Motley Crue's Generation Swine Whose 20th Anniversary It Is Is Their Best Album For Real

Dear Internet: I am and have always been in love with Motley Crue's Generation Swine. My other favorite Motley Crue album is Too Fast For Love, which sounds like it was recorded to each and every cassette individually on a boom box every time one was sold. It is one of the messiest and tawdriest punk-glam albums ever made and I love its jacked-up teenage energy with the all of me that I have been. I love every 80's Motley Crue album too or realistically, every Motley Crue album really but they got progressively glossier and more/less ornate depending upon the needs of the marketplace which is totally awesome until they became confused by grunge and hired John Corabi which is also fine but then fell out with him for being Too Grunge during the pre-production for what would become Generation Swine and rehired Vince Neil. Generation Swine is Motley Crue's inverse Sgt. Pepper, awash in anger, failure, drugged-out apathy, noise, vocal filters and processing, depression and decadence gone stale in the aftermath of real tragedy. Motley Crue's inability to comport themselves to a marketplace which had largely abandoned traditional rock formats in favor of prog, futurist r&b, electronica, adult contemporary, watching or pretending to ignore an already fading Marilyn Manson occupy their satanic-glam niche, whilst nonetheless absorbing all of these currents into itself produced a masterpiece. I don't say that lightly. I can't think of anything else which captures post-grunge anomie subsumed within late-Clintonian venality better than this album. It is full of detritus and waste, incomplete reflections of the reality of things that it just doesn't want to know but can't avoid. It can't adapt to the future but it can't pretend its not living in the future either, a skidding into the abyss, which honestly is kind of welcomed because it would mean escape from the light, from the exhaustion of living as an unsold product within a star system in full rejection. A morass of sludge and beauty and filth, I love this album with all of my heart, my scarred and failing and damaged middle-aged heart, even more than Too Fast For Love, because it means more, holds more intentionally or between its scattered thoughts, all the way down