A lot of them used the same look, (big hair, flashy clothes), since that was in style at the time, but I would define hair and/or glam metal as a band where the primary emphasis was on their looks rather than their music, like Poison. (And yeah, Def Leopard were totally hair metal)
And yeah, I’d say Van Halen were definitely metal, although they were less flashy after Roth left.
I mentally gave my 16 year old self a phone call. He wants to fight anyone that thinks Def Leppard and Van Halen are metal.
I am one of those people, to me Van Halen, Bon Jovi and Guns N’ Roses could have been “hair metal”.
But thanks to post here I now mostly know how to distinguish. But I don’t think all 80’s bands were hair metal, say U2, INXS, Duran Duran, Bauhaus etc.
To answer the question, some of it was good, very little of it was great, and like all genres there was the trash. If one really likes that genre, then I guess you would find greatness in the music. As for guitar in the middle, well most songs have a middle instrumental solo regardless of music type. As it were rock music, guitar was to be expected.
By the way I think Poison and Whitesnake were “hair”.
Motley Crue holds up really well. Solid pop-metal that never fails to make me crank the volume. I dismissed them back in the day, however.
My 20 year old self would drop dead if she heard me say the following: I’ve come to really like Poison. At the time, they represented the worst of hair metal - a pale imitation that was so watered down that it didn’t even deserve the venerable label of “metal.”
Now I see things differently. Poison wasn’t a weak metal band. They were never a metal band in the first place! They were power pop with metallic stylings. They made big goofy fun crowd-pleasing pop songs while riding the wave of the hair metal craze. If you can’t enjoy Unskinny Bop, there is something wrong with your soul. (Never mind that atrocious orange guitar solo. Oof)
Motley Crue is the one that came to mind for me, too, especially the album “Shout at the Devil.” I agree that Van Halen isn’t hair metal, but it does often get lumped into these discussions (along with bands like Guns N Roses, which I also don’t feel are hair metal) and they certainly did influence the hair metal bands.
Def Leppard is not a hair band, it is a torn jeans band.
They are still touring, one-armed drummer and all.
I shall group the bands that are undeniably hair bands under the label “High Hair.”
I see a clear progression leading to the ascendance of High Hair.
Led Zeppelin --> Van Halen --> Def Leppard --> High Hair.
Van Halen was too early to be High Hair. It was all their fault, however.
Def Leppard was the immediate precursor to High Hair, and therefore not truly part of that group. Given the multi-year hiatus necessitated by drummer Rick Allen’s car crash, they re-emerged at the height of the hair era. The chronological overlap leads to some confusion, but they were not High Hair.
Bon Jovi started out in a rather hair-ish direction with their first single, Runaway, but their massive breakthrough album a couple of years later, Slippery When Wet, showcased a distinctly non-metal sound. Not High Hair.
Guns’n’Roses were the beginning of the end for High Hair. Once Appetite for Destruction came out, High Hair just couldn’t last - they’re post-Hair.
So 1987 was an interesting year. We had monster albums from pre-hair Def Lep, post-hair G’n’R, and Poison recording the quintessential singles that would define the era. Things started getting more interesting in the world of hard rock and metal at that point, paving the way for Nirvana to come along and change the whole scene within a few years. High Hair was a pretty short-lived fad in the end.
Hair Metal seems like a euphemism of Metal One Hit Wonder to me.
Ratt and Poison and Warrant and Cinderella fit in quite nicely. Van Halen and Motley Crue do not.
Van Halen started in the 70s and weren’t a copy of anything. I have been listening to lot of Van Halen, mostly from DLR era, and I hear NOTHING but virtuoso performances. Everybody knew about Eddie and DLR, but godammit, Alex was phenomenal. I have grown to appreciate Michael Anthony more and more.
What do we need for a Hair Metal Band. Let’s start a checklist.
Anything else?
You were a huge success on MTV, within that pop-metal scene. Trixter, Give it to Me Good. That stupid song where a guy uses a chainsaw during the lead. And hell yes, Whitesnake with their gal Tawny straddle dancing across a couple of Jags.
It helps if the lead singer had a girl’s/ambi first name. Jani, Taime, Lani.
Yes, Def Leppard are hair metal. Ultimately, any pop-metal that emphasized hammy/glammy video success and crossover appeal during the '80’s was in the mix. Having songs about girls, needing them, missing them, and seeing them objectified are all big topics - something “true” metal bands sneer at.
Van Halen were not hair metal, but were ground zero for the emergence of hair metal, because their success in '78 is what made LA’s Sunset the place to sign bands. VH laid a foundation of deep respect in their fans for Eddie’s playing and DLR’s frontman mastery before MTV popped. They had a headstart and were seen as the Originators.
Green Bean - sorry; I can’t follow any of that. Led Zeppelin has nothing to do with hair metal. Back in the day, when the term Heavy Metal was first getting worked out, Zep was categorized as Heavy Metal alongside Black Sabbath. As the New Wave of British Heavy Metal emerged in the late 70’s, and Metallica and VH split into very different directions, Zep has been typically grouped in Hard Rock/Blues influenced Rock, whereas Black Sabbath is ground zero for metal, heavy or otherwise, with Metallica as founders of thrash and which is the root for an infinite variety of metal subcategories.
$.02
I think you have to distinguish between pure hair metal bands and bands that adopted some of the stylings of hair metal bands because that was the era.
Pure hair metal bands: Poison, Europe, Slaughter, Stryper, Danger Danger, White Lion
Bands that adopted the style: Bon Jovi, Kiss, Def Leppard, Winger, Whitesnake.
The bands that were purely of the hair metal craze didn’t really have anything going on but the image and some good hooks, while the bands that were around before and temporarily adopted the style, or bands that came in late and were shoehorned into the genre by record companies or poor judgment tend to have a lot of non-hair metal worthwhile material to listen to.
I’m a big fan of the genre so every band should be judged on their own merits, but one point I think has to be made is that any genre that is supported primarily by commercial concerns rather than artistic is going to end up as a punchline sooner or later. Almost all of these hair metal bands consisted of great musicians and songwriters who lived in an era when selling millions of records and doing stadium tours if you came up with the right formula was a very real possibility, whereas just making an honest, workmanlike rock record may have gotten you critical acclaim but not much else. So they bought their aerosol and sang about girls and cars. Once the audience for that dried up, they either did one of three things:
On the bright side, there was tons of innovation in guitar soloing since everyone was trying to top each other. I don’t think there’s been a new idea in guitar playing since 1991 when Steve Vai’s Passion and Warfare came out, so the era isn’t without artistic merit.
And one more thing: hair metal doesn’t hold up well because it was slickly produced commercial music that didn’t really come naturally to very many of these guys. Most of those guys were into the bluesy stuff, the Beatles, real heavy metal, or early 80s glam. In 2015, there are a lot of bands playing 80s-style hair metal, complete with the image, and guess what? It rules, because it’s real stuff to them. They are writing and playing the music they love and won’t make a cent off it and they don’t care.
I agree that Van Halen was never metal, they’ve always just been a hard rock band. But since Eddie pioneered the guitar playing style that every other guitarist in hair metal tried to imitate, he got lumped in with them.
Whitesnake though did get metal in 1986 with the self-titled album. Whitesnake may not be a hair metal band since most of their work is not of that era, but their biggest selling albums were totally hair metal.
I don’t know. Poison were not a “one hit wonder” to me. It looks like they only have one number one hit (and I would not have guessed correctly which of their hits was the only one to reach number one,) but they have six top ten hits (“Talk Dirty to Me,” “Nothing But a Good Time,” “Unskinny Bop,” “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” “Your Mama Don’t Dance” and “Something to Believe In.”) That’s well beyond one-hit wonder territory for me. (Oh, and it’s “Every Rose” that was the number one. I would have guessed “Unskinny Bop.”) Also, three of their albums peaked at the top three on the Billboard charts.
I wouldn’t even put Motley Crue as a one-hit wonder. Hell, “Kickstart My Heart” only made it to #27, and I’d consider it their big hit, even though stuff like “Home Sweet Home” and “Smokin in the Boys Room” charted higher.
what is that? Had no time for that shit Madchester was breaking open, and breaking me 
BooYeah! Stone Roses - Fools Gold(Full Version) - YouTube
It’s kind of a self-regulating thing. If a group was called a ‘hair band’ it meant that their music was not taken very seriously by music critics or die-hard metal and/or rock & roll fans (regardless of how successful they may have been). They were pop bands. And they were not only pop bands, they were *gimmicky *pop bands. And ridiculously big hair was the defining gimmick.
The following were definitely all Hair Bands:
[ul]
[li]Poison[/li][li]Skid Row[/li][li]Quiet Riot[/li][li]Twisted Sister[/li][li]Warrant[/li][li]Winger[/li][li]Slayer[/li][li]Bon Jovi[/li][li]Cinderella[/li][li]Whitesnake[/li][li]Great White[/li][li]Ratt[/li][li]Any girl-lead-singer metal bands[/li][/ul]
Skid Row, Bon Jovi and Winger were all basically pretty-boy lead singers that the girls could swoon over. Poison, Twisted Sister and Quiet Riot were so gimmicky that they bordered on being open parodies of metal bands. The only one I would say that had some real rock & roll chops would be Ratt. Also it pays to mention the original gimmick hair metal band, namely KISS.
I would NOT consider the following to be ‘Hair Bands’:
[ul]
[li]Def Leppard[/li][li]Van Halen[/li][li]Guns 'n Roses[/li][li]Tesla[/li][li]Cheap Trick[/li][li]Ozzy Osbourne[/li][li]Metallica (blasphemy!)[/li][/ul]
And although 80s Motley Crue certainly fit the mold of a hair band, they kind of stand out a little because part of being a hair band was ultimately being innocuous and ‘kid-friendly’. And 80s Motley Crue was the very definition of sex, drugs and rock & roll excess. Also by the 90s (Dr. Feelgood and later) they started putting more effort into their music rather than just their look and image. IMO musically I think their best sounding album was the one they did with replacement lead singer John Carobi.
Something very telling about Guns 'n Roses: Although Axl Rose has a ridiculously huge coif in the *Welcome to the Jungle *videothis was their very first music video so his look in it was decided by the record company’s marketing dept to match the ‘hair metal’ trend. He never appeared that way before or after.
And Def Leppard never had ‘big’ hair. Long yes, but not big & teased. And they wore regular clothes, never spikes or leather. And, most importantly, they put an enormous amount of effort into their music. And as lead singer Joe Elliot said, “We’re as much Duran Duran as we are Led Zeppelin”.
My emphasis.
Did you perhaps mean Slaughter?
Hehee, no. Hair metal predates the Manchester sound by five years or so.
Zeppelin and Van Halen certainly were proto-Hair without knowing it. Without Zep, the 12 string wouldn’t be used so often in the ballads. And as WM observed VH made LA the place where you went to hire bands like that. Aerosmith has a non-zero influence on them as well.
Motley Crue’s Too Fast for Love in '81 was probably the first Hair Metal record, with Def Leppard’s High 'n Dry being the first crossover act into Hair Metal. I’d actually say that they’re both the high water mark for the style, and the pool was draining from then on. I don’t know if I’d actually call either of those records good, but I don’t actually loathe them.
I don’t think that quote says what Joe thinks it’s saying. Has he looked at Duran Duran? Pretty much hair without the metal.
Yeah, please please tell me that’s a typo.
I like Dio. Do they count?
As in “Holy Diver” and “The Last in Line?”
Nope, just good ol’ Heavy Metal.