Daily Jam - Poison

In those transitional days before my older sister made the jump to full-on country music fan, she espoused the tunes and tenets of the hair metal balladeers, the spandex-wearing, glittered and dolled up front men shredding their brand of guitar pop. When I was in the fifth grade, she used to pick me up after soccer practice in her Honda Accord, jamming cassette singles from Tesla, Motley Crüe, and the unexpected late 80’s revival of Alice Cooper, returning to the charts with 1989’s “Poison.” At 10 years old in Midland, Texas, I was not exposed to a whole hell of a lot of music, hearing and learning what I could through my sister, my friends’ older siblings, and our near constant airing of MTV. We were still two years away from punk breaking, and hip-hop was still primarily relegated solely to Yo! MTV Raps. Hair metal reigned supreme, and I ate that shit up.

That is not to say that there wasn’t plenty of great music to be found and heard at the time. There always is. And I will wholly support the notion that the aforementioned “Poison” is one of the best songs from that entire decade. Co-written and produced by hair metal Übermensch Desmond Child, “Poison” was pretty much primed to be a huge hit for the classic rocker, and while the album Trash from which the single comes from is not the strongest in Cooper’s oeuvre, that song makes it most worthy of note.

I will admit that the song has a certain penchant for cheese, four and a half minutes of glam metal posturing and PG-13 S&M imagery, but that’s really just a product of the times, a slice of old pop culture all wound up in tight leather, sweat, blown-out hair, and sex, sex, sex. I thought it ruled.

I still do…and it still does.

There will always be a part of me that’s a dumb grade school kid, pumping his fist in the air to Alice Cooper, singing along to “Poison” with reckless abandon, and feeling cool catching a ride from his older sister.

Listen below, our Daily Jam.