Rock scholars talk about the birth of punk in a way that's become pretty well canonized. The rock titans that made it to the late '70s became too big, too indulgent. Seduced and overblown by the excesses of rockstardom, budgets were squandered, concepts were exhausted, and the rock-and-roll-all-night lifestyle truly became too much for the bands and their fans to handle. The stages were too big, the lights were too bright. The parties dragged on too long, the vices took their hold, the stars' best work already shrinking in the rearview. A natural response to this corporate bloat came in the form of a firm march in the opposite direction with the stripped-down sound of the Sex Pistols. Reasonable enough. Another? Doubling down.
The Source
Hair metal comes from deep-rooted rock tradition perpetuated by artists like David Bowie and T. Rex. Legends in their own right, the high-octane, pyrotechnics-prepped, spandex-clad hair metal to which we're aphoristically referring truly lays with the MTV generation. Los Angeles would become the ecosystem from which hair metal would take its first steps out of its evolutionary, primordial froth. Acts like Mötley Crüe, Ratt, and Quiet Riot came to set the pace for the ensuing decade, penning effortlessly marketable anthems of the sensationalized, bottomlessly self-indulgent lifestyles of the rich and famous that would eventually shape neatly into sixty-minute VH1 programming sandwiched between ads for the latest developments in Swiffer dusting technology and this year's Nissan Altima.
The Scoop
We should give hair metal its credit, though. It was a class with many exceptional students. A number of our most enduring musicians entered the cultural conversation through this musical influx. Randy Rhoads, Vivian Campbell, Slash... we would truly be missing a later generation of guitarists were it not for hair metal's best. A musical form so centered around all-night parties and wistful sentimentalism was bound to captivate at least a few fans past its expiration date, and why not? Every album has its closer, but every rose has its thorn.
Our Call
You'd think that, from their origins at the kick-off of the '80s with the weight of '70s arena rock atrophy so heavy, they'd see the dawn of the '90s and the death knell of Nirvana barreling towards them like an Earth-shattering asteroid. But, among the many things hair metal stars and large, Cretaceous reptiles have in common, they were interrupted woefully unaware, gone in a euphoric flash, and forgotten just as quickly. We kid, of course. The hair metal print on pop culture is still very much impressed. The era's ubiquity in American culture still looms large as touchstone aesthetic markers of the genre are still instantly recognizable. Is it easy to point to the time's all-but-required showmanship and excess as ultimate downfall? Yes. Does that paint the whole picture? Of course not. We're saluting hair metal and all the fun it is. After all, you don't need nothin' but a good time.