How About That Thing?

Steel Panther have been around forever. They went under different names in the early-to-mid 2000s, but it wasn’t until they went with Steel Panther when they found success. having a hilarious YouTube video probably didn’t hurt, either.

In particular, Steel Panther were fucking HUGE here in Kansas City for a while. They received regular airplay on The Johnny Dare Show at one point, although a significant amount of bleeping had to be done in the process. They were regular guests at Twisted Christmas : a local concert 98.9 The Rock held in December for many years. They’d become a tour de force, and I was enjoying every minute of it… Right up until 2012 or so.

Yeah, it’s weird how that worked out. I was one of Steel Panther’s biggest fans from 2009 to about 2011. Then 2012 happened, and for some reason, I ended up purging them from my fandom. And I don’t just mean I got bored and moved on with my life, either. I mean I outright got rid of the then one and only album they’d produced from my collection, I deleted their cover of The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want it That Way” from my YouTube favorites… I was just done. And I have no idea why anymore.

For sure, it had nothing to do with the band doing anything to me personally. Hell, if anything, the one year I was able to get tickets for Twisted Christmas, security saw I was blind, mistook my friend as my “assistant”, and helped us get a spot front and center! I even got to high-five the vocalist during his cover of “Sweet Child of Mine” and everything!

It also had nothing to do with everybody becoming super PC and having an entire fucking oak tree up their collective ass about every single fucking thing anymore. Although I do admit that I’m amazed Steel Panther somehow haven’t been canceled yet. And to put things into perspective, cancel culture eventually caught up with Cannibal Corpse and Eminem. I’ve also heard tale that several countries have begun to, or are at least thinking about arresting people for so much as posting “misogynist humor” on-line! And yet, Steel Panther is still at large. Go figure, I guess.

So what is it about Steel Panther that made me start out loving them, but then suddenly wanting nothing to do with them two or three years later? I couldn’t remember. So I decided to fire up the Tidal account, and give their old and new material alike a listen.

Naturally, I started at the beginning with their first, and probablytheir best album to date: “Feel the Steel.

This right here is the quintessential must-have album if you want to give these guys a try. It’s home to so many of their most popular songs,.

I started listening to this album, and… Yip, you can definitely tell this was released in 2009. Holy monkey! You DEFINITELY couldn’t get away with some of this shit nowadays. For example, they outright refer to Fifty Cent as a [BUNDLE OF STICKS] in “Death to All but Metal”. Not to mention that fat people must have had more of a sense of humor about themselves in 2009. That, or mob mentality hadn’t toxified the social network and inflicted it with a nasty case of sepsis. All I know is nowadays, so much as mentioning that you’re trying to watch your weight gets the “plus size” mob thirsting for blood and demanding your head on a stick. So I can only imagine how well a song like this will probably go over.

Between all of this, and a bucketful of raunchy lyrics that’d make a sailor blush, “Feel the Steel” is definitely a product of its time. Whether that time is 1989, or 2009… You be the judge.

The 1980s were full of bands who dressed in leather and rinestones, and wrote songs about picking up strippers and hookers and the like. Although THEY weren’t trying to be funny. Not on purpose, anyway.

Meanwhile, the 2000s was the decade of edgelord humor, and things like “the R-word” and “The Other F-word” were more commonly used. No joke, I remember hearing about actual honest to god kids with downs syndrome referring to a fan theory about Charmed as being “the R-word”, that’s how commonplace shit like this was back then.

Despite a few things that honestly haven’t aged well, though, Steel Panther aren’t just some random group of jackoffs just dicking around on instruments. These are guys who really did their homework on the hair metal subgenre, and the instrumentals on “Feel the Steel” reflect it. If these guys wanted, they could easily write serious music, and it’d sound just as good. It’s probably too late NOW, but still…

That being said… Yeah, I think I’m starting to figure out why I eventually left the fandom when I did. Granted, my tolerance for raunch is lower now than it was back then, probably due to being a dad now and having to think like a dad and what not. However, even when I COULD tolerate this sort of thing, I figured out why I stopped listening over a decade ago pretty quickly.

To put it bluntly, Steel Panther is really only capable of telling one joke. Whether it’s due to the confines of the genre they’re poking fun at, or because that’s just how dry the well truly is, I found myself getting pretty bored with what I was hearing two thirds of the way in. Nostalgia probably helped me get through as much of “Feel the Steel” as I did, because when I tried listening to newer material, I found I wasn’t enjoying any of it nearly as much.

Overall, I wouldn’t say that Steel Panther are BAD, or even UNFUNNY, per say. At absolute worst, I’d say the band is kind of a one trick pony, and while it’s a pretty cool trick at first, it gets old pretty quickly. Or at least that’s my experience, anyway.

I do treasure the memories I had with the band. I remember listening to “Feel the Steel” from front to back with nowhere near as much repulsion as I unfortunately do now. I remember the previously mentioned Twisted Christmas show where my friend and I got to be in the front row. I even remember friends and I checking them out on iTunes and giggling like middle school kids getting away with watching The Man Show or whatever.

I’ll treasure those memories… But in the long run, I’m starting to see why I eventually moved on. Maybe your experience is the same. Knowing my luck, though, my experience is probably in the minority. Oh well, it is what it is.