It's fine. That's my short answer.

It's a subgenre of music that I enjoy in small doses, and it has some very solid, rocking and fun songs.

Motley Crue - Kickstart My Heart
Sammy Hagar - Heavy Metal
Def Leppard - Pour Some Sugar On Me
Quiet Riot - Cum on Feel the Noize
Bon Jovi - You Give Love A Bad Name

Those are a few examples of songs I like to spin from time to time. But I don't "love" any of that stuff enough to call them favorite songs or favorite bands.

I know some are more glam rock then glam metal, but in my opinion they are all just kind of glam, regardless of how heavy they are, and kind of all fall under the same stylistic umbrella.

However, it's a genre that I find to be somewhat unidimensionnal or at the very least, kind of limited. So it's fun, but I don't go into that genre expecting some band to push the boundaries of music much further.

I love it. Nothing wrong with pop metal.

Plenty of great stuff already mentioned. I did revisit Shout - In Your Face, Holy Soldier - Holy Soldier and Krokus - The Blitz for my morning commutes since this thread was started. All killer.

In the 90's almost all 80's metal was considered hair metal!

(Unfortunately?) kinda true. There were some metal nerds who made distinctions and were "accurately" using subgenres, but ultimately the average consumer wasn't really filing Iron Maiden, Dio and Dokken in separate categories.

There was a vague awareness of the ridiculousness of lumping Metallica, Saint Vitus, Slayer, etc. in with the same zeitgeist as hair metal, and that awareness got more pronounced as the descendents of bands like that got more and more extreme. Which eventually led to the current obsession with micro-labels we have now. But I think being able to go from Motley Crue to Slayer in the 80s and getting your shoes blown off without really expecting it was part of the appeal of metal in the 80s.

I will say nothing finishes off an 80s horror movie like a hair metal tune in the credits. Nightmare on Elm Street 3? The Blob (1988)? What would these movies be without hair metal/AOR? A tiny bit less good, less fun, and less a part of their era, that's what.

Unironically love it

Poison was probably the poppiest band from the hair metal scene yet they came up with one of the most MASSIVE riffs from that era

Yeah, Europe's newer stuff is bluesy and heavy. I once had Winger's 'Pull' album, but got rid of it years and years ago. Their new album sounds very promising; especially digging 'Proud Desperado'! Yeah, it doesn't sound exactly hair-metal anymore, as doesn't Lillian Axe....

Some of it is just damn fun to listen too, Whitesnake 87 is one of my favourites to listen too, LA Guns, Crue...

How could you not bang your head to that riff from Uncle Toms Cabin?

I don't like to call it Metal and I don't like a genre of music being defined by a look. Certain bands have aged better due to less cheese in the lyrics. GNR, LA Guns, Faster Pussycat, and others in the Sleaze category have more of an edge to them. The mainstream bands like Bon Jovi, and Def Leppard, I just consider Hard Rock or Pop Rock.

That Poison riff is just weak, the whole song sounds uninspired. Perhaps they have better stuff, to be honest I never listened to their records.

Europe, however, that's another story. Their 'appalling hit' is what got me into guitar music in the first place. Everyone just called it hard rock so I don't know that they belong in this topic (same with Def Leppard, Bon Jovi). They evidently had their phase with big hair and make up but the music was never so pop. The rhythm guitars got dialed down in favour of keyboards on The Final Countdown but John Norum's shredding still had a prominent place in the mix. Even the ballads, like "Carrie", are great songs. Really well-written stuff. I consider their first album to be metal, since it's so riff-heavy and has that feel.

The "Look What The Cat Dragged In" title song actually has a pretty heavy riff set that could almost pass for an Accept song were Brett Michaels' vocals not so squeaky clean. Some of the deeper cuts from the album like "Play Dirty" and "Let Me Go To The Show" also rock reasonably hard, but generally Poison's stuff was on the lighter side of the guitar rock paradigm. That being said, C.C. Deville was an absolute beast every time he played a solo, I honestly think Poison could have been a more credible band if Brett Michaels had just played rhythm guitar and they'd gotten somebody with a grittier voice to do lead vocals. He doesn't sound terrible, but aside from their ridiculous image, his vocals were the primary reason why they get called a boy band with guitars.



Agreed, Europe was always an outlier in the mid-80s AOR wave, I think primarily because they started much earlier and had a heavier sound in the beginning. Several cuts from their first two albums like "In The Future To Come", "Seven Doors Hotel", "Memories", "Boyazont", "Scream Of Anger", "Wings Of Tomorrow" and "Wasted Time" are about as heavy as anything that the mainline NWOBHM acts had put out between 1980 and 1983, and even some of the deeper cuts on The Final Countdown like "On The Loose" and "Love Chaser" had a pretty strong metallic edge to them. Even their so-called glam era from 1988 through 1991 was closer to a blues-rock based similar to Tesla that simply had cleaner vocals and more keyboards. Some of the B-sides off of the Prisoners In Paradise era like "Yesterday's News" and deep cuts like "The Seventh Sign" and "Girl From Lebanon" rocked way harder than a lot of the latter day L.A. bands.



This is basically how I ended up getting radicalized as a metal separatist in the mid to late 90s when I was in high school. When people started conflating Black Sabbath's Dehumanizer and Dio's Lock Up The Wolves with hair metal, I basically checked out of the mainstream rock radio craze. Though to be fair, I noticed that there was a lot less of that when the late 90s nu-metal craze started versus the early post-grunge period from 1995 through 1997.

pure shit

Hehe, "SlipKnoT_SOAD"

Do you ever wonder if there was a staff room meeting about you? With the teachers asking whether or not they should be worried about "metal radicialisation?" I'm just imagining some kid wearing chain mail storming through the corridors screaming "Dream Evil rules, dickheads!" or something of that ilk.

I somehow missed the whole hair/glam metal thing and went straight from Christian rock to Metallica, Black Sabbath, etc. I did/do enjoy some hard rock like GNR (unpopular opinion, the Use Your Illusion albums were their peak) but really never listened to Dokken, Poison, etc.
I am listening to that Tesla song now though and it's pretty cool.

I went to a religious HS and got my balls busted CONSTANTLY for having long hair and wearing band shirts...I'm sure the staff talked about me and the one other metalhead lol.

Listening to Dokken's 1999 live album, "Live From the Sun".
This features Reb Beach on guitar...absolutely kills it. Such great energy.

Truth be told, I had to turn a few t-shirts inside out back in 9th grade because Megadeth and Iron Maiden's mascots were considered a distraction, but by 1994 much of the obnoxiousness of the Satanic panic stuff had settled down in my area, and I didn't even get exposed to bands like Deicide until after high school anyway.



In my case, I got 12 years of public schooling, and my parents were semi-practicing Episcopalians who were very middle of the road on most stuff. The staff in my schools probably talked about me for being a general outcast who acted out because he was bored to tears over being waterboarded with the same crap in class every day. Public schools don't care much about religious conformity, but failing to socially conform or showing an inkling of independent thought can raise some eyebrows.

It was my gateway into metal (via my sister who introduced me to it). I never fully got into the glam scene, though there were a few bands I liked, and even now still an album or two I like to spin every once in a while. For me it was Motley Crue, LA Guns, Skid Row, Slaughter, and WASP. I kind of don't think WASP quite belong lumped in with the rest of them though. They were always heavier and faster, and their shows were meant to shock, not dazzle.

I'm still partial to Skid Row's "Slave to the Grind" (listening to it right now). It's heavier than their debut overall, and the title track has that killer fucking riff that really wouldn't be out of place on a thrash album. Another one is LA Gun's "Hollywood Vampires." One of my favourites. It's cheesy AF but has so many great moments. To me it sounds like it has a little darkness running through it which, even when I was a kid, was certain to grab my attention (in particular Over the Edge). I always did gravitate to darker tunes.

Whitesnake homonymous 1987 album is a fucking heavy metal/hard rock masterpiece. The softer songs are radio classics, but the heavy ones are fucking amazing man, so underrated.

I enjoy the heavy hitters the most and not so much the other examples. Bands like Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, Skid Row, Motley Crue, Europe I do enjoy. I started first with Poison which I still like occasionally but have fallen out a lot over the years.

Slave to the Grind is a really unique record in that most hair bands got LESS heavy as they went along, but Skid Row was one of the few who decided to up the ante with their followup record.

I tend to listen to *A LOT* of it in the warm summer months. In the late 90's, I was just getting into metal and considered it to be just as pivotal to my metal-fandom as bands like Priest, Metallica and Slayer. I also live in a small city where, in the years around 1999 - 2004, we tended to get many of those bands going through small club/casino runs. Got to see a lot of them in that time frame for under $20 a show.

Fallen Angel by Poison is probably one of my favourite songs of all time, tbh.

Yep, Slave and Subhuman were thick records with a much heavier tone than the debut.

Love it. I listen to a lot of Ratt, WASP, Dokken, etc.

I like the Norwegian band Return, but I wouldn't say they qualify as hair metal. But then again, if Bon Jovi is anywhere near any category of metal, that description is void anyway.

Yeah, WASP is and always has been a metal band. They even toured with Slayer in the mid 80s (although I'd hate to be the band that followed Slayer during their halcyon days).

Dang, that would have been a great show to see but I was likely way too young. I've actually been laughed at when I tell people WASP were never a glam/hair metal band (by other metalheads). Talking out of their asses, obviously.

People think visually rather than sonically. WASP looked like a brother of Motley Crue. A much more sinister Motley Crue, but especially with the teased up hair in the 80s style. Granted Running Wild had that look for a bit too, but Rolf didn't have that "rawk" voice like Blackie did.

I will say I do think that Last Command and Inside The Electric Circus are more glam than not, but the debut, Headless Children and Crimson Idol? No way.