Last Friday, I saw Billy Squier in concert on Long Island at the Capital One Bank Theatre. For those who don’t know or don’t remember, Squier was a rock icon in the 1980s. His breakthrough 1981 album, “Don’t Say No,” was one of those rare rock records in which every single song was both a hit and a thoroughly pleasurable tune. It still stands up today on its own terms and as a symbol for Squier’s distinctive sound, one that registers lots of “ups”: an up-front guitar sounding memorable riffs, upper-register vocals with just enough roughness (more than Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, less than Bon Scott or Brian Johnson of AC/DC) to signal for our culture a kind of masculine bravado, an up-energy stage presence and urgent vocal throes that get people up to move. I had remembered Squier as a rock musician with lots of “brightness,” in the sense of that knob on amplifiers that renders the sound crisp, direct, gathered, and wound-up, forbidding all dull droning and floor-exploring bottom end by zinging them up into neon-sign like crackles. And definitely no loose noodling, no meandering solos, no spare parts. His songs are built to register a rockish plea in a way that makes sure you will not lose focus, even on some of the “slower” tunes. These are all ways of saying that he innovated a distinctive sound, and did I mention he was huge, huge in the 1980s?

(See “In the Dark” and “The Stroke” on YouTube — I am not able to embed the videos here.)

There was also his live persona, which – as academic studies of rock show – helped “validate” as well as “complicate” the music heard on record. He had a sexy 1970s mane of hair, but coiffed enough to make it qualify for the 80s. And then there were the white tennis shoes (an inventive choice) that seemed to signify a suburban mood, then again there were the tight jeans that also connected him to 70s rock and urban masculinity. These things too were a part of the rock culture which he helped create and in which he operated, and gave a sexual patina that was becoming familiar but was still new, compelling, and a little confusing to his suburban (male, anyway) fans like me: he could work the spectrums of androgyny as a rock artist that — certainly by the close of the 1980s — was almost expected in harder rock, but also there were the feints that back then we would have called (or even maligned as) “gay,” but now (in academic terms) we might examine as “queer,” by which I mean lyrics and gestures that were culturally coded “gay” (or better, outside what is taken to be typical heterosexual display) being performed by an artist framed culturally as “straight.” (I am talking here about cultural codes for how sex/gender are understood, and not about Squier’s “personal life”). In hindsight, this is one of the things that made me interested in Squier: the palette of masculinities on offer in the register of rock. He sang about women and seemed to fit in performance-wise with the erotic rock god. Lots of women screamed for him at his shows. But he also sang lyrics that could be interpreted homoerotically, and used gestures on stage that were outside the “straight” cultural scripts.

This fertile palette of masculinities, which are more common in rock than is often recognized, are frequently misunderstood as somehow telling something “directly” about Squier’s personal life, and it is easy enough to find lots of speculation about that on the internet. (An infamous music video for the song “Rock Me Tonight” has made such speculation a permanent part of Squier lore.)

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