relatives incredibly cooler than you |

Non-Poetry Aside of Fashion! / In Defence of Bret’s Hotness

April 29, 2008

Now, I admit: it’s not as easy to defend the opinion that Bret Michaels is the Hottness as it is to defend Slash’s Hottness. Talent-wise, at least. I mean, I think we all agree that Slash has talent. Not talent like, oh, Shawn Lane had, but — in all honesty — I’d rather have Slash blaring from the speakers of my car rather than Shawn Lane as I’m gnashing my teeth on the angst and general malaise and incredible rage that comes with Being a Poet.

Now, Bret Michaels does have the ability to play the guitar. He can play it just as well as your Unspeakably Cool Cousin plays it outside on the porch when he visits during the holidays after his parents and your parents and all of the other grown-ups have gone to bed, and your Unspeakably Cool Cousin plays and talks about Jimmy Page, whom you secretly despise, but you respond to your cousin’s blatherings about Jimmy Page the same way you respond to blatherings on Ernest Hemingway (whom you also secretly despise), and that is by saying, “Yes, [insert man name here] is a man who worked extremely hard on his craft, and no one can deny him that,” and you are happy with your statement, for it is neither negative nor positive, so you do not feel as if you’re lying and pretending to be someone other than yourself, but — and this is purely hypothetical — if you were yearning to be someone other than yourself, you’d be yearning to be someone one tenth of one percent as cool as your Unspeakably Cool Cousin, because, even though both of you turn thirty this year, and now that your clothing screams FASHION! and your wit is as sharp as a brand-new switchblade and you have read every single thing Dave Eggers has ever thought of writing and can discuss it for great lengths of time with great enthusiasm, you still feel like Super Dork of the Universe when beside your Unspeakably Cool Cousin, who has now moved from talking about Jimmy Page to talking about the prison fight that almost kept him from being released last week, and you listen with wondrously rapt attention because, even though you are fully aware that you will never be able to touch the coolness that is your Unspeakably Cool Cousin, you enjoy being given the opportunity to look right into the Glorious Face of Great Coolness once or twice a year because it is so much better than never being able to be in its presence at all.

Whew! That was exhausting! Back to Bret Michaels. So I cannot defend the hottness factor of Bret Michaels by speaking of his musical talent. I can, however, defend Mr. Michaels’s hottness by saying that, even though he may not be king of the guitar, he is most, most certainly the King of Fashion. Our Lady of the Most Fashionably Fashionable Fashion Brenda Dickson tells us: Fashion is something that is acquired by looking at a lot of different fashions. Mr. Michaels takes this wondrous quote and makes it his own, which is this: Fashion is something that is acquired by trying out a lot of different fashions. Some fashions are, understandably, a lot more fashionable than others. See the Metamorphosis of Bret Michaels’s Fashion below. Note the photos in which Mr. Michaels bears an uncanny resemblance to a) a Raw Eddie Murphy and b) Kid Rock (those being examples of Bret’s unfashionable moments).