These guys were never a personal favorite, but I always loved " Never Enough" and still do. They might have come closest with this, though some might nominate 1991's Hollywood Vampires. The Guns circled the bigtime but never quite hit the bullseye. I used to love piecing together that story from interviews in Circus and Hit Parader back in the pre-internet day. Guns and Guns 'n' Roses is interesting reading. The Venn diagram comprising the early years of L.A. It's just the dumbest piece of metal genius ever written. Case in point: " Waysted Love."Īnd really, you can't really improve on the title track. Ridiculously awesome and awesomely ridiculous, let's consider this album a border town that officially announces to weary travelers that they have left other genres and crossed over into Hair Metal proper. This is very much not pointless, though it is very silly. I might as well get this out of the way upfront: metal that sincerely attempts to be scary is a) never scary, b) sillier for the attempt, and c) pointless. With the band's name and that cover, you'd be forgiven for thinking this belongs on a different list: Best Death Metal or something so-named. I really went overboard - but that's more or less required any time the topic of discussion is Hair Metal.
"Within that document" (blam!) "lay the Vietnam war." You want to hear a completely off-the-radar precursor to Hair Metal that is instantly recognizable as everything tc come? Look here. But lest we forget - this is a pretty airtight example of what hair metal sounded and looked like when it ruled the roost.) And there are plenty of essential hair metal songs (like " Loud and Clear" by Autograph, or "Save Your Love" by Great White) that don't appear below because the album's they appear on don't live up to those particular songs. Honorable mentions: Warrant's Cherry Pie (probably pretty essential, but do you prosper from having the whole album instead of just the singles?), and Firehouse's Firehouse (which may be more emblematic of hair metal than some of the selections below, but is it something I consider "essential?" Apparently not, as I don't feel the need to own it. Service not quite from the frontlines (as the war ended long ago) butįrom somewhere near where the war once raged.
Then I made columns (riff, production, badassedness, context, degree-of-chauvenism - not as cut-and-dried as you might think! Some hair metal gets so extreme in this regard that it might legitimately cross over into Shaktism -, any "YAAAAAAA!!"s (ex: 0:13), calls to reject any external restriction on the amount of rocking that you might want to do, reckless living, confused occultism, and more), assigned points, you-tubed the crap out of everything, and voila. (Full disclosure: I spent most of the 80s convinced hair metal was the natural evolution of humanity and its best bet for a maximum-rocking future.) I solicited friends and the internet to accumulate as many choices as I could. To answer some of these questions - for myself, sure, but I'm dragging you along - I made myself a spreadsheet and listed all of the albums listed in the Rolling Stone article for starters then added any hair metal album I could think of. What is hair metal, exactly? Or better yet, where is it? If musical genres were represented on a map, what would the capitol of Hair Metal be? What are its borders and what genre-lands lay beyond them? Is there an army of guitarists that lets visitors know when they've crossed the border? We know the Black Crowes don't belong in the discussion, but we're not exactly sure why. The Rolling Stone list is quite good overall I reluctantly raise the sign of the horns in their direction. And scientifically speaking, cock rock is more hair metal than heavy metal. They're right in saying W.A.S.P., musically, might have been more straight-up heavy metal, but their subject matter - at least in the period under examination (roughly '82 to '92) was unabashed cock rock. I agree for the most part, but in 1988, there would have been absolutely no question that Guns n Roses was of the same genre as any band no one in 2015 would think twice of designating "hair metal." W.A.S.P., too. The consensus seemed to be that they were a breed apart from this animal called hair metal. G'n'R's "transcendence" prompted a few remarks on my facebook wall. Up musically than you might guess: Trimming this list to a mere 50Īlbums was so tough that in the long run Guns N' Roses had to beĭisqualified for transcending the form and W.A.S.P. "Swept under history's rug and summarily dismissed as fake when thrashĪnd grunge came along, hair-metal's been out of the spotlight longĮnough by now to be forgiven for all but its sleaziest sins.