Best 80's 'Hair Band'

[koolkat]

rileydog said:

I'm proud to say that I own not even one Bon Jovi album. They're also not hair metal. They're just plain shit. A genre unto itself.

Hair metal is endearing in some weird way. Bon Jovi is, was and always will be the worst fucking band of all time, in any genre.

Did Doc Drum put you up to getting me wound up about Bon Jovi?

Well, you did say "I own albums by all the artists listed" so I naturally assumed you also meant Bon fuckin' Jovi, since they're on the list too. Doc Drum had nothing to do with it, they were your words.

[riley]

Fair enough. My bad. It was sort of meant as off the cuff and not literal though, but at closer examination, I actually do have albums by all of them except Bon Jovi. Sadly. Amusingly. Truthfully.

[riley]

The only bands there I would actually roll into what was truly the hair metal era would probably be Winger, Warrant, Cinderella, and Poison.

The rest either pre-date the genre and have big hair by coincidence or evolved to look and sound like the bands they pre-dated and probably ultimately influenced.

[riley]

White Lion would also be 80's hair metal, as would Black & Blue, The Bulletboys, Trixter. They were all shit too.

Not sure if they're Hair Bands or not, since but LA Guns were actually decent in context and Faster Pussycat, well they kicked a lot of ass and i'm not even kidding.

[koolkat]

White Lion and LA Guns aside, I don't think I remember any of those bands you mentioned. I think I was more into pop back in the day... and a bit of R&B, before it got mixed in with hip-hop and turned into the shit it is today, where every single fucking song is by a 'soul' artist "featuring" a rapper.

Out of all the bands listed, I only own albums by the Crue, Skid Row and Def Leppard. I also liked Whitesnake... until I discovered Led Zeppelin's music and realized he [Coverdale] was just a bad Robert Plant wannabe. Now I can't stand the bastard.

[Kensterberg]

Oh god, Trixter were awful. Absolutely awful. Bad beyond words.

[Ayinger]

Wha? No voting area for Jackyl? Sheeit,,,,can this be a true poll?

_{or Slaughter, Firehouse, Europe, Quiet Riot, Steelheart, Great White, Damn Yankees,,,,,gawd it was BAD back then!}

Okay: the gimme is Motley Crue for combining the best of KISS-antics/attitude with some catchy tunes with a semblance of knowing the way around their instruments. Hey, it's what made Rock & Roll, right? rawk ow'l nite, n' pawty ev'ry day

I'll give props to Skid Row for getting a hardon in their 2nd inning and Cinderella seemed to take a few stretches too. Dokken could have been a better band methinks but got swallowed by catering to the times and Def Leppard (sorry Doc...) just pissed me off once Mutt Lange stepped in....hell, I could say the same with The Scorpions once they started with that "rock me like a hurricane" bullshit........

Night Ranger I actually saw live (w/Great White "Rock Me" & no pyro opening) in a fuckin' gymnasium and weren't actually 1/2 bad.....I could even endure "Sister Christian" as a matter of fact.

Winger/Warrent ------ FUCK! don't even go THERE!

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

Mention of the Scorpions (who surely sUxx0rwhatever - am I dope with the street now, Riley bro'?) and Europe got me thinking about mainland Europe's contribution to rock n' pop over the years. Add Abba, Roxette, and woefully trashy europop like Sabrina... then factor in that David Hasselhoff and Midge Ure still dominate the German scene... and what you have is me getting seriously off thread.

But seriously, there's something fundamentally wrong with mainland Europe.

Sure, the scandinavians try hard with their black/death metal, as do Lithuania and the Ukraine. But guttural thrashings aside, I've noticed that for good music you have to almost exclusively go to the islands - UK and Iceland in particular. I wonder if it's something to do with island mentality. Hmm, I'd better check out what's happening in Cyprus lately.

[Dr. Drum]

[luke]

VH1 always has those "Amazingly Bad" lists. Metal moments, rock songs, pop songs, whatever. And "Final Countdown" never fails to top EVERY SINGLE LIST. Worst song EVER. Bon Jovi's collective may be worse, but he NEVER produced a song that awful.

I saw Jackyl live, and they tore it down. Good stuff.

[tuneschick]

Final Countdown blows, but that doesn't mean I don't love to sing that little synthesizer part.

dododo do... dodo do do do

Wasn't it White Lion that did that unspeakably terrible 'When the Children Cry' or something like that? Seriously, that's one of the worst songs in the history of the world.

Faster Pussycat are awesome, and I mean that with absolutely no sarcasm at all. In fact, the last mix CD I made for a friend of mine (titled 'You Can't Fuck a Crazy Girl Sane') included Madame Ruby's Love Boutique.

(not to mention that their cover of You're So Vain is far superior to the original... there, I said it!!)

I have one other thing to say, which I think I admitted before: I really, truly love Talk Dirty to Me by Poison. So much so that I wanted to play it at our wedding.

[tuneschick]

Oh, and speaking of David Hasselhoff - this is my favourite website right now. Retardedly addictive.

www.waxhoff.com/

[Mary]

The thing that's fabulous about Ken Holzman is that he doesn't even have the slightest bit of nostalgia for any of this stuff. I mean, I know it's all shite, but if I hear Crue on the radio, there's NO WAY i'm changing the channel. (unless perhaps it's Home Sweet Home - which obviously qualifies Crue as a hair band in and of itself about 200 times over) But shit, if Dr. Feelgood comes on, or - we can only hope - Looks That Kill - I'm rolling down all the car windows (as if I have a car), cranking the volume, and making embarrassing devil signs out the window at pedestrians. I don't even have a choice, really - it's pure instinct.

And anyway, when it comes time to sing karaoke, you fucking CANNOT beat Poison or Crue. Since singing karaoke is inherently idiotic, you just have to wallow in the idiocy and choose the most idiotic possible music to sing.

I will, however, contest the inclusion of Faster Pussycat in the hair band category. Faster Pussycat belong in the same category as GNR, whatever category that might be. Sleaze rock, perhaps?

Oh. my. god. When the Children Cry. I haven't thought about that atrocity in years. Holy shit tuneschick, I think you just uncovered a deeply repressed part of my subconscious.

Here is a funny list of the worst power ballads of all time, complete with amusing commentary. Although this guy totally forgot When the Children Cry, which obviously belongs on this list:

www.deansplanet.com/jeremy_the_loner_broads-ballads.html

Cheers,
M

[Kensterberg]

Yep, absolutely no nostalgia for this crap. I hated it in the eighties when it (and I) was new, and I hate it today. I'd rather listen to ... well, hell, I'd rather listen to anything GOOD rather than hair bands.

Now, I must confess that I will watch Sebastian Bach or some of these guys on VH1 talk about all the shit they did off-stage. There's always that voyeuristic aspect to the whole "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" and the hair metal folks sucked at the last of that trinity, but had the first two down pat.

But to actually have to listen to the music? Oh hell no ...

NP: Elvis, Man Out of Time

[luke]

Such a fabulous read for rnr decadence, although it falls apart towards the end, when Vince is going off on how "the Crue never went away" and Tommy is being his typical douchebag self.

My favorite story is when they shove a telephone up some girl's pussy and get her to call her mom on it. In the days before cell phones, or even commonplace cordless phones, that's pretty impressive on every level from the dynamics of it to the willingness of the girl to degrade herself to that extent in order to maybe blow a member of Motley Crue.

The stories don't sound so far-fetched when you read them, though, as there's this sort of hazy disbelief when the band members tell you that they actually did this stuff.