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For my '80s Blog genre I have chosen to look at Glam Metal music as it is a genre of music that I enjoy, and would like to look at and learn more about, as although I enjoy artists such as Mötley Cruë and Europe, I do not know a lot about the genre or a particularly large number of artists that play the style. Glam Metal started to emerge in the late 70s in the United States, and is a sub-genre of Heavy Metal. It was massively successful, and shifted hundreds of millions of records in the United States and in the United Kingdom. The genre was also known as Hair Metal, a term popularised by the music TV channel MTV when it was born in the very early 80s. The genre drew a lot of it's influences from the Glam Rock music of the 1970s, featuring artists such as T.Rex, David Bowie, Queen and Aerosmith. Glam Metal musicians drew partly from the image of 70's Glam Rock, including the make-up and fancy outfits, such as tight leather, headbands and lots of spandex worn by the likes of David Bowie (see here: link). The other main influence was the Heavy Metal from the same period, bands including the likes of Judas Priest, from whom they took the leather and studs image (example: link). The combination of these two images brought together the Glam Metal look.
Glam Metal was born mainly in Los Angeles and New York in the United States, with the Sunset Boulevard, known as ‘Sunset Strip’, in LA worth a particular mention, as it became a haven for musicians, especially those of the Glam Metal variety, in the 1980s. Glam Metal bands to emerge from LA include the likes of Mötley Cruë, Dokken and Quiet Riot. Other notable artists to come from across the United States include:
●Bon Jovi – New Jersey
●Twisted Sister and KISS – New York
●Alice Cooper – Detroit
●Ratt - San Diego
And then just to be awkward, there were Def Leppard from Sheffield, in the UK, and Europe from Upplands Väsby, in Sweden.Def Leppard were, and still are, a very successful band, despite their seemingly unlikely location in comparison the most of their Glam Metal peers – Sheffield is somehow lacking that certain something in comparison to Los Angeles! The band actually formed more as part of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal in the ‘70s, and prefer to be seen as such, and are labelled as Glam Metal because of their mainstream success as much as anything else, although they did seem quite suspiciously partial to spandex…
Glam Metal was massively successful in it’s day, hence sometimes being referred to as ‘pop metal’, with many album releases shifting millions of copies. Here’s a few examples:
●Def Leppard – Hysteria – over 20 million sales worldwide
●Mötley Cruë – Dr. Feelgood – over 7 million in the US alone
●Bon Jovi – Slippery When Wet – over 28 million worldwide
In total Glam Metal must literally have sold hundreds of millions of records across the globe. I think this popularity was due to the fact that Glam Metal was, at the end of the day, basically about having fun, having a good time. You could say it was party music. Most songs included memorable, powerful sing-along choruses. Probably my favourite example of this is Rock The Night by Europe, from their multi-million selling album “The Final Countdown”, also featuring the single of the same name that hit #1 in 26 countries. This is a great song by the band, featuring a chorus that after one listen you just can’t get out your head:
“Rock now, rock the night'
Til early in the morning light
Rock now, rock the night
You'd better believe it's right.”
Listen to the track on YouTube here: link
Another track with a chorus you can’t help but sing along to is Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’, with a catchy repetitive chorus. Listen to the song here: link
The sound of Glam Metal was based around heavy guitar riffs, featuring chugging palm-muted powerchords and often virtuosic, or ‘shredding’, lead playing. Other over-the-top guitar techniques used by many Glam Metal guitar players included two-hand tapping and divebombs using locking tremolo systems. There were a lot of harmonised vocal lines, and shouted chants, and huge anthemic, catchy sing-along choruses. The vocals were usually also quite high pitched. Drumming was simple and not usually particularly flashy, as was the bass playing, which rarely took centre stage in Glam Metal.
Showmanship and outrageousness was a big part of a Glam Metal show, featuring the likes of naked dancing girls in cages, and pyrotechnics. Tommy Lee, drummer in Mötley Cruë even had a drumkit which he was strapped into, which rotated vertically. The bass player from Mötley Cruë, Nikki Sixx, once even set himself on fire on stage! Glam Metal artists didn’t just save the outrageousness for the stage either. Alcohol, sex and drugs were major players in the scene, and disrepute was the name of the game, with the first video for ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ by Mötley Cruë banned from MTV because of explicit content. Their song ‘Kickstart My Heart’ was written after Nikki Sixx was declared dead after a heroin overdose on December 23rd 1987, but was brought back to life by two adrenaline shots to the heart.
Personally I think that Glam Metal was a great genre of music because of it’s fun-loving atmosphere, which lead to it’s enormous success across the globe. The excess of insane guitar abilities, silly costumes, hair and makeup, and sex and substance-abuse controversy attracted many people, who although many probably weren’t so inspired by the junkie side of the scene, they were inspired by loads of musicians setting out and enjoying themselves and making great music.
Useful websites/sources:
www.sleazeroxx.com
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/glam_metal
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