I agree with this and was about the post the same thing until I read this post. Warrant and Poison at the top as the most Hair Band (80s Power Pop, is what I’ve always called it). Skid Row I’d put closer to the middle. They were harder (although they had some ballads too) and had the long hair, but not quite the teased hairsprayed dos of the others. See: Youth Gone Wild
Bon Jovi was very much a hair band, but without the glam/makeup of some of the others too so I’d put them much closer to Def Lep. Maybe Bon Jovi, Crew, Skid Row, Def Leppard?
Ha ha, too true. A couple of years ago I was at my mother’s for the holidays and my younger sister and I wound up watching a rerun of SNL with musical guest Skid Row. My sister said “This is from 1991? Where’s their flannel?” I said “No no no, this isn’t grunge. You’re witnessing the twilight of hair metal. The skintight pants are the big give away. By 1992 this would pretty much all be over.”
She was actually embarrassed that she couldn’t tell a grunge band from a hair metal band at a glance, but Skid Row wasn’t the “hairiest” of the hair bands and by 1991 hair metal wasn’t as flamboyant as it had been. In terms of their actual hairstyles then in 1991 there was little difference between Skid Row and Soundgarden* or Pearl Jam (all links go to YouTube), but grunge bands didn’t wear tight leather/spandex pants and hair metal bands didn’t wear shorts that were too big for them.
As for the OP, my first adolescent interest in rock music coincides with the rise of grunge so I remember hair metal primarily as a ridiculous dying dinosaur of a genre, but a while back I was listening to the Spinal Tap soundtrack and thought “Whatever else you may say about hair metal, it was at least FUN.” Spinal Tap was of course a parody, but I can see a certain charm to the straightforward “Girls! Beer! Let’s party!” attitude in a lot of real hair metal. Sure, it’s not deep, but listening to rock music doesn’t always have to involve seriously contemplating the plight of the homeless. I still don’t care for hair metal, but I’ll give it the faint praise of saying I can see some entertainment value in it. (And not just the “point and laugh” kind.)
*I feel it only fair to mention that the members of Soundgarden hated this video and considered it hideously embarrassing. But this was what they looked like on MTV in late '91/early '92.
I don’t think it was the hairstyles they considered embarrassing, but the chains and flames and all. Apparently they had been led to believed that there would be other footage making up the bulk of the video.
