80s transvestites who called themselves 'metal'

[PunqueRoquer]

I remember a few years back watching a VH1 show in their "When ______ Ruled The World" series. They had one where they filled in the blank with "Metal". I thought they were going to talk about Motorhead or Metallica... you know, real metal! What did they profile instead? Bands like Poison, Ratt, and Motley Crue.

A Marshall stack doth not metal make!

Toward the end of the show they were talking about their resentment toward the Seattle scene for basically crushing the Hollywood hair genre. Some mook who didn't look like a musician (maybe he was a journalist or a roadie or something) made a statement along the lines of, "Rock and roll has always been about escapism."

Really? Since when!?!

Any genre steeped in escapism is doomed to a limited shelf life. Disco, for example, was based on escapism and look what happened there. Just the same way that punk rock had to come about to crush disco, Seattle grunge had to do the same with the hair scene.

The bands involved with hairspray and make-up were singing songs about the big party that was going on little realizing that not everyone was invited. Nor did they realize that no matter how much fun you're having at the party, it has to come to and end sometime and you have to go back to work.

The only artists who have made an impact in music had nothing to do with escapism. They were about identification. Someone whom kids can listen to and say, "This guy is speaking to me. He is speaking for me." It's the difference between being a voice-of-a-generation and being a footnote. Between being a legend and being a flash-in-the-pan.

I'm sorry if any of you like those 80s hair bands.

I'm not sorry I offended you, I'm just sorry you like those 80s hair bands.

[Maleficarum]

The 80's was a very embarrassing time for music and fashion alike. I fucking cringe when I see the music videos from back then, thank god I never got caught up in all of that shit, i liked Ska, R n B etc.

[shovelheadroad]

Yeah, it's funny how metal history has been re-written, with the shittiest bands getting the credit. Me and mine were listening to the likes of Judas Priest, Sabbath, Motorhead, Budgie, etc...bands like Twisted Sister, Ratt, etc. were considered novelty acts. I used to refer to poison as "Posin"...they were so ghey.

[PunqueRoquer]

Depends on what you consider a "hair band." Many people consider the Scorps to be a "hair band," but they were pretty cool. Also depends on what you consider to be "escapism." I always liked bands like the Blue Oyster Cult, who had intelligent lyrics tied to cool riffs and instrumental virtuosity. On the other hand, I always hated metal bands who tried to show their so-called intellectual capacity by writing songs that were basically reinterpretations of literary classics (yeah, Metallica gets knocked a few points by me for dicking with Lovecraft. Also for fucking up my favorite B.O.C. song and my favorite Skynyrd song on the same album). Though I always thought Rush nailed Coleridge and "Kubla Khan" with "Xanadu." I hate pretension in rock and roll more than I hate hairspray, I guess. And the first song I ever learned to play was "Rock You Like a Hurricane," so I guess I'm biased slightly towards the Scorps even though their songs were pretty mindless. With cool riffs though.

I never really counted The Scorpions as an 80s hair band. They were around for like ten years before they hit it with "Rocks You Like A Hurricane". Also they wore leather. The things I equate with hair bands are things like hairspray, spandex, bright colors, feathered boas, make up, Hollywood and a waaaayy too sunny attitude.

I can't agree with you more about the pomposity of concept albums and pseudo-intellectualism. I haven't heard the new Judas Priest album, "Nostradamus" but I'm hearing bad things about it. I also heard it tanked sales-wise.

[Taylor]

Well I'm glad you're here Punque. Now I have somebody to converse with on the music forum when Mabuse goes missing

[A.P. Hill]

The 80's was a very embarrassing time for music and fashion alike. I fucking cringe when I see the music videos from back then, thank god I never got caught up in all of that shit, i liked Ska, R n B etc.

I still like to hear those old English Beat and Madness albums.

You know what you get when you take reggae and add White people and some talent?

Ska.

Used to be a guy around another forum who was big into King Crimson and the old, real Genesis. That stuff was fun to talk about and remember. It takes a real level of talent to have a concept and then pull it off. Only real metal band I can think of to pull it off (and I mean REAL metal) was Iron Maiden. Sorry to all the whigs if I can't quite get into Busta Rhymes after listening to some stuff that is REALLY intense. :)

[Overdose]

depends on the band, a lot of 80s bands got lumped into the "hair thing" whether they had one ballad that was a "hair ballad" or a full album of saccharin laden crap. I laugh when I hear dudes I know now say "I was never into that hair stuff", when I remember clearly them buying "new jersey" or "slippery when wet" by Bon Jovi (a band I really cannot fucking stand). Same dudes taking their aquanet princesses to see Jackyl or whatever. Warrant, Poison, Britny Fox - yeah hair stuff - (heck, I had Poison's first album, thought it was a decent collection of 80s pop metal). Their manner of dress maybe pathetic to look at now but it was a part of the time, just like every dude that grew a goatee and wore flannels from 1993-1996. Any older dudes remember the leisure suit? Every time frame has its embarrasing fashion. Case closed.

Bands like Dokken, Scorps, Crue, Def Leppard and even VH got thrown into thrown into hair band genre by music retards even though their early music was fairly aggressive & more heavy rock then hair rock. Sure, a lot of their later music was weak compared to their earlier stuff. A band like Extreme or Saigon Kick that had one ballad and a whole lot of fairly technical rock tunes were also called hair metal - probably because these guys were also decent looking dudes & could actually play their instruments and sing in key. Check out any Nuno Bettencourt solo on youtube - the guy was scary good. Bands like Great White/cinderella & even DLR straddled the fence - but all of them were good musicians (DLR had steve vai and Great White could damn near pull off any Zep tune) in contrast the seattle sound was good but also pretty overated - for every Alice in Chains, Soundgarden (whom I always thought were more metal then grunge) Pearl Jam & Nirvan you had 10 shit bands also getting air play. That's the problem w/record companies, they generally have no imagination - as soon as something big hits they all go the same way. As a guy who grew up in the 80s/early 90s and played guitar in rock bands I remember well the whole migration from metal to grunge...it wasn't pretty. Dudes who were playing ibanez rg550s w/long blonde hair one week were wearing a les paul and flannels and playing dissonant sounding non-riff music the next week - par for the course. I also remember the guys who couldn't pull off a lot of the technical 70s/80s rock music loving the simplicity and ease of the grunge seen. Overall not that musically challenging.

WRT videos - Of course the 80s videos were dumb, heck, videos as a concept or in principle are dumb. The further dumbing down of America. Grunge (aka whine rock) videos from the 90s were dumb - generally because they make no fucking sense. Why the fuck do we need videos anyway? Because those prancing fags at MTV say so? Methinx it was for gen-x, gen-y & the pepsi gen that has no attention span. If a song is good in the first place that should be enough, I don't need some idiot director giving me his interpretation of the song. Case in point - ever see Metallica's video for "whiskey in the jar?" What the fuck does a bunch of groupies trashing a house have to do w/the original traditional irish bandit theme from Thin Lizzy? Answer: Nothing. I'd rather conjure my own mental images for the song. Videos are stupid. I.E. - the book is almost always better than the movie.

[Undertow]

I remember a few years back watching a VH1 show in their "When ______ Ruled The World" series. They had one where they filled in the blank with "Metal". I thought they were going to talk about Motorhead or Metallica... you know, real metal! What did they profile instead? Bands like Poison, Ratt, and Motley Crue.

I think I caught part of that before. I thought it was going to be cool then it turned out to be about puss metal. Unfortunately though, I think I could name every puss metal band from that era because I grew up around then. The original headbangers ball used to be the shit, the only thing was you had to sit through the puss metal vids.

In VH1's defense, I saw some of a decent Metal documentary the other day called Heavy, the history of metal. The parts I saw, this dude was interviewing slayer and slipknot, it was pretty good. They have also done some good behind the music ones.....Pantera was excellent.

[RizzleMcDizzle]

I think this is why metal is having a struggle in returning to prominence, because idiots out there are equating hair bands with metal. IT'S NOT METAL IF YOU'RE WEARING WOMEN'S MAKEUP AND GRINNING LIKE A DUMBFUCK!
Anyways, yes, I may be guilty of listening to hair bands once in awhile, but I know the difference between that and metal!!

[SST]

There are not enough bad things to say about the hair bands. I will give poison a nod. I won tickets to see them from my local radio station. I went to the venue and sold my tickets for a dollar lower than face price. My wife and I went and had a lovely dinner from the proceeds. Thanks for the dinner wankers! Other than that all I can say is "what a waste of braincells that could have been harvested for medical research".

[Black Plague]

Reminds me of the time when i was 11-13 and I wanted to buy a Poison CD so i finally made it to the store and pulled the cd out of the rack, looked at it and i was like "WHAT THE FUCK???!!!" They were all dressed up like fucking transvestites. I looked around to make sure no one had seen me looking at it, and quickly put it back and walked away dejectedly as a broken young man brought to an awareness of things I wish i had never known.

[Gallóglaigh]

Poison, Ratt, Warrant, et al did indeed suck, but it would have been great if the music industry had replaced them with something BETTER instead of something WORSE.

By worse, I mean grunge; a talentless crowd of unbathed crybabies who weren't passionate about anything other than flannel, heroin, and lack of hygiene.

I hate that boo-hoo garbage. If I wanted to hear whining, I'd listen to Country.

[shovelheadroad]

I remember seeing this interview once with Sebastian Bach of Skid Row...the interviewer asked what he thought of Skid Row's "rivals"--poison---and Bach flipped out and says.."What?! you comparing "18 and life" to "unskinny bop!?"...FUCK YOU!! and he stormed right out....I laughed my ass off.

[Overdose]

Un-skinny bob - LOL! That song was awfully brutal. I also cried to see Motley Crue go from Shout at the Devil to the shit they were doing before they broke up.

I forgot to mention Skid Row - depending on the person, people used to think they were hair metal because of the ballad "I remember you" - in contrast to Slave to the Grind - a fairly heavy album at the time.

Heck, even G n' R & Ozzy used to get lumped into hair metal - a lot of 80s acts did. Again, because record companies needed on ballad from each act to stay viable. My point being that every band unfortunately had to pay the corporate devil w/one throwaway ballad to get their albums released - unfortunately the general listener never picked up on the rest of the album which was usually different from the teeny ballad on the radio. My case in point about bands like extreme, saigon kick etc. I remember checking out their albums and thinking as a 15 yr old kid, damn, their gay-ass ballads are nothing like the other 10 tunes on the cassette.

The worst hair metal bands in my book are tied between Firehouse and those fags from Nelson. Simply Horrible.

I think a lot of folks rip on the 80s because it's trendy to do so. Reminds me of all the commercials today where they try to portray the nigger as the "hip guy" and his white side kick as non-cool or square. We wouldn't of seen that shit 20 yrs ago. In 20 yrs from now everyone will be saying how overated 90s music was or whatever. Sure, I won't defend any grown man wearing spandex or aquanet - that's rules for an ass whipping where I come from. Hair metal was definitely juvenile transparent music compared to it's forebears in the 70s and early 80s heavy metal -- but man, those concerts were always about a good time, beer and tons of chicks who actually dressed like women and not those fugly chicks trying to look like a rat in a flannel - and at the very least...it wasn't Rap.

[Fee-Fi-Fo-Figger]

I remember seeing this interview once with Sebastian Bach of Skid Row...the interviewer asked what he thought of Skid Row's "rivals"--poison---and Bach flipped out and says.."What?! you comparing "18 and life" to "unskinny bop!?"...FUCK YOU!! and he stormed right out....I laughed my ass off.

Bas was definitely metal. I still dig Skid Row, and GnR (Well Appetite at least).