (and if so, were they like, “Whatever, I’m giving these guys a pass”)? If capitalism is a process of extraction, I like to think we were just filling up our reserves. I’m not saying it was subversive on our part. But it was . . . something.

Why did we decide to watch this VH1 movie from 2001? I no longer remember. What I do recall is my coworker saying, after we finished the first clip, something like this was the shortest 10 minutes he’d ever experienced and we needed to keep going until we watched the whole thing. Like time was moving differently, and like Time itself wanted us to watch this movie during our workday. And who were we to defy Time itself?

It opens with the car crash in which drummer Rick Allen lost his left arm. But then flashes back seven years earlier, to a young Joe Elliott, with an Aladdin Sane poster in his bedroom, leaving to start his day at a tool factory in Sheffield (where an old-timer calls him an idiot). After missing a bus, he encounters Pete Willis in the street, who says his band is breaking up after their singer and lead guitarist quit. Cut to the remaining band members – currently called Atomic Mass – coming over to Elliott’s house to hear him audition. And one of my favorite clips:

I don’t know why it’s so memorable for me. Something about the innocence of it, maybe? And the yearning? That Elliott, at least in this telling, has been dreaming of this moment, has even already made posters for an imaginary band he wanted to join, because really he’s been longing for a different life. And then there’s the collaborative effort (friends!) to perfect the band name by changing the spelling. The notion that you could “rock harder” by erasing an “a” and an “o” and adding a “p.” Like, fuck oppressive orthography! Maybe it does rock harder?? I suppose it depends on what your metric for “rocking” is. Somehow the Swedish subtitles in this upload only enhance the whole experience.

In unrelated yet still somehow related news, I ordered a used copy of one of the few Anita Brookner books I haven’t read, A Friend from England, which was published in 1987, the same year Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” came out.

And that’s it. I could never fit this into an IG story.