It is natural to think of Whitesnake entirely in the past tense; one only ever encounters them duringkaraoke nights, Vh1 Best-Of countdowns, and the occasional feminist musicology/culture studies article. As a result, it is easy to reify the band in a web of hair metal tropes, imagining that they exist only in an alternate reality in which time remains perpetually stuck in the late 80s. This tendency to de-historicize Whitesnake obscures reality; the band first started recording in the late 70s, shortly after singer David Coverdale’s stint as the frontman for Deep Purple, and the band has been touring and recording off and on since that time. This surprising longevity is due largely to the fact that Whitesnake has been the enduring brand name for Coverdale’s musical output during this entire time period, regardless of which musicians form the backing band. The new Whitesnake album, “Good to be Bad”, is Coverdale’s 11th studio album using the Whitesnake moniker and the first using the musicians he has been touring with for the last five years.

Sure, its easy to get caught up in the sheer excitement of discovering that a band whose cultural moment ended 20 years ago is still releasing albums on relatively unknown German metal labels. Is the music actually worth listening to? After one listen, the impulse is to dismiss the music on “Good to be Bad” as being “generic”, “derivative”, or “unoriginal”. The first two descriptors may actually be accurate, but not in the sense in which they are typically employed. The blazing guitar solos, multi-octave vocal arrangements, and rhythmic structures closely follow the conventions of hard rock and pop-metal from the mid 70s to the late 80s. The composition of the album also closely follows standard practice, mixing up-tempo party hits (“Call on Me,” “All for Love,” “Lay Down Your Love”), grinding mid-tempo jams (“Best Years,” “Can You Hear The Wind Blow”) and soaring power ballads (“All I Want All I Need”). In addition to hewing closely to genre conventions, Coverdale also churns out riffs and hooks that sound like you’ve heard them somewhere before –Zeppelin is still his most obvious sonic reference point, but the album is littered with countless musical references to other bands (Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Guns ‘n Roses), in addition to directly quoting “Bad to the Bone” in the title track.

Coverdale’s slavish devotion to the musical tropes of 70s and 80s metal is exactly what makes this album work at all. Because the singer and his backing musicians are implicitly devoted to denying that the Sex Pistols, Fugazi, or Nirvana ever existed, “Good to be Bad” sounds like relatively few recent rock albums. And yet, the album doesn’t even exactly sound like something straight from a 1987 time-capsule either; if you go back and listen to the biggest hits off of Def Leppard’s Hysteria, Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, G n R’s Appetite for Destruction, or even Whitesnake’s eponymous album from the same year, they don’t seem nearly as heavy as this set of songs does. The 2008 incarnation of Whitesnake makes 80s pop metal as you remember it being, not as it actually was.

Given the extent to which “Good to be Bad” sounds like the platonic ideal of a cock rock album, it should be easy to predict what the songs are about: fuckin’, boozin’, and ridin’ motorcycles. Yet this couldn’t be further from the truth; the strongest theme throughout the album’s 11 songs is that it is awesome to be middle aged and happily married. As Coverdale declares on the album opener, “These are the best years of my life”. On “Can you hear the Wind Blow”, he assures his wife “All I want is just to spend my life with you”. Even when the songs are about sex, it is tender, committed, marital sex. In 1987’s “Still of the Night”, Coverdale was a prowling animal, lusting for Tawny Kitaen; in “Call on Me” he sends out the “hounds of love” so that he can tenderly spoon his wife and tell her that he is there for her.

The apparent mismatch between “Good to Be Bad’s” music and lyrics stems in part from the fact that Whitesnake never was never, strictly speaking, a cock rock band. Certainly, “Here I Go Again” rode the same wave to popularity as “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” “Girls, Girls, Girls,” and “Cherry Pie”; however even that song was a re-recording of a song that Whitesnake had originally released in the early 80s. Listening to the original reveals Coverdale’s roots in the British blues metal of Zeppelin and Deep Purple, rather than in the milleu of image-before-substance hard rock of bands like Poison and Warrant. Even though many of Whitesnake’s songs and videos were hyper-sexual and their hairstyles and stage-shows were over the top, Coverdale never necessarily aspired to a raunch factor equivalent to many of his band’s peers.

But even more than any particular characteristics of Coverdale’s personal history and musical background, the deviation of “Good to be Bad’s” lyrical content from 80s metal norms can be explained by age. Coverdale is pushing 60, has been married for 10 years, and has two grandchildren from his first marriage. He’s clearly not the same dude he was in the 70s and 80s, and in writing the songs for this album, he had the good sense to take this into account and actually write about his life now rather than pathetically pining for the glory days. In addition, he seems to understand that most of the women who were flinging panties at him in the 1980s are currently similarly domesticated; his main promotional stop in support of this album’s release was “Loose Women”, the UK’s version of “The View”. Rather than being emasculated or ridiculous, Coverdale was at ease, chatting about fitness regimens, tea, and grocery shopping. Yet even knowing this doesn’t make “Good to Be Bad” rock any less hard; in fact, Coverdale’s commitment to what made 80s metal awesome while acknowledging that his own life has changed remarkably since he started making that music is what makes the whole album work.

Look out Sheryl Crow; this is the new sound of adult contemporary.