The biggest problem I had with hair metal was the awful, awful production:
Guitars so trebly that even distortion sounded glossy, nothing like a real guitar
Bass almost inaudiable
Drums tinny and heavily compressed
Layering every ballad in gunky synths that sounded like rejects from a Peter Cetera album
Compare it to the hard rock before and after, it sounds so soft and watered down–closer to synth pop than any real rock.
No way! Dio could never look like a hair metal frontman, thank god!! 
And his music was about metal topics, not chix and partying.
Def Leppard seems to be a topic. To be clear, they wore a hair metal crown for the bulk of the 80’s. If folks don’t see Pour Some Sugar On Me as pure, unadulterated hair metal, we need a whole 'nother thread.
It seems to be important to differentiate whether the band is a pure hair band, or adopted hair. Heart would be a classic Hair Adopter - long legacy prior, then a big Hair phase, from which they thankfully recovered. With Def - I dunno: not much legacy prior to MTV; huge MTV darlings and pop-metal/crossover hits - their relationship with Mutt Lange leading up to Mutt crossing over and blowing up Shania Twain in Country - they were targeting huge commercial video-metal pop success.
I respect and enjoy a lot of their work and much of it stands up well to this day. And as a band, they have endured and evolved and have had a really great career. But yeah: totally Hair Metal. Joe Elliott may not have boofed his hair or worn make-up, but if that is the fine line being drawn…meh.
[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]
I too, question the inclusion of Slayer as hair-metal. Have you ever listened to them?
While I would concede that hair band is about looks, it is also about musical style and lyrics.
For me Def Leppard were aiming at pure ‘rock’ (I seem to recall Mott the Hoople was their favourite band) but I would categorise them as pop / hard rock. As a British Band they are the obvious successors to the criminally underrated UFO.
I think Def Leppard are best summed up as a band that get lumped in with metal / hard rock but themselves don’t worry if people think they aren’t hard enough. As opposed to many metal bands, particularly back in their early era, where not being hard enough or being caught overdubbing live albums, or using keyboards or… Whatever. Was such a crime. Def Leppard never got caught up in the struggle to be harder, faster, louder or whatever.
However I don’t really consider them hair metal. I think hair metal is a very American thing.
Now if you REALLY want to look for a band that has Led Zepplin influences, is British but have an overpowering aroma of hair I would suggest looking at The Darkness. Very late on the scene for Hair Metal but they have hair, wear spandex leotards, embrace being naff (to use a British word)…
TCMF-2L
First of all: yay UFO! Their live album Strangers in the Night, is a high point of my high school metal years.
But their “heirs” if they had any, were Iron Maiden, not Leppard. Melodic, but complex songs and Schenker-style lead work.
Zep had a heavy influence on VH, who in turn had a heavy influence on the hair bands. Do you disagree with that?"
Exactly! It was the overwhelming success of Def Leppard’s meticulously produced and radio-friendly Pyromania in early '83 that made everybody want to do something similar - albeit with added eyeliner and hair spray. That makes them the parents of High Hair, but not necessarily High Hair themselves.
Agreed that Pour Some Sugar on Me has a sound that fit right in at the height of Hair, but that only tells me that Def Lep was really good at making songs that were commercially successful
So where does a band like W.A.S.P. fit in?
If a record is sonically indistinguishable from a recognizable stylistic genre, it doesn’t really mean anything to insist that it’s not of that genre.
I didn’t think they just had an “aroma of hair,” I thought they were very self-consciously imitating to the point of almost parodying American mid-80s hair bands. Is this not the case?
Only if you define that genre by sound only.
What else is there? Music is sound. Non-sound attributes of a musical artist can signify genre, but they can’t be the genre.
No one you mentioned fits your own criteria.
Ratt only had 1 really big hit single, and it wasn’t a ballad. But they had 5 Albums that went at least Gold, 4 were Platinum, 2 Multi-Platinum. A 6 year commercial run.
Poison had around 80 top-40 hits. OK, I exaggerate. They had 10 (w/ 6 top-10s), and that’s leaving out “I Want Action” because it only hit #50. I guess the 1 ballad would be the #1 smash “Every Rose…” but then you have the #4 “Something to Believe In.” Plus 3 Multi-Platinum albums.
Warrant- Shorter-lived and not quite as big as Poison. They were a little later, so only managed 2 Multi-Platinum Albums and the final Gold while hair metal was dying. Their ballad was #2 “Heaven,” But you can’t think of Warrant without thinking of Janie Lane as “The ‘Cherry Pie’ guy.” If you were alive in 1990 you remember the video with his future wife and unavoidable #10 single. Plus, you had “Saw Red” and “Down Boys.” Lesser singles like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” were notable.
Cinderella- 3 Platinum Albums, 2 were 3X. They do have 1 standout single that went #12, but they also had a #13 and 6 other charting singles, and managed to get over 1 million people in the US to buy their music during 3 different album cycles over 4 years.
Most of these acts had their peak sometime between 1986-1990, and most of the bands mentioned in this thread that also were around during that time and played similar music could be considered “Hair Bands.”
Since I was born in the late 70s, all of these bands/songs were unavoidable when I was a kid, despite not seeking out any of their music or owning any of it. One hit wonders they were not. I think you can say Poison wasn’t exactly Van Halen, or even GnR, but they were huge for about 4 years. So, that’s not the way to differentiate it.
A big problem with UFO is the constantly changing line ups led to different sounds. In the Schenker era they could lay a claim to heavy metal although even then they were always much more of a hard rock band than a metal band. After Schenker left they were much lighter - although for me still great.
I remain happy that UFO in their post Schenker period (I was going to say ‘Late Period’ but Mogg kept them going for years and years with that Japanese guitarist) were a British Rock band with a fixation on America (look at the constant americanisms in the lyrics) and a radio friendly melodic sound. Def Leppard were also a British Rock band, never metal, with a fixation on America and a radio friendly melodic sound.
Now Iron Maiden began as BLATANT Judas Priest wannabes and like Priest were always considered Heavy Metal. Maiden stepped out of the shadow of Priest pretty rapidly by developing their sound and adding the signature time changes in their songs. The Priest, for me, blew it after the Unleashed in the East live album (in my opinion the greatest metal album of all time) first pursuing a simplistic (musically and lyrically) metal sound. Then they concentrated on slavishly going for a generic thrash metal sound.
Ironically Priest had inspired thrash metal with their twin guitars and fast paced songs such as Exciter. But Unleashed In The East had so much more range, styles, colours, sounds, moods… ‘Thrash’ was the tiniest part of their Unleashed era performance. But once they started concentrating on thrash, following those they had previously inspired (round about Screaming For Vengeance) they lost me.
TLDR: UFO and Def Leppard are rock or hard rock. Maiden are metal.
TCMF-2L
I did say an overpowering aroma of hair.
To be honest I never really understood The Darkness. They had some technical, musical ability within the band, a singer with an reasonably impressive range but they weren’t taking themselves especially seriously.
I think there was a lot of parody in there but I don’t they were deliberately aping hair bands as such. I think Queen, Led Zepplin, Kiss and Van Halen were all in there as more primary influences. I think they were aiming for generally ‘over the top’ and a ‘rocking good time’ and became a sort of parallel evolutionary line to Hair
My goodness. ‘Parallel evolutionary line to Hair’ - Pretentious? Moi?
TCMF-2L
I always thought **Dokken **and particularly George Lynch were a cut above as hair metal bands went. I thought Operation Mindcrime by Queensrÿche was pretty good stuff.
My first reaction to seeing The Darkness: “How on earth did I live through the late 80’s/early 90’s without ever encountering THIS?!?!?”
Ironically, that was also my first reaction to Minecraft.
The thread seems to be asking if any hair bands were good while asserting that if a band was good, that means it wasn’t a hair band. 
Yeah, that was my opening point. Oh, and I did mix up **Slayer **with somebody else. :eek:
Back in the day I loved seeing an interview with Warrant’s Jani Lane regarding how much he hated Cherry Pie. It’s a little sad to watch now, because he eventually suffered severe depression and drank himself to death. And before this he did say that he was just very depressed on the day of that interview and didn’t really feel that much animosity towards the song. Cherry Pie is often considered the last gasp of hair metal. I saw another interview with Warrant where they said that not long into the 90s they were still on top of the world as far as the record company was concerned. Then, after a vacation, they went into the office and Nirvana and grunge had suddenly hit big almost overnight. And now they couldn’t get the time of day.
Ratt and Cinderella are what I refer to as ‘greatest hits’ bands. Simply, I only have their greatest hits CD and both are pretty good. Although both bands are classic hair metal I’d say Ratt came closer to being a more serious hard rock band. I wasn’t particularly crazy about their big hit Round 'n Round all that much, but *Lay It Down *and Way Cool Jr are good hard rock songs.
I never liked Poison** at all**. To me they were a joke, an embarrassment. Skid Row too (always though pretty-boy Sebastian Bach looked like Darryl Hannah*!*)
I am a big fan of Def Leppard so I always like to clarify things when they get hit with the, seemingly accurate but ultimately not, moniker of having been ‘hair metal’…
I would put them with early Twisted Sister and Lizzy Borden as more of a “shock rock” band of a very specific type that was briefly popular around 1984 or so. These bands were obviously influenced image-wise by Alice Cooper, the music was aggressively heavy with no love ballads, and their lyrics tended to be more explicit than most of the bands we’re talking about (W.A.S.P.'s debut single notoriously has an f-bomb right in the title). I suppose Motley Crue on Shout at the Devil might fit in here as well.
As metal got more commercialized in the next couple of years this little subgenre got squeezed out fast. Twisted Sister and Motley Crue got more radio-friendly in a hurry and W.A.S.P. got a little softer too by their third album, but not that much - here’s a single from it. This isn’t really ticking a lot of the “hair metal” checkboxes for me so I would say W.A.S.P. were just plain metal. Contrast with Twisted Sister who were putting out this as a lead single by 1987. That one ticks most of the hair metal boxes for me.
Well, Van Halen were around before “Hair metal” was even a concept, so it’d be hard to include them.
But why isn’t GnR a hair band? They sure had hair. They had a standard hair band presentation and arrangement - singer, two guitars, bass and drums - and sang hair band songs. What sets them apart from hair bands you never think much about anymore, like Ratt, is that they were REALLY good.
If we dismiss a band that’s really good as “not a hair band” then it becomes a circular argument; no hair bands can be good because a band that is good isn’t a hair band. But GnR was absolutely a hair band.
Def Leppard was pretty good, too - not as good as GnR, but quite talented and they had a number of really good songs - and was absolutely a hair metal band.
I would disagree, and I would say so because the other defining element of ‘hair metal’ was: Wardrobe!**
Along with big, poofy, stylized hairdos hair metal bands all had similarly flamingly-styled wardrobes. If they wanted to be seen as more ‘metal’ it was spikes & leather, but usually it was, well, just horrible 80s clothes. Bright colors, big shoulders, long flowing layered jackets & sleeves, leather boots etc. Bands like Van Halen, Def Leppard and Guns 'n Roses just wore mostly regular clothes. Sometimes leather jeans or jackets etc. but just off-the-rack stuff. And never, EVER makeup*!* That’s the key to why hair metal sucked, the bands appearance was always just as important (and often more so) as their music. If it wasn’t for the dominant 80s visual medium of MTV, ‘hair metal’ bands would never have been successful because their music alone just wasn’t good enough for FM radio.