There are few subgenres of rock music more loathsome than hair metal. Or poodle rock, or butt rock, or cock rock, whatever you want to call it. It all sucks.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, hair metal enjoyed unchallenged popularity on MTV, which was most kids’ main source of music back then (and which actually played music videos). You couldn’t go more than one or two videos without one of those shitty bands in lipstick and blush, dressed in skintight leather pants festooned with bandannas flinging their poodle haircuts about.
Even “Headbanger’s Ball,” where all the actual metal videos were relegated, was overrun with crap like Trixter and Warrant. Perhaps that was because in its early days, The Ball was hosted by Mr. Poodle Haircut himself, Adam Curry.
This kind of music burns its candle of suckitude on both ends. The vapid lyrical content, over-reverbed drums, self-indulgent weedly-weedly guitar solos and scalded-cat vocals are bad enough. It’s the image that these bands project is what makes them doubly loathsome. What is cool about making yourself look as womanly as possible by troweling makeup on and teasing your hair? MTV should have run a contest for girls back in the day: “Win a dream date with Poison, where you can trade makeup and hair secrets!” The stage antics of these bands were just as ridiculous as the way they looked: Singers twirling microphones, guitarists throwing their “axes” over their shoulders, drummers flipping their sticks, etc. It’s all contrived and corny and probably learned at Musicians Institute.
Thankfully, by the early 1990s other bands had come along to relegate hair metal to the cutout bin of musical history. On with the list:
5. “Girl School,” Britny Fox – I don’t recall this one getting a lot of daytime play on MTV. But did it ever rule “Headbanger’s Ball.” You had to sit through two or three videos such as this to get to one from Anthrax or Suicidal Tendencies. It doesn’t take a genius to be able to infer the content of the video from the song’s title.
4. “More Than Words,” Extreme – This song should have been called “Baby I Wanna Fuck You.” It’s not your typical chorusy, reverby, overwrought hair-metal power ballad, but with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, the lyrics fulfill two of the three main hair-metal cliches: partying, fucking and loving you forever. You can guess which two this song has.
3. The entire “Hysteria” album, Def Leppard – There was a time when Def Leppard didn’t suck. In the early 1980s, they actually were considered among the top acts of the so-called New Wave of British Metal. And as an 8-year-old with two teenaged siblings, I thought the “Pyromania” album (“Onda-gleeben-glouten-globen!”) was the cat’s ass. I listened to that record so much that I even memorized the vinyl noises in between songs on my brother’s copy. But something happened in between “Pyromania” and “Hysteria” that turned this band into garbage. Maybe it was the drummer losing his arm, maybe it was my evolving musical tastes. But during seventh grade, this album spawned a never-ending stream crappy videos, epitomized by:
2. “Unskinny Bop,” Poison – This song contains possibly the worst lyric in the history of recorded music: “Like gasoline you wanna pump me.” Seriously… what the fuck?
1. “I’ll Never Let You Go (Angel Eyes),” Steelheart – Coming at the tail end of hair-metal’s “relevance,” this song very well could have been the one to lower the hair-metal casket into its grave. It neatly encapsulates most of hair-metal cliches: The parentheticized song title; the over-chorused arpeggiated acoustic guitar intro; the over-reverbed drums, of which there are a ridiculous amount; and, of course, the eardrum-perforating, upper-register screeching of the lead singer. Please remove all pets and small children from the room before the end of the video.
In the late 1980s, hair metal, along with R&B counterpart new jack swing, was soulless, corporate music at its acme that even a moderately intelligent 13-year-old could see through. And after seeing these videos again 15 years later, it is music that, even with the benefit of nostalgia, has not gotten any better with age.
