I Wanna Be Somebody

This is glam-metal stripped of its more decorative tendencies and pushed toward something rawer and more confrontational — the guitars are thick rather than pretty, the rhythm section hits harder than the genre average, and Blackie Lawless's voice operates at the outer edge of controlled scream. The production has the early-80s quality of believing in reverb as a tool of amplification, everything given slightly more space and echo than strictly necessary, which creates an arena-scale ambition even on record. The lyric is among the most direct in the entire genre — pure aspiration, the desire for recognition and significance stated without irony or complication. For 1984 this was both artifact and manifesto, arriving when young audiences needed music that validated wanting more than what had been assigned to them. There's something almost punk in the directness, the refusal to dress the ambition in metaphor. Lawless understood that the audience for this music was working-class kids who wanted permission to want things, and he gave them that permission at maximum volume. The shock-rock theatrics that surrounded the band can obscure how functional this specific song is — beneath the imagery it's a fairly earnest statement of intent. It plays best in the context of the era that produced it, but the core feeling it articulates is durable. Reach for it when you're twenty and have not yet learned to be embarrassed by wanting things.