Has anyone here attempted a chart of the best Hair Metal and extreme guitar albums of the 80’s?
For arguments sake, the best of anything that occurred between Van Halen I in 1978, and Nirvana’s culturally accepted demolition of Hair Metal with Nevermind in 1991.
1. Van Halen - Fair Warning // Woman & Children First
2. Motley Crue - Too Fast For Love
3. Def Leppard - High & Dry
4. Scorpions - Blackout
5. Guns & Roses - Appetite For Destruction
6. Dokken - Under Lock & Key
7. Ratt - Out of The Cellar
8. Whitesnake - Slide It In
I have a metal list and a progressive metal list. Neither one has much hair metal. That said, it's not always easy to delineate between standard metal or other metal subgenres and hair metal. I generally think of hair metal as having an unacceptably high cheez quotent. Ratt, Poison, Cinderealla, Warrant, Bon Jovi, Night Ranger, etc.; all things I can do without.
Plenty on Rocky's list I don't consider hair metal (especially the first two Ozzy albums and Triumph).
That said, I'm fully on board with Chief Rocka's call out of the Badlands album.
Here's one I would add that I have loved through the years:
I’ve lined up a 1200+ song playlist thanks to Rocky’s chart, the suggestions here, and a Rolling Stone Top 50 Hair Metal chart.
I’m not sure how far I’ll get into the list, like you Fischman, I have a low tolerance for the cheese factor. That said, I’m old enough to experience some of this stuff in real time. I have a soft spot for Van Halen, for instance. Back in the 80’s King’s X were the band that I fell in love with, partly because they seemed more emotionally intelligent in comparison to the rest. I’m not sure they really fit the hair metal label either. They fall somewhere between hair metal and grunge.
I had a thought while listening to some of this stuff... sometimes there are otherwise excellent albums that arrived just a little too late.
There are several “hair metal” albums that arrived in 1989-1991, that might’ve been huge if they had arrived in 1986-1988, for instance.
It’s not a new thought, but given that listeners like you and me are digging around in the past more than ever, whereby it often takes a bit of a mental shift anyway to engage with the music of a different era, it’s not a great leap to imagine an album that came out a little too late, in fact didn’t.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
