I’m curious as to what the opinion of SD is on Hair Metal. I’m also curious…How many here were say, 16 and above during the height of Hair Metal (roughly 1984-1992)? I’m curious to hear different generation’s perspectives on the various bands and the scene as it grew, changed, evolved and finally died.
I’m curious to see if there are any differences in the perspectives of any Baby Boomers here, versus that of any Gen Xer’s here.
I turned 18 in 1984 and I hated Hair Metal from the get-go. It was always regarded as “not really metal” and even “not really rock” by me and my friends because it was just pop songs with a little more guitar than usual. Eventually the over-the-top outfits and makeup were their own thing to ridicule and detest; that kind of shit is what poseurs do and wear.
Hair metal was a small handful of talented musicians, a smaller number of talented songwriters and a bunch of freaking idiots who just wanted to party and be famous and be on stage. Nothing good came from hair metal.
Hair metal was awesome. Well, sometimes. What was actually awesome in the 80s was hard rock/metal, and there was usually a direct inverse relationship between amount of hairspray and makeup and music quality.
I grew up during that time, I was 16 in 1990. MTV was at its peak at least as far as showing videos went and that style of music made for the most outlandish music videos possible. It was glorious.
As far as the musical quality went, there was a lot that was worthwhile. Musicianship always had to be top notch to be taken seriously in the scene, and if you couldn’t bring it live you didn’t last long. While there was a lot of nonsense and excess, that doesn’t excuse what came afterwards: grunge musicians who prided themselves on sucking in the studio, not giving a shit live, writing lyrics primarily about misery, and yet making sure it was “relevant” to the musical trends of the time so they could afford to buy drugs.
What’s funny is that the better bands from the 80s still sell out arenas and most of the grunge artists that supposedly supplanted them are literally dead. There will never be a grunge version of Rocklahoma, where all the best bands from the period get together and entertain their fans. I guess that’s one reason people remember it so fondly: it came, it didn’t wear out its welcome, and then it shuffled off and no one ever had to see their heroes get old.
I was 18 in 1988 and was in college during the era of grunge and I like both genres well enough, more nostalgia’s sake for hair metal, and even then, a lot of that music doesn’t hold up very well today. In addition to trite lyrics and limited musicianship, I don’t think many of the hair bands had quite as much staying power as you suggest.
Still, acts like Dokken for instance I can still listen to, mostly because of George Lynch. Motley Crue isn’t too bad. But stuff like all the Poisons, Wingers, etc…blech.
I do take issue with your assertion about the quality of live and studio material of grunge acts though. Maybe you’re referencing some of the more obscure acts that were like that, but certainly Nirvana, AIC, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam were all good to great bands, as was STP later in the game. I count Alice as one of my favorite bands ever, with some quite memorable songs (and I love me some Jerry Cantrell, who had a few good solo songs himself).
I had always tended more towards “truer” metal even early on though, like Maiden, Judas Priest and bands like that, then onto Metallica (until about 1992) and Pantera after that. Metal has become a confusing landscape now with all it’s sub-genres and much of the music I don’t get or care for, particularly egregious to me is anything with “cookie monster” vocals. Pantera to me, especially the first few records, was the ULTIMATE evolution of that type of music. All great players, great songs, Anselmo could shriek or sing, dark subject matter…the very best. And Dimebag ranks up there as one of the very best metal guitarists of all time, with a very…unique…tone.
Yeah, I think that hair metal was a transitionary period when metal started to move away from the 1970s and blues influences and became more of a true genre itself. The subgenres are just evidence of how much creativity there is these days and no one is concerned about making a ‘relevant’, otherwise known as ‘commercial’, recording anymore.
The rise of hair metal and then of grunge also had a lot of to do with the power of MTV at the time. MTV pretty much made both genres, as the commercial success of both on radio and in album and ticket sales still paled in comparison to pop music. MTV was pushing those styles hard. Some people say “rock is dead”, but rock actually died in the disco era commercially, MTV just gave it new lease on life for awhile. But once MTV lost interest in music videos it all just sorta went away.
Hair metal turned into any of the varieties of Emo rock. The hair is still all important.
I was almost 30 in 1984, Hair Metal was largely derided among us Boomers initially, but there was no clear successor to 60s Rock so a good Hair band might be more appealing than the alternatives.
Are you trying to say that Madonna and Debbie Gibson weren’t setting Boomers’ world on fire?
Even though Van Halen was kinda the root influence of hair metal, they weren’t really considered hair metal themselves.
As for Hair Metal, not my thing. I am always going to pay attention to guitar oriented stuff, but the whole Cherry Pie video, lead singer with a girl’s name, and EVH wannabee lead player got old fast. If I don’t listen for 10 years, some songs are fun.
When G n’ R came along, they were a like a breath of Aerosmith’s first tour bus.
SDMB thread: Were any of the Hair Bands in the 1980s any good?
I was sixteen in 1986. We called the stuff we liked (Ratt, Ozzy, Iron Maiden) heavy metal. The groups we didn’t like were dismissed as being “hair bands”, meaning all their worth was in their makeup and hairstyles (Poison being the ultimate example of the type).
These days it all gets lumped together as hair metal, I guess. I still like it, it’s even good to hear an old Cinderella song now.
I’m not much of a fan of music, but there were a few hair metal bands I thought were talented, some I thought were overrated, most of the rest I ignored.
Talented: Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Guns n Roses
Overrated: Europe, Twisted Sister
Etc: Motley Crue, Poison, Van Halen
Click on crafterman’s link and check out the “map of metal” in the thread. It’s pretty cool.
You sir, hit on two of my favorite bands. Actually Twisted Sisters albums are not all that great, but I do really love some of their songs. Europe on the other hand had two hard rock albums out before Final Countdown that were good, and their stuff from the last 15 or so years is REALLY good.
Is it still working? I tried looking a couple of hours ago and it said the link wasn’t valid.
I turned 18 in 1989. Not much I can add to what everyone else has said. We definitely made a distinction between “good rock” and hair metal (we called it “glam rock” at the time). The only people I knew who liked bands such as Poison or Warrant were little kids, under 12 years old. Such as my little brother, who later came to his senses.
I was a 13-year-old boy in 1990, so I thought it was amazing.
Of course, the next fall I was in high school and Nirvana broke, but I quickly moved past the hair metal and grunge and went harder and darker, first with the big-name thrash outfits i.e. Metallidethraxslayer, then on to “newer” bands like Pantera (who had been around for a decade but didn’t break until '92), and from there to the local underground punk/hardcore/metalcore circuit.
I still have all that hair metal stuff, though. Some of it holds up better than others, but I still enjoy the stuff I enjoyed back then, even knowing it’s terrible.
I followed the second link posted. The URL is mapofmetal.com
It’s freaking sweet! I love stuff like this.
Sweet, it was my browser, they changed some of the settings at work and it doesn’t work now. :mad:
I was 24 in 1984. Hair bands were poseurs, pure and simple.
But, even the worst of them could (not always, though) have a good song.
Maybe we need a list. Which are the hair bands? I don’t put Van Halen in there, nor Def Leppard. I wouldn’t have thought Dokken either, but maybe?
I think you had to start as a hair band, not morph into one. You get the legacy exemption (1984, I’m talking about you…). 
I disliked most hair metal: Poison’s first song was pretty good but everything else in the genre sounded the same after that. I didn’t lump Def Leppard into the category at the time, and I liked them, but I no longer do as I have outgrown them much like some people claim to have outgrown Zeppelin. Many other types of music, like 70s glam rock and 70s/early 80s arena rock I still don’t lump in with Hair Metal even though they had big hair.