Best of the Worst: Hair Metal edition!

Like most American metal fans, it was hard to avoid glam metal growing up. While most elitists won’t recognize glam as a legitimate metal subgenre, it was an important piece of Metal’s story throughout the 80s and even impacted the sound of legitimate old guard metal bands such as Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne. The backlash against the genre within the underground also helped us get bands like Megadeth. In short, the story of metal is incomplete without a discussion of the hair bands.

For me growing up, hair metal was just a necessary piece of the puzzle getting introduced to metal. If you were listening to a metal oriented radio station (to the extent those even existed) you were inevitably going to get some Ratt and Poison mixed in with your Iron Maiden and Testament. If you were watching archival footage of important metal moments, such as Monsters of Rock in Donington, there were going to be some glittery moments. I didn’t hate this music, and to this day I mostly treat it as fun pop music at best (not unlike the nu metal movement that came a couple decades later). There are even a few formative glam metal albums that I had on heavy rotation growing up, such as the self titled Winger album and the entire Extreme discography (although they evolved quite a bit over the course of four albums). There are also a lot of edge cases in the mix that appeared on compilations/glam metal oriented stations, such as Scorpions and Van Halen.

Like most people who stick with the genre in the longterm, I grew out of these glam metal acts pretty quickly once I was introduced to other subgenres - namely extreme metal of the 90s and progressive metal of the 00s). Recently though I decided to go back and revisit some of the most famous glam metal albums to see how much of it holds up. I decided to use the list of glam metal albums found in Ian Christe’s Sound of the Beast¹ as a reference. There were a few albums that I wasn’t familiar with, as glam was very much a singles genre, but I was curious to see if there was anything of interest in the deeper cuts of bands like Ratt and Warrant who had massive singles but probably aren’t really remembered for their albums. I’m not going to discuss all of the albums here, but I thought I would give some thoughts on a few that stood out for better or worse and see if there are any lost treasures.

Warrant - Cherry Pie (1990)

I guess I never really thought about how late in the game Warrant were, but it’s hard to ignore how (for lack of a better word) thirsty this album is. So many power ballads! The band’s debut, Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinkin’ Rich isn’t too bad. Down Boys is one of my favorite glam metal tracks period. Unfortunately, all of the edge from that first album is completely absent on the followup. Cherry Pie, arguably the strip club anthem, is probably this album’s best moment. The rest of the album feels like a cheap attempt to get as much MTV cache as possible in anticipation of the grunge freight train that would swiftly wipe out Warrant and many other bands that start with the letter W. Jani Lane was clearly a talented songwriter, and also a bit of a musical opportunist. I am actually surprised he never went the Nuno Bettencourt route and pivot into pop songwriting, as Cherry Pie feels more like a showcase for his hookwriting skills than a cohesive album.

Poison - Look What the Cat Dragged In (1987)

Generally speaking, I find that the highest quality glam metal was released in the early to mid 80s and usually has some sort of connection to more traditional metal (see WASP as a prime example here, but also material not discussed in this list such as the first few Ozzy albums). These albums are typically more creative and the artists aren’t necessarily chasing a trend, but are creating something new. I think of Poison as the prime example of glam metal shifting from something new to a bunch of lazy copycats trying to cash in on trends. I don’t hate their hits, the obvious highlight of this album is Talk Dirty To Me, but that’s pretty much where I get off the Poison train.

W.A.S.P. - W.A.S.P. (1984)

Unlike Poison and Warrant, I put WASP more in the Motley Crue/Van Halen bucket of early influencers who weren’t merely trying to jump on a trend, but were really trailblazers of their own. You might call the stage persona and abrasive lyrics pandering, but I do think they were on to something with the way they openly antagonized MTV and the American mainstream. Call it shock value or cynical marketing, it was unique at the time and succeeded where other acts (i.e. Venom) previously failed to penetrate middle America. Animal (F*** like a Beast) is insane and over the top lyrically, but it also has a great hook.² The other hit, I Wanna Be Somebody is straight up arena rock candy. A couple decent deep cuts as well such as On Your Knees and The Torture Never Stops.

Stryper - To Hell With the Devil (1986)

I actually have a lot of patience for Christian oriented rock music. Paul and I have discussed Neal Morse a few times on the podcast³ and I usually hold him up as the gold standard for mixing rock music with Christian themes. In the metal realm, I think Stryper would fill that role for a lot of people. There are even stories of the band attracting fans who were unaware of the Christian messages (although I’m not sure how that is possible on album like To Hell With the Devil). Lyrically I think the album is mostly just fine, but man how many cheesy keyboard ballads did they need to include? As is the case with a lot of Christian rock music, I don’t mind overtly praising Jesus in the lyrics but did the music have to be that lame? When the album leans more into the heavier riff driven side, this is less glam and more straight up metal, more of that please!

Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin (1986)

It’s interesting watching Ozzy respond to a subgenre he sort of helped create.⁴ Paul and I had a lot of positive things to say about Ozzy’s first few albums when we paid tribute to him last year, but we didn’t talk much about that late 80s period. There’s no arguing against the heavy metal bonafides of that original trio, but the catchy/radio friendly vibe almost sets the template for the fusion of pop and metal that defined the hair bands. With The Ultimate Sin, Ozzy really leans in (especially with the look). Still, I think it would be a bit reductive to boil this album down to the MTV bait Shot In the Dark. Thank God For the Bomb, Lightning Strikes, and Killer of Giants both from a lyrical and musical perspective are fairly in line with the riff driven social commentary that runs through Ozzy’s earlier solo work. At the end of the day though this feels more like a poor cousin to Bark At the Moon than the epic Ozzy comeback that was advertised at the time.

Motley Crue - Girls, Girls Girls (1987)

My take on this album is the same for all Motley Crue albums: spin the hits, bin the rest. It’s actually incredible to me how much staying power this band has had, even still being able to play stadiums to this day (albeit usually in some sort of coheadlining package). Motley Crue feels like the ultimate “you had to be there” kind of band because there really isn’t anything that puts them as a cut above any other Hollywood glam rockers, in fact in many ways they were actually worse than the competition. Honestly I think the fact that they were there first and their debut album came out so early comparatively just gave them a head start. Vince Neil doesn’t become a half decent vocalist until Theatre of Pain, Mick Mars never really becomes a very good guitar player⁵, and despite the controversy around the glittery sounds of power ballads like Home Sweet Home, their sound didn’t really evolve that much from album to album. I suppose you could say Girls Girls Girls best encapsulates their glam era (definitely a step up from Theatre of Pain, easily their worst 80s album), but just like every other Crue album there’s very little quality material outside the hits. I love Wild Side and the title track as much as the next dad rocker - I really do think they’re great songs, but outside of maybe Dancing On Glass or Nona there isn’t much to grab on to after that.

Leftover Hairspray

As is always the case with these types of lists, a lot of the best material from the era wasn’t represented and therefore I didn’t get a chance to touch on. In the late 80s and early 90s you start to see a wave of bands that are glittery in look but have a lot more to offer musically. These bands had pretty short lived moments in the spotlight because of the grunge wave that came later (not to mention simply being cannibalized by better hard rock/metal bands like Metallica and GNR) and I believe had a lot to offer musically but were mismanaged into appealing to the lowest common denominator as weak Poison knockoffs. So a quick shoutout to the following albums:

Extreme - Pornograffitti: Ignore More Than Words and Hole Hearted and enjoy the textbook shredding and riffs with bite in songs like Decadence Dance, It’s A Monster, and He-Man Woman Hater. Anyone serious about learning guitar should be studying Nuno as both a rhythm and lead guitar player. Certainly the best of his generation and severely underrated thanks to this band’s glam image.

Winger - self titled: Again, good music hampered by a bad image. Instead of going all in on what was already a dying oversaturated sound, these east coasters should have leaned into their college educated more technically proficient playing skills to cash in on the burgeoning progressive metal space taken up by Dream Theater, Queensryche, and Fates Warning (all bands that struggled in the 90s but no doubt came out on the other side ahead of Winger and most glam rockers). Ignore the lyrics and enjoy the odd time riffing on Seventeen as an example. But this album also goes deeper than the typical lead single/power ballad combo. Madeleine and Hungry are an excellent one to punch and there are some quality tracks in the back half as well. Like Extreme, there is also a lot of quality material across their later forgotten albums.

LA. Guns - self titled: There’s no Ballad of Jayne, but this album is better for it. This is a very competent debut album and a nice missing link between the rough attitude of Guns n Roses and the hook-y stylings of Motley Crue. If you wish Appetite For Destruction had just a tiny bit more glitter, this is a good choice. Also just a surprisingly consistent album, very little filler to be found.

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Footnotes

1. The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, as it is subtitled, is a decent entry level book for new metalheads. Like any survey of an entire style of music, it leaves a lot to be desired among hardcore fans and definitely takes a pretty America centric approach at times, It also includes a very dubious top 25 metal albums of all time (maybe a subject for a future podcast episode!). ↩

2. Not on the original vinyl, but really improves the 1998 remaster of the album. ↩

3. While we’ve yet to devote a full episode to Morse’s music, we did rank V as our favorite album of the year 2000! ↩

4. Not represented on this list, but late 80s Kiss fits this mold as well, see Asylum, Animalize, ↩

5. On an unrelated note, you have to nominate Mars and Neil for the luckiest guys in show business award. Is there a precedence for a successful rock band where neither the diva frontperson OR lead guitarist were the primary creative forces? Kudos to Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee for being a solid rhythm section and hit songwriting team. ↩