Grunge - how did the '80s hair metal bands react?

i mean soul asylum was around pretty early on anyway, as loud fast rules, they were pretty much a part of the same scene as huskers for the most part

slave to the grind by skid row to thread, that did it well

But that was mid '91, by which time lots of hair bands (Cinderella, Poison, etc) were already "getting serious," before grunge broke through. I have an a piece on this in the current issue of Spin btw (didn't notice all the comments until just this second, though):

http://www.spin.com/articles/myth-no-2-nirvana-killed-hair-metal

And yeah, Goo Goo Dolls were totally a Soul Asylum style indie-rock band (as in Replacements + Husker Du - most of their inspriation) when they were on Celluloid and Metal Blade Records in the late '80s.

And nope, Bryan Adams doesn't get on country radio. But Bret Michaels has been a judge on Nasvhille Star and is supposed to be on Hillary Duff's imminent "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" cover, Carrie Underwood covered Motley Crue, Jon Bon Jovi collaborated with Sugarland (and a couple country acts covered "Wanted Dead Or Alive" -- "I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse" etc), Tom Keifer from Cinderella was on an Andy Griggs album a couple years back, some guy frome the Bullet Boys has a country rock band, and so on. So yeah, hair metal still lives, in Nashville.

didn't the dude from Keel end up as country too?

Aargh...not Hillary Duff, I mean Miley Cyrus (whose Nashville connection is her dad, obviously.)

and right, the Keel guy went country too.

I'd definitely second that assertion about skid row - they weren't reacting to grunge so much as courting a "proper" metal audience. after their early patronage by bon jovi went sour, they were trying to shake off the pretty-boy pop-metal thing they'd been saddled with. hence the hardening of the sound (at that time, virtually every pop-metal band claimed they were going to do this), touring with pantera, etc.

come to think of it, the sven gali track above may be a hair-metal response to skid row, rather than grunge.

and of course pantera used to be hair metal too before going for the hardman image

this is true. they presumably shared hair-flattening tips.

If some hair metal bands went grunge, how many went Pantera hardman or nu-metal?

http://media.fanfire.com/images/product/large/TLE/TLECD001.jpg

Btw, Warrant's very good '90s albums -- Dog Eat Dog from '92 and Ultraphobic from '95, both 7 out of 10s in Martin Popoff's metal guide -- might be the best hair-gone-grunge examples of all.

worst grunge move i've heard in recent months is a tape of kevin seconds and his band drop acid. yuck. album came out a month or two after nevermind and 10 so it was an EARLY grunge move. but definitely trying to emulate bleach/seattle stuff. yuck! oh i said that. but its really bad. (i can still remember feeling betrayed by 7 seconds when they put out new wind in 1986. kevin seconds, betrayer of youth!)

waht abt hardcore kids who went metal who went grunge

At the time, Alice in Chains seemed to me more of a metal band than a grunge band, but they got lumped in with grunge since they were from Seattle.

Posted By Kiko Jones
11.23.09 5:21 AM

"This coming from someone who once, non-ironically, raved to me about the merits of Poison, of all people? Pay attention to Chuck Eddy and your brain will turn to mush."

OTM!

very

Yes Chuck their PCTV rip through "Don't Fear the Reaper" was metal as fuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmAyUr4DqAk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB8l3-mGeSg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDY2DVju1c4

Anyway, I think xhuxk is right. Hair metal - if defined as silly, glammy, party-hardy pop-metal - was already on the way out by '91. If anything killed it, it was probably Appetite for Destruction, with its nasty, snarly, darker vibe - though the long-maned, mascara'd beast took a few years to toddle off.

And besides, what is grunge if not the incorporation of metal elements into hardcore? And then grunge elements were re-incorporated back into metal. So it's not who-killed-whom but rather a long dialogue that extends back to the late '70s at least.

Van Hagar did much to bridge the gap between hair metal and Pearl Jam.

It seems that there were a lot of darker currents in popular music and culture in the late '80s/early '90s, or maybe it just seems that way, since the '80s Reagan years were an unusually sunny time for pop culture. But it wasn't just in rock with grunge supplanting pop-metal, you also have gangsta rap (NWA, Ice-T, Cypress Hill, etc.) supplanting fun party rap, the cartoon violence of '80s action-comedy movies being supplanted by the grittier, more realistic violence of Tarantino, etc. - you even have a very dark movie like "Silence of the Lambs" about cannibalism and serial killers sweeping the Oscars in '91. So something was going on in the culture. Maybe it was a reaction to losing the optimistic, grandfatherly presence of Reagan for the dour, slightly creepy Bush Sr. Or a reaction to the uncertainty caused by the fall of Communism. Or the violence related to the crack cocaine epidemic in the inner cities.

"or maybe it just seems that way, since the '80s Reagan years were an unusually sunny time for pop culture."

i'm having trouble remembering the sunny parts! do you mean bobby mcferrin?

It just seems like if you look at the top-selling music, movies and the highest-rated TV shows, etc, it was a more light-hearted, less serious, more optimistic time as compared to the late '80s/early '90s. I realize this could be hard to quantify though.

Whoa on getting all historically accurate and intelligent and shit. I mean grunge was a complete media creation and did not kill hair metal, I was just making a goof thread b/c hair metal is something that absolutely fell from fashion and was derided as false and overblown a la Prog/Arena which was not particularly "killed" by Punk Music but rather Punk as a proposition. Grunge was part of the total Alternative proposition that killed Harmless Music and the '70s music industry dynamic (which survived Punk and flourished through the home taping is killing music era, printed absurd profits on CD markups, etc). It was briefly difficult to be taken seriously as a musician if you were not serious about the content of and popular response to your music. The same white men in tattered clothes was a comically inverse reaction to glam/hair metal and the industry turned comparable profits on Pearl Jam, Nirvana, STP et al. Ultimately all of the major grunge acts were suckered-in or only to happy to help an industry they purported to deride.

a case could be made for or against i guess. there was a lot of fear and loathing too. post-vietnam death trips. threat of nuclear destruction. slasher-mania. sly. arnold.

then again, there were the pointer sisters. mtv was pretty upbeat and colorful.

x-post

Ultimately all of the major grunge acts were suckered-in or only to happy to help an industry they purported to deride.

*drops dishes*

threat of nuclear destruction

I think that having this in the back of people's minds may have contributed to the shallow, materialistic, fun vibe of the '80s - it was like, "Don't think about anything serious, it will just bum you out."

Wait, so where does "99 Luftballons" fit into that equation?

see also Prince's 1999

Nuclear paranoia was definitely a current that runs through the '80s, along with the sharp rise in homelessness, urban decay, and lots of other unhappy things. But the biggest-selling phenomena of '80s pop culture were things like the upbeat idealism of Michael Jackson, the hedonistic fun attitudes of Madonna or Ferris Bueller, the larger-than-life heroism of Sly, Arnold or the A-Team, or the perfect parental role model of a Bill Cosby. The dark underbelly of life in America in the '80s remained mostly out of sight in the mainstream popular culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTqElk6TpgY

upbeat idealism of Michael Jackson

Uh, did you ever listen to his lyrics? (The music could be pretty dark, too, come to think of it.)

There was a lot more to Madonna than "hedonistic fun," too, as I recall.

And I'm pretty sure Springsteen and Mellencamp had some big songs about, like, the recession and stuff.

also doesn't Bobby McFerrin commit suicide in the Don't Worry Be Happy video

Whatever. Not trying to be cranky -- and pop music did sound pretty celbratory though much of the '80s, one of the things I liked about it -- but there were counter-examples everywhere. And even a lot of the celebratory stuff had a underside that didn't seem quite so optimistic. Lots of paranoia songs, for one thing. (Rockwell, the Police, Men At Work, whoever.) And by 1987 -- hardly the end of the decade -- you had GnR and P.E. and a big album by Metallica, too. ("The Message" was 1982, and it wasn't alone then.)

I think that upbeat idealism and hedonistic fun were a large part of what the broader audience who bought those Madonna and Michael Jackson records was hearing, though of course there was more nuance there if one listened for it.

Any generalization about an entire decade is going to have many exceptions, but what I'm saying isn't terribly novel. Many observers at the time commented on it: The "Daydream Nation" of Sonic Youth's album title. The bafflement of liberals at the hypnotic effectiveness of Reagan's pied-piper act. The alienated subcultures of goths and pig-fuckers who mocked the sunny mood of the mainstream. They were reacting to the same feeling.

one of the only parts about "fargo rock city" that i thought was really good was when klosterman was talking about how you always read that in the 80s everyone was living under some cloud of nuclear war and fear, and he was like "i don't remember even caring or thinking about it as a kid"...i was the same way, none of that stuff seemed real at all, i just wanted to play with star wars toys and ride bike and stuff

I was a kid in the 80s and was totally freaked out about nuclear annihilation - but then I had parents who were part of a anti-nuke group and let me watch stuff like The Day After and Testament

but yeah my emotional/general memories of the 80s boiled down to "wow shit is really terrible what is everybody else so goddamned cheery about"

culturally it really seems its closest analog is the 50s - this outward facade of wide-eyed optimistic consumerism papering over paranoia, racial tensions, etc.

Pretty sure little kids in the '60s, '70s, '90s, and '00s mostly just wanted to play with their toys and ride their bikes, too. (I dunno, maybe a day or two in mid-September 2001 might've been different, but then again I lived in New York.)

It's possible I'm letting my personal experience color my view of the decade, because I was pretty much just a kid in the '80s, so naturally things would have looked different to me if I had been an unemployed rust-belt autoworker or something. But it does seem like there are lots of examples that fit the overall pop-culture trend narrative of mid-'80s optimism giving way to late '80s/early '90s grit and realism.

i think you are right. lots of stuff was hidden from view. there was a definite party in the ruins vibe too. rome before the fall. i was miserable and worried about the bomb and my heroes were joy division, crass, and others like them. so, i was not the norm.

i got all my news from subhumans u.k. lyrics.

i remember lots of talk of nuclear war and how evil the soviets were but i never once thought it might happen.

Grew up two miles away from a primary target - general attitude among the kids was "if it happens, whatcha gonna do?"

I was in the Army for four years in the middle of the decade, setting up communication rigs on hilltops within spitting distance of the East German border, so it seemed real to me. I mean, "99 Luftballons" was a really fun song and all, but it wasn't only fun. (The Clash seemed really big with soldiers at the time, as far as I could tell.)

i was definitely paranoid during the 80's. might have been the coke though. i thought it was pretty evil overall. the reagan sunny 50's thing hiding all the repub evil. and moving to philly in the late 80's during crack fever and homeless epidemic just confirmed all my worst fears about everything.

Technically, Kurt Cobain's poor scholastic performance and his participation in high school wrestling would make him more jock than nerd, but c'moooon.

Motley Crue = jocks burnouts who smoked behind the shop class
Counting Crows = nerds hippies
Soundgarden = nerds preps

Didn't I see Tommy Lee palmsmash LL Cool J in the face in MTV's Rock & Jock B-ball challenge, cementing his team's threepeat?

vince neil was good at baseball i think...

lots of burnouts were jocks and jocks were burnouts and nerds were jocks and jocks were nerds IMO

yeah, i mean, the wrestling team -- loaded with super nerds bound for MIT who could also kick your ass.

― tylerw, Tuesday, December 22, 2009 6:07 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hmmm..i think this is more my area but yeah that was not true for me at all, but we were close enough to iowa where wrestling was more of a glamour sport, more popular than basketball tbh

but wrestling is a weird subculture for sure.

lots of burnouts were jocks and jocks were burnouts and nerds were jocks and jocks were nerds IMO

and nerds were burnouts, too

that too

it's like we learned nothing from carlos the dwarf.

or randall "pink" floyd

"gibby haynes from buttholes was an athlete to iirc and in a fraternity in college"

yes! He went to my college about ten years before me. I know the frat he was in (we only had local frats, not national ones, so naming it isn't going to be helpful for you guys)...it was the frat for rich, athletic, good-looking party kids---jocks, basically. I was in another frat, for nerdy drunks, but we'd go to his frat's parties...sadly there were no xrays of girls passing gas there.