Thanks for the explanation. I always considered WASP at least quasi-hair because they were more style than substance, but yeah, I guess they don’t really fit. Just a particularly cheesy metal band of a particular era.
Dammit. Now I Wanna Be Somebody is stuck in my head. That’s a catchy tune.
You didn’t read the rest of my post:
Yes. Remember Guns 'n Roses didn’t break until 1988. Hair metal was still around, but it had peaked and was on the decline. GnR was most definitely a return to true, hard core rock & roll and a death knell for big hair. So-called ‘grunge’ (for lack of a better name) was the absolute final nail in its coffin. Once bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, and Metallica’s ‘Black Album’ came out hair metal looked really, really stupid.
Somebody ought to draw a Venn diagram of this stuff.
I always imagined hair metal to be where pop and metal intersected. Bands like Poison were way too pop-sounding to be metal, like say Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica, etc… There were variations in skill and sound among hair bands; some were more metal, some were more pop.
Bands like Van Halen and GnR were more (IMO) in the rock/metal intersection, but caught some drifting hairspray and glitter from the hair metal bands.
First, remember that, as a wise man said, “90% of everything is crap.” That’s as true of hair metal as it is of rap, country, punk, disco, blues or folk.
But there was a lot of very good stuff in that genre, if you look for it. Cinderella remains my favorite of the bunch, but Ratt and Motley Crue had a strong pop sensibility, and they recorded a lot of fun songs.
And the key word is fun. The hair bands rarely even pretended to have anything important to say. They wanted to rock out, become big stars, make a ton of money and sleep with thousands of groupies. So did Cobain and Vedder, of course, but those guys seemed more legit, somehow, because they acted as if they conflicted about stardom.
My tuppence on Def Leppard:
In all fairness, if VH get a pass on being hair metal because they predate the genre, then DL could also get a pass. They formed in 1977, their early work is pretty clearly NWOBHM and photos of them prior to about 1983 showcase them as archetypal, style clueless, Northern British Blokes (and I speak as an archetypal, style clueless, Northern British Bloke, so I can spot them pretty easily). They struggled to shrug that off even later in their career as well, really. Check out the original video for Pour Some Sugar On Me and it’s based in a British terraced house that is getting knocked down, with horrible carpets, a terrible fireplace and woodchip wallpaper. When Love And Hate Collide is post Hair Metal but they all look like they’ve given up and gone and got the greyest thing they can find from The Gap and have just lifted themselves off the sofa, torn themselves away from their can of beer, a cig and the football on the telly, to play the song - like my Dad or something. They’ve always had the frisson of uncool Northern England about them - not that this stops them being Hair Metal necessarily of course, but I would argue their image was more nuanced than that.
That they slid into more commercially successful rock/metal that had a load of hooks in it, and some LA stylist got hold of them and told them what to wear means they probably slid into hair metal from a style and music point of view - but, to be honest, I am not seeing the distinction between this description and what happened to VH.
A lot of this is to do with the label “Hair Metal” though - it’s a pejorative and people don’t want bands they like tarred with that brush. Well, fuck it, I’m reclaiming it. I like Def Leppard, The Darkness (far too late for Hair Metal’s heyday but 4 albums in and still knocking out silly but great tunes about Vikings invading East Anglia or what have you) and some of the other bands that have been mentioned in this thread and I don’t really care that they’re described as Hair Metal. They played songs that had great choruses in them. The Final Countdown’s on the Metal Gear Solid V soundtrack - it’s brilliant. Fuck the haters.
And frankly, whoever in the thread said that a scene could be described as 90% terrible, a couple of decent bands and maybe one or two stand outs is probably right. Those in the 10% from Hair Metal had more idea about what a winning chorus sounded like than most of what replaced them in the USA (Dave Matthews, Hootie and the Blowfish, grunge that isn’t Nirvana, Pearl Jam and maybe one or two others? Please).
Yeah, in 3D – and with a time-line, too, because there’s definitely a lot of overlap.
Just to throw some fodder into the discussion, I thought it might be useful to take notice of what was influencing the short-lived Hair Band era. It might help to illuminate some of the why’s and wherefore’s that affect inclusion or exclusion from the category.
Because musical styles are part of a continuum, it’s going to be difficult to determine precisely when the Hair Band era started and ended (if it ever ended) or morphed into something else. However,
As many have already pointed out, the genre was a fad (many say “short-lived and passing…”) and to me that speaks heavily of Pop music. Glam metal grew out of glam rock (Queen and early David Bowie) in which costuming and appearance were important factors in the artist(s) marketing package. But both were sub-genres of Rock. KISS, by the way, was filling arenas in the early 1970’s by cranking up the distortion and caricaturizing themselves to parody* the Glam scene.
Heavy Metal was around in the 70’s – with Born to be Wild cited as the first song to use the phrase, if not ignite the subgenre on its own.
But it was in the late 70’s and early 80’s in which the makers of Effects Pedls started producing and selling hardware which distorted sound (usually an electric guitar) to new levels – pun intended.
And, of course, it was in the late 1970’s that music videos became an increasingly story-driven medium (as opposed to simple concert captures or staged performances) that gave rise in 1980 to MTV (Music TeleVision), a station originally dedicated to just showing music videos and commercials for the young teens to watch endlessly and numb-out their brains. This new outlet for music distributors made appearance exponentially more important.
All of these factors converged to make distorted hard rock (i.e. Heavy Metal) and appearance/persona (Glam), and massive guitar distortion (FX processor technology), and video presentability (MTV) into the Hair Band/Hair Metal fad. Technology and prior trends made something new and diffeent that caught on for a short while.
Don’t forget, however, that there were other trends occurring on the radio waves. New Wave, New Age, Rockabilly, Dance, and Rap were getting more and more air play, as well. Some of it was driven by innovations in keyboard/synthesizer technology and some of it was just more attention to existing forms with older roots. But we’re not exploring those in this thread.
–G!
Everybody’s
Talkin’ bout
the new sound
Funny, but
It’s still Rock N Roll To Me!
…–Billy Joel
…It’s Still Rock N Roll to Me
…Glass Houses
*And while the Demon/Vampire, Space Alien, and Cat (later Fox, later ???) were clearly anti-glam characters/costumes, Paul Stanley’s – what? Lover? Star? – seemed to fit right into (perhaps it defined?) that I’m so pretty I even wear lipstick stereotype.
I’d say GNR is most definitely NOT hair metal.
Sure, Axl had big hair in the Welcome to the Jungle video, but think about the Appetite for Destruction record, it’s really just a straight ahead rock album (and a masterpiece, at that). Actually, in the back of my mind, I consider it blues rock (though pretty hard/heavy blues rock), though i’m sure the more musically knowledgable will be along to tell me the songs aren’t in a blues mode. But it feels like blues to my amateur ear.
Well, they had hair-metal-ish tracks. “Sweet Child of Mine” and “Paradise City” are on the first record, and “November Rain” is a Hair Metal extravaganza musically. They might have been light on the hairspray and spandex, but they spent a lot on leather and wardrobe. As I said before, they were the outro of Hair Metal, still obsessed with the look, but looking for a different one.
I wanted to bump this thread due to the other hair metal thread because I missed this one, but this map of metal is AWESOME!
Everything you say here is somehow negated by quoting that Billy Joel song. He is a fine songwriter but that song led to his Rock card to be revoked.
Hair/Glam rock
Motley crue
Ratt
Poison
Cinderella
Lillian Axe
Britny Fox
Hanoi Rocks
Bullet Boys
Bang Tango
Faster Pussycat
Ezo
Loudness
Love/Hate
Smashed Gladys
Trixter
Vixen
White Tiger
Autograph
Madam X
Pretty Boy Floyd
To me all these bands were good, even if they did not last.
There are bands not in that list you will notice right off and think “Hey wtf??”, like Twisted Sister and W.A.S.P.
but those bands and the ones like them are not Hair/Glam
They are Hard Rock/Heavy Metal/Shock bands, they would be more in place with things like Alice Cooper or Kiss.
I also do not consider bands like accept or quiet riot or the scorpions part of the Hair/Glam metal scene.
Pantera and Slayer are definitely not to me, no matter who writes the list.
SKid Row, LA Guns, Guns and Roses, Bon Jovi, to me are also not part of this either.
Dokken were great! George Lynch is seriously one of the best metal guitarists of all time. Sadly Don has lost his voice but in the 80s these guys were amazing.
And mine tells yours that Creem and Circus sure as shootin’ called them Metal at the time.
Has Slayer, of all bands, ever been confused with a hair metal band? 
(Pantera, too, although apparently they have some glam metal in them from the early 80s that I’m not familiar with, but who the heck would call Slayer hair metal?)
Heh. I think 16 year old me and 16 year old you are gonna have to take it outside!
Now that this thread has been revived, I wanted to give props to this post – nailed it. Hair metal sounds thin and airy – everything (guitars, vocals, drums) is just a light hiss. None of the full-bodied, wide-frequency sonic thump of 70s hard rock, nor of 90s grunge (nor 90s art rock like Radiohead, nor 90s jam rock like Phish).
Def Leppard’s Hysteria is pretty good, yes.
I was never a big Poison fan, but an uncle of mine seemed to think they were OK. But if you’re writing even them off in the OP, then, no, maybe you’d best give up on the whole scene. 
Except Queensryche. They were arty. (Not that I would call them hair metal anyway.)
Although now that I think about it, this thread’s so old that 16 y/o me is now 18. That version of me is into King Crimson and can’t probably be bothered to care about metal/not-metal.
All of the Peechee doodles and Trapper Keeper stickers I had at the time were weighted pretty evenly with Def Leppard, VH, Ozzy, Quiet Riot, Krokus, Motley Crue, and Ratt. Make of that what you will, my torn jeans and bandanna tied at my thigh like Joe Elliot are my cite.
There was also that weird kid in front row home room with an Oingo Boingo shirt, I suggest beating him up instead.