Friday 5: What 5 (More) Hair Metal Albums Are Essential?
Happy Friday, MetalSucks reader! Welcome to MetalSucks Friday 5, our awesome series that appears every Friday (duh) on MetalSucks (duhh) and involves the quantity of five (duhhh).
Here’s how it works: A list of best/worst/weirdest/whatever five somethings is posted by one of your beloved MetalSucks contributors or by one of our buds (like you?). Then you, our cherished reader, checks it out, has a chuckle, then chimes in with a list of the same. No sweat, just whatever springs to mind, k? (Just like that movie about those losers working at a Chicago record store!) After all, it’s Friday — the day dedicated by the gods to mindless, fun time-wasting.
Today, let’s get hairy!
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THE FIVE
Rolling Stone just ranked hair metal’s 50 best albums. What five albums would you add?
THE LISTER
Anso DF, MetalSucks senior editor
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Blue Murder
Blue Murder
1989 | Geffen
Believe it: Hair Metal is responsible for 50 awesome albums. A big magazine ranked that many this week in a tasty list — and it’s a real fist-pumper. It will help a bunch of people get into a bunch of rad albums (ie. people who look to Rolling Stone) and we love that. Fuck, as we speak, somebody is for the first time getting their mind blown by that first Badlands album. I remember that feeling! Anyway, what if Rolling Stone phoned me or Allyson BC or another hair metal superfan to chip in on their list? Then the first words from my mouth in reply would be “Blue Murder” then “John Sykes” and “Bob Rock” and finally “Sex Child.”
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https://youtu.be/knsRdcP-Zkw
The Headless Children
W.A.S.P.
1989 | Capitol
For their list, the RS team’s feeling was that W.A.S.P. is too heavy to be hair metal. Just as valid an opinion is the one that acknowledges W.A.S.P.’s awesome party vibe. And you could argue that the point is that fans of hair metal worship W.A.S.P., so let’s help interested listeners find The Headless Children. Whatever it is, it’s for people into hair metal. P.S. Dear readers, please re-visit my August story about hair metal greats T-Ride, there’s a correction.
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Love + War
Lillian Axe
1989 | MCA
The public narrative on hair metal is this: Over a short period of time, it became too dumb, too obnoxious, and too fake — and now, in retrospect, it all seems lame. Butttt you don’t have to be in denial to fail to find any evidence of that. It’s a theory droned by the bitter losers within and the unkind without. In 2015, we know that popularity dies fast and hair metal’s run was stout at its weakest. It was big money; it attracted big songwriters, nuclear-grade hooks, the most driven performers, the boobest cover models. So that’s why even a random unsuccessful album by Lillian Axe (?) or Babylon A.D. (??) is fucking incredible.
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https://youtu.be/RVMBEtiDScw
Babylon A.D.
Babylon A.D.
1989 | Arista
Fun fact: Babylon A.D. was the first heavy band on the roster of Arista Records and was signed by Clive Davis himself! Imagine the party that night.
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A Little Ain’t Enough
David Lee Roth
1991 | Warner Bros.
In the RS blurb about Winger’s debut album (#41), singer-bassist Kip Winger states to Greg Prato that he was unaware of the implications of “Seventeen.” Where he lived, that’s the age of consent; to him Winger’s mega-hit isn’t about an underage girl, it’s about a barely legal girl (“Feels good/Dancin’ close to the borderline.”). You might not buy that, it might seem like the new opinion of a guy now in his 50s who has a daughter/niece/granddaughter that age. On the other side of the coin, David Lee Roth’s vibe is age-proof. Whoa, I say.
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Your turn! Have a great wknd!
