Whitesnake - Slide It In

Geffen, 1984

Reviewed by Kloghole

I can't remember when it was, but an Eric Clapton tune came on, and I had to stop what I was doing because I just couldn't fuckin' believe what I heard.  Ok, let me get this straight.  Did I just hear, "don't let my love flow out of you"?  Alright, maybe I am just reading into this.  The chorus of "Easy Now" repeats.  "Easy now, don't let my love flow out of you.  Please remember that I want you to come too."  Nope, that cinches the deal.  He's talking about not letting his fuckin' jiz slide out of her - blazing a snail trail down to her ankles.  No, I got to be some fuckin' pervert.  Let me give this another read.  Let's take a look at the lyrics and start from the top.  "Holding you, you holding me.  Everyone could see we were in ecstasy.  Making love against the wall."  Alright, what the fuck?   Clapton is a sick mother fucker.  Jesus Christ, I like my cock-rock, but I never expected all the fuckin' fluid talk from Clapton.

Oh, that reminds me of an interesting story.  I was working at this pizza joint - stop me if you heard this one.  I was the opening supervisory dude.  I would blast out Maiden and Def Leppard while pressing out the dough, drinking pickle juice to cut the hangover and waiting for the rest of the crew to show.  One morning, the back buzzer emitted its angry, uneven grind that sounded like a short circuited wire.  I open the door to see this dude that I recognized from some parties at friends' apartments.  Didn't know the fucker, but he seemed like a cool dude.  I look at him with my bloodshot eyes and aching head.  He blurts out, "I'm the new delivery guy."  I cut him off, closing one eye slightly in a pained grimace.  Grabbing my ample junk and rubbing it, I inquire, "Don't you fuckin' hate it when you have post-coital drip in the morning and your ball-sack is all fuckin' crusty in your underwear?"  His eyes widen, not sure what the fuck is going on, so I just instruct him, " Just stand over there by the sinks and look pretty.  The delivery dude should be showing up in a bit, and he'll tell you what's up."  From that point on, we got along famously.  Ah, those were the days.

Well, Eric Clapton's "Easy Now" is not the first time I read a little bit into a song.  I had a habit of coming up with perverted lyrics to existing songs.  For Prince's "Kiss," I would shout out in the bars, "You don't have to be rich to be my bitch, you don't have to be cool to be my screw" just to piss off the stupid fuckers listening to that bullshit.  For those fuckin' losers into Bon Jovi, I had a little for them.  "Shot through the dick, and you're to blame, you gave me a bad disease."  Then, I heard this Van Hagar tune, and I didn't have to change a word.  It was fucked up enough the way it was.  "Some kind of alien waits for the opening then pulls a string, love comes walkin' in."  Ok, sex while it is "that time of the month."  I can respect that, but do we really have to sing about it?  Other songs drip with overt references to sex and sex acts - fucking references, if you will.  Sammy Hagar's "Dick in the Dirt," Great White's "Down on Your Knees," and W.A.S.P.'s "Fuck Like a Beast" are pretty clear in their message.  While some bands dabbled in the sexual references or made them part of their kitschy, cock-rock, big hair, vacuous attempts at musical contributions, one band not only perfected the genre, but also set the standard by which none can hope to match - Whitesnake.

David Coverdale did not waste time with subtlety when naming the band.  Whitesnake tells you exactly what you are getting into, and it did not take too long for the cover art to likewise lack subtlety.  The album, Trouble, depicts a snake poised to strike with the unmistakable pink vulva set in the snake's open jaw.  Lovehunter is a little less vaginal, but has a quite pleasing-looking nude woman astride a dragon-like snake.  The vulva theme returns on Come an' Get It with a snake encased in a glass apple.  Whitesnake's pinnacle achievement, Slide It In, moves to more sedate imagery with a snake angling its way into a woman's cleavage.  Enough about the cover art, which I'm sure attracted quite a few horny pubescent males.

I am not sure that it is possible to really distance oneself from an album like Slide It In to give it a fair shake.  Misogyny and objectification of women is a serious problem, especially when we consider the 80's cock-rock genre as a whole.  I tend to avoid the term "butt rock" in that the fuckin' term came out of nowhere and makes no fuckin' sense to me.  Whoever came up with it is a fucking ass, and the people who use it tend to be buck-toothed, jag-offs that can't tell the difference between Warrant, Queensryche and Megadeth.  There are subtle and debatable differences between '80's metal that tends to fall into the big hair category - some of which can be considered cock-rock.  We may leave that to another review, but, in general, I think there is good cheese and bad cheese.  Can I get an amen, Reverend Jimmy!

I've always considered Whitesnake good cheese despite the misogyny.  I guess it is just the fuckin' solid rockin' from the groovin' blues of the early albums to the screaming riffs on Slide It In.  The album starts out with a tempting guitar hook hanging in thin air.  It stalls seductively before the repeat of the riff, then the rest of the band bursts into the song.  Mmmm, mother fucker.  Damn.  "Slide It In" then pulsates with sexual energy.  Just when you think the tension cannot get any tighter, we hear the gentle building of keyboards leading into the opening string-bend of "Slow an' Easy."  "Keep on pushing babe, like I've never known before... You know you drive me crazy child, an' I just wanna see you on the floor ..."  The song builds, and the drum starts pounding out a tempo.  This fucking song got me in a lot of trouble.  Son of a bitch.  You start mixing two-for-a-dollar drinks with $10 dollars, "Slow an' Easy" and a young women I can hardly remember pulling me onto the dance floor, you got a recipe for disaster.  "Rock me 'til I'm burned to the bone."  While I don't remember much of anything else from that night, it is hard to forget the pulsation of that song and a woman who is digging it even more than you.  

Not all the songs on the album are so hideously sexualized.  In fact, the majority of songs on the album avoid the overly sexualized references while maintaining a powerful energy and delivery.  "Love Ain't No Stranger" allows a dumb-ass to wallow in his self-destructed relationship.  "I was alone an' I needed love so much I sacrificed all I was dreaming of."  Perhaps that's why a woman in a bar is alluring enough to flush a relationship down the toilet, especially when I jumped headlong into the relationship I did not actively seek.

The use of timing, Coverdale's wailing voice, and intentional gaps to create emotion and energy all combine to deliver a phenomenal album.  Even the use of keyboards does not detract and actually adds atmosphere to the album.  Keyboards spelled the death of '80's metal as producers forced rock bands to incorporate keys (see Blackfoot's Vertical Smiles for definitive proof of my thesis).  Whitesnake's album is able to avoid that artificialiality since keys had always been a large part of their sound.  Overall, this album is diverse from slow songs to rockers, perverted to tender, and songs that build into a crescendo to those that burst right out the gates.  While I've heard about the debates with respect to the rerecording of the album with John Sykes, I can't compare the European and US versions of the album because I never had access to the European import.  I think it would be an interesting listen.

I still have a mix tape of Whitesnake songs.  I titled it, inappropriately enough, "All you need is a little piece of ass and a lot of Whitesnake."  Wishful thinking I guess, on both parts.  I should bust that fucker out again.

It is no secret that Whitesnake Slide it In has sweet sticky balls to spare.  It is one of those albums that gets regular repeated play.  This is a must have.  I give it three sweet sticky balls.  Now grab this album, crank it up, grab your closest love interest and create some sweet, sticky, post-coital drip of your own!

Sweet Dreams Mother Fuckers