Here's a pretty cool essay about the survival..well resurgence..of hair metal bands. Written in 2005, and from the website RetroJunk.com.
"Hair Metal was a fad. Even its most loyal fans couldn’t have ever expected the genre to continue in the mainstream, chart-topping format that it had held in 80’s America. It’s a well-known saying that too much of anything is bad for you and this was definitely true of the bands that had originally received fame on the LA circuit. Hair Metal was so in tune with the 80’s that even the bands who had hit the big time in that decade found it hard to even chart their material in the 90’s. An article in Q Magazine once said that its ‘readers’ taught Kurt Cobain’s greatest achievement was destroying Hair Metal. It seems that the ignorance of the Grunge era is not yet dead completely when we read this statement, because we wonder why the supposed readers had no time to take into account the changing political climate (the fall of the Soviet Union), the reinvention of MTV and Beavis and Butthead, an animated cartoon series about two college students who would sit on a couch and comment on the latest music videos, with their next door neighbour being portrayed as an uncool kid that wore a Winger T-Shirt! But I suppose if you were the kind of person who got down to a song like Poison’s ‘Nothing But a Good Time’ in 1988, you’d hardly have taken a fancy to Nirvana’s ‘Rape Me’ in 1992."
"But we’re in 2005 now, and both decades have ended. And if you look around (and I mean look beyond the obvious), you’ll start noticing that Hair Metal is still there. The bands still release the albums, the groups still perform the tour and the records still ascend the charts. But try looking for Grunge. Try looking for Grunge past bands like Nickelback and Staind, past yet another Nirvana ‘Greatest Hits Compilation’ and you’ll start to notice something. Grunge is gone, Grunge is dead. Sure Grunge has helped influence some of the most successful rock groups of the late 90’s and early 00’s, but it hasn’t actually succeeded in doing what it was created to do, eliminating the bands with the big mullets and the leather pants. Some Hair Metal bands remerged from the woodwork in the mid 90’s, noticing that their biggest enemy had vanished and they were free to sell records again. In fact, while Nirvana fans may be so bold to claim that Cobain killed Hair Metal, music fans might admit that the real truth is simply that Cobain just stalled Hair Metal and actually killed Grunge (as well as himself!). Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins once said, ‘Kurt’s death seemed to take the wind out of everyone’s sails’ and in retrospect, perhaps this is the most truthful statement that has ever been made about Grunge."
"But before we can examine why Hair Metal has seemed to survive Grunge, we must examine the truth behind why Hair Metal succeeded in becoming such a popular movement in the first place. The truth of the matter is that Hair Metal artists were serious musicians. Songs in the 80’s required more power to perform so there was more virtuoso. The 80’s were all about excelling to the next level, where as the 90’s seemed focused on self-pity and it became uncool to do nothing more then stand and play on stage. Now, I understand that Grunge fans will feel that this is an ignorant statement, but lets be fair, because asides from Alice in Chains who used odd time signatures to a creative effect, there wasn’t much going for Grunge. Take the example of when Def Leppard performed live unplugged on an American radio station, singing in harmony. The DJ said, ‘That was incredible’, to which Joe replied: ‘you must be a product of the nineties. There is nothing incredible about three guys singing in tune.’ "
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