Hair Metal: Did Nirvana really kill it in 1991?

What you said reminds me of what Vince Neil said once. Basically, he said that the grunge generation was all about "I hate my parents" and teen angst. He didn't understand the point of all that. He basically said that we know that life can suck, so let's go out, have fun, drink some beer, and have sex with some hotties.

Yeah, I remember that argument (though at the time, I was in my 20s, and got along fine with my parents) :), but don't forget that Vince took his own ethos too far (remember the 1984 car crash he was in, that resulted in Razzle, Hanoi Rocks' drummer being killed [Vince was driving the car, and was quite drunk]), as did some of his bandmates (Nikki Sixx had an alarming habit of getting drunk or stoned out of his mind, and ODing).

Hair and Grunge both had their bad points (a fair amount of grunge musicians were smackheads). More than anything else, I preferred the darker, rougher musical sound of grunge, to the not so heavy, overly produced/polished sound of glam and hair bands. I remember seeing on occasion, a couple of regionally successful bands, that though they had a glam image, sounded pretty good live - they were pretty heavy sounding. Each band released an album (which we were looking forward to), that was downright disappointing. Everything was majorly toned down (with excessive amounts of vocal harmonies to boot), to the point where it seemed like it was a case of the producer being of the "Barry Manilow does heavy rock" school of music production. You could say that it was a case of the same situation The Who had - better sounding live than on record (they always sounded toned down on record), but this was worse. Basically, both bands' albums seemed to adopt the same formula that most glam and hair bands adopted, because it sold records. In the case of both of the bands (that I used to see play), they were active around the time Grunge exploded, so it was a case of "too late" for them.
 
What you said reminds me of what Vince Neil said once. Basically, he said that the grunge generation was all about "I hate my parents" and teen angst. He didn't understand the point of all that. He basically said that we know that life can suck, so let's go out, have fun, drink some beer, and have sex with some hotties.

Ironically, most hair metal videos (as well as some of the songs) would usually feature authority figures (including parents) as antagonists (ie, We're Not Gonna Take It, Nothing But a Good Time, The Right to Rock, and Crue's cover of Smokin in the Boys Room).
 
Tey sold out to arena rock in the late 80s. the black album is obviously pop accessible.

If they are on hair bangers ball and going after the same customers, they are merely another flavor of baskin robbins.

Just an F.Y.I. - it was actually caled Headbangers Ball. And yes, it did become flavor of the month (like most MTV did) after a while. In the early days, like 120 Minutes, Headbangers Ball, featured a fair amount of darker and edgier stuff. Unfortunately, MTV joined in with (and in some cases helped dictate), the hair band explosion, and Headbagers Ball became all too often, an outlet for hair metal.

This is a good clip, that explains a lot of the nonsense that was going on with metal in the late 80s and early 90s
 
When I think of "Arena Rock", I think more along the lines of Journey, Foreigner, Styx, Loverboy, all that AOR stuff, and while there certainly was a healthy AOR market in the 80s, it all imploded during 87-88, hair metal's peak (Journey broke up in 88, Foreigner and Loverboy's final hits, Say You Will and Notorious came out in 87, and Styx broke up in 1984, the 1990 reunion not being very big aside from Show Me the Way, and that was because of the unauthorized "Gulf War" mix with comments from soldiers).
Hair rock is arena rock, because all the same bands toured together and were on hairbangers ball.
 
Hair rock is arena rock, because all the same bands toured together and were on hairbangers ball.

None of that is an assessment of actual music. You know, you're starting to sound like one of those metalheads that dismisses lighter bands as "pop music" while making it clear that they've never listened to an actual pop song in their lives. I'm not completely averse to being convinced of your position, but you're not making a good case right now.
 
Also, wasn't Metallica often mistaken as Hair Metal when they actually weren't?

Yes. Or at least the Black Album was criticised as being hair metal when it came out by some metal fans.

Yeah, what can I say, Megadeth does KMFDM infused industrial metal, and not very well IMO (if you want industrial metal, listen to Rammstein, or Ministry), in an effort to appear more alt rock (even after grunge imploded in the mid 90s, it was still cool to be alt rock, and not a "throwback to the 80s").

That Megadeth album is a great example of why metal is considered to have died in the 90s. Look at all the releases widely deemed as "sellout". Although for most everyone but Metallica, it usually meant you either copied Pantera (like those terrible Judas Priest albums with Tim Owens) or changed your sound in some other way that people didn't like (like the Blaze Bayley Iron Maiden albums which are very unfairly maligned, but that's just my opinion and very few others).

Of course, there's exceptions to the rule (death metal--Morbid Angel sold extremely well for death metal in the 90s, Dream Theater, etc.)
 
None of that is an assessment of actual music. You know, you're starting to sound like one of those metalheads that dismisses lighter bands as "pop music" while making it clear that they've never listened to an actual pop song in their lives. I'm not completely averse to being convinced of your position, but you're not making a good case right now.
If one band opened for the other band, it shows contemporaries beleived they shared the same genre.

Simply read this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metallica_concert_tours They toured with Bon Jovi, Dio, Dokken...they were essentially the thrash element of the genre, jsut like Alice in Chains was the metal element of grunge as NIN was the techno element.
 
If one band opened for the other band, it shows contemporaries beleived they shared the same genre.

Simply read this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metallica_concert_tours They toured with Bon Jovi, Dio, Dokken...they were essentially the thrash element of the genre, jsut like Alice in Chains was the metal element of grunge as NIN was the techno element.

Alice Cooper once opened for Chad & Jeremy. Kool & the Gang opened for Van Halen. Violent Femmes once opened for Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, of all bands. Maybe I'm being dense here, but that's still not conclusive to my mind. At most, it means that big name rock bands traveled in a lot of the same circles at the time, not that they deserve to get lumped into the same subgenre.
 
Alice Cooper once opened for Chad & Jeremy. Kool & the Gang opened for Van Halen. Violent Femmes once opened for Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, of all bands. Maybe I'm being dense here, but that's still not conclusive to my mind. At most, it means that big name rock bands traveled in a lot of the same circles at the time, not that they deserve to get lumped into the same subgenre.
The question is when did those bands open for each other? Alice Cooper obviously was not glam rock in the 70s. But, he clearly was in the late 80s and early 90s.

If you want to be scientific, you have to remove arena rock bands that started in the 70s--Cooper, Y&T, Scorpians, Van Halen, ACDC, etc because they are able to legitimately tour with bands outside of their genre, as long as that band was of the same general genre back in the 70s.

So, look stictly at 80s bands. Metallica. Dokken. Bon Jovi. Guns N Roses. Megadeth. Iron Maiden. Accept. Warrant. You will notice that though their sounds are all across the spectrum, they toured exclusively with one another and other hair bands. That is very telling as to what they were and who their audiences were...after all, they are buying the concert tickets.
 
Just an F.Y.I. - it was actually caled Headbangers Ball. And yes, it did become flavor of the month (like most MTV did) after a while. In the early days, like 120 Minutes, Headbangers Ball, featured a fair amount of darker and edgier stuff. Unfortunately, MTV joined in with (and in some cases helped dictate), the hair band explosion, and Headbagers Ball became all too often, an outlet for hair metal.

This is a good clip, that explains a lot of the nonsense that was going on with metal in the late 80s and early 90s

Even after the hair bands were big, Headbangers Ball was still the best place to get less commercially accessible hard stuff. A lot of punk/metal crossover stuff was shown. I cant remember too much because I was always under the influence by that time in the evening but I remember Danzig's "Mother" being played a lot. Not exactly your MTV countdown material in 1989.
 
I saw Public Enemy open for U2 in 1992. Were they the same genre?

I saw Sting (Fields of Gold era) open for the Grateful Dead. Same genre?
exceptions don't make the rule. Linkin Park did a mash up with a rapper, Aerosmith with RUn DMC, etcetera. However, if Metallica exclusively toured with hair rock and metal bands, it takes special pleading to say they were not head bangers ball material.
 
So, look stictly at 80s bands. Metallica. Dokken. Bon Jovi. Guns N Roses. Megadeth. Iron Maiden. Accept. Warrant. You will notice that though their sounds are all across the spectrum, they toured exclusively with one another and other hair bands. That is very telling as to what they were and who their audiences were...after all, they are buying the concert tickets.

You know, there's been a lot of cross-pollination between rock and country music in recent years, with plenty of rock acts based out of Nashville, and rock fans migrating to country stations, but I still wouldn't say that the genres are converging musically. There's too big a gulf between Blackberry Smoke and Chris Stapleton. So no, using audience and marketing as heuristics still isn't convincing me. I still think I need a musical argument that Metallica is closer to Bon Jovi than it is to Venom, at least pre-Load.
 
Alice Cooper once opened for Chad & Jeremy. Kool & the Gang opened for Van Halen. Violent Femmes once opened for Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, of all bands. Maybe I'm being dense here, but that's still not conclusive to my mind. At most, it means that big name rock bands traveled in a lot of the same circles at the time, not that they deserve to get lumped into the same subgenre.

And Rush opened for KISS for much of the '75 tour
 
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