ZZ Top
Cinderella hands down.
Best Musically? Def Leppard, but the pre-hair-metal “Pyromania”
Best-All-Around-Cheesy-Hair-Metal-Image? Stryper
Best Used-To-Be-Black-Metal-But-Went-The-Way-Of-Hair-For-An-Album-Best-Forgotten? Celtic Frost
Oh good lord I actually listened to that album once. Second-worst album in metal history.
Actually, think that hair metal and non-hair metal (whatever you call it) are really the same thing except for the lyrics. From what I remember,
Hair Metal - songs about love, sex and relationships (and has more of a female audience)
Other Metal - songs about madness, violence and pestilence!
“Best” and “hair metal” do not belong in the same sentence.
Having said that, I was once in the Student’s Union at Leeds University, during the '80s, and a TV in one room was showing a performance by Twisted Sister. I left, and went into the other TV lounge, and, by some weird coincidence, Whitesnake was playing on the TV there. The difference was like night and day. I was never any sort of fan, but the contrast was obvious and instructive. Whitesnake were not doing anything very interesting or original, but they seemed to be expressing real emotions, and were clearly still in touch with rock’s roots in the blues. Twisted Sister (quite apart from their sheer visual ugliness) were a horrible, fake, meaningless noise.
I really don’t think they belonged in the same genre.
OK, I’ll bite…
What was the worst?!
A friend of mine’s brother was (is?) the drummer for Warrant, so I’m gonna vote that way.
This is a tough one! You could break this one down into several different criteria.
I played in several rock/metal bands in the 80’s so I consider hair bands to be the ones that were all looks, clothes and hair with limited talent and limited success.
According to your list, White Lion seems to lead in all these areas.
It’s pretty difficult to be a metal band in the 80s and not have been “hair metal” to some degree.
Some bands like Van Halen, Guns & Roses and Aerosmith managed to transcend the “hair metal” image towards the late 90s. Post David Lee Roth Van Halen went for a bit less outrageous look and albums like For Unlawfull Carnel Knowledge and G&Rs Use Your Illision double albums were popular well into the 90s after the hair metal scene disappeared. Aerosmith made all those music videos with his daughter and Alicia Silverstone, including that 2 hour long one directed by Michael Bay. Bon Jovi has also managed to stay somewhat relevant by adopting a less “glam band” look through the past 20 years.
This poll makes me happy, because I was trying to decide between Guns n Roses, Def Leppard, and Bon Jovi, and when I saw the results these guys are the ones doing the best!
I voted GnR, but I agree they’re really not hair metal. Yes, they were based in Los Angeles in the mid-to-late 1980s, but there was nothing “glam” about them, which I think is the thing that defines a hair metal band - not just having a lot of big hair, but also having it permed while wearing a unitard.
I was surprised to see G’n’R in the poll, of course I voted for them because it was the only good rock’n’roll band in the poll (except for Whitesnake, who release a couple of really nice records before going “hair”, but I believe that was still during the '70s); anyhow, then I was going to write about the exact same thing as Spartan above.
“Pink Bubbles Go Ape” by Helloween.
It’s a Catch-22. Had I not included them the outcry would have been, “What, no Guns ‘n’ Roses?!”
Fact is, no matter what your individual definition of “hair metal” may be, they were a humongous part of that era and included in the genre at the time whether they conformed to the formula or not.
Actually, after re-reading this list, I’d have to say that Ratt is probably the best of the bands on here that in my mind represent true hair metal (meaning I’m excluding GnR and Van Halen). They probably weren’t quite as commercially successful as Motley Crue, but I think all around they were better players (especially at the lead guitar spot, which is a crucial component of a hair metal band) and wrote equally successful, schlocky “Girls Girls Girls”-type songs.