Me too, great isn't it?Originally Posted by Scott Bails
This thread is like the soundtrack to my youth.
Me too, great isn't it?This thread is like the soundtrack to my youth.
That's basically true. The real dividing line was the rise of MTV as a cultural force in 1982-83. MTV played a lot of the later singles by the classic AOR bands like Journey and Foreigner, but most of those bands weren't particularly "telegenic" and didn't really transition to video well. MTV played them because they were already popular. The hair metal bands like Bon Jovi and Poison were the real successors to AOR, and they focused a lot more on looks and visual gimmickry because of the video factor.
New Wave was an entirely different and opposed thing to AOR in the context of the radio formats and listener types back then. A lot of people my age (born 1967) who started out on music in the later days of the classic AOR bands made a seamless transition to hair metal in the '80s. That rarely happened with New Wave, which was typically a different social group.
Probably because she's pissing in a urinal.
"Who would have thought a whale would be so heavy?" - Moe Sizlak
Pretty much what I said, I'd thought about MTV but didn't write that down as it was before my time, and it also has less impact in the UK, I think. As you say, New Wave was a totally different thing, though there's a few bands who made the transition to a wider appeal like The Cars (the none-more-AOR 'Heartbeat City', for instance) and The Pretenders.
I feel the 'hair bands' work has aged badly in comparison. It's not just the image, the music itself seems timelocked IMHO, with all those big reverby productions and formula ballads. Bon Jovi seem the only one from then who seem to have lasted in popularity terms, in the UK at least. (Though I'm not that wild about their music either, personally.) Also when listening to the 80s output of bands from the 70s like Heart, Aerosmith and ZZ Top, I think their earlier stuff sounds better now.
Queensryche is the survivor for me.....they had the look and sound in the mid 80s but were always trying to maintain that precarious balance of "commercial appeal" and "artistic integrity", giving just enough to each camp to keep from being pigeon-holed. Although their record sales dwindled in the subsequent decades, they managed to survive the about-face of trends and do music on their own terms that didnt sound "dated"
To a lesser extent, Night Ranger sort of survived, but only ghostly marginal compared to Queensryche.......I think part of it has to do that the name Night Ranger itself usually always conjures up 80s imagery, but I add them because the music on the albums of the subsequent decades also managed to change with the times ---
I never got that into Queensryche- nor 'progressive metal' generally- but they aren't really who I think of when I think of 'hair bands'. I think of Poison, Warrant etc.
LOL! I think she's wiping off graffiti actually but I like the way you think.
Interviewer of reprobate ne'er-do-well musicians of the long-haired rock n' roll persuasion at: www.velvetthunder.co.uk and former scribe at Classic Rock Society. Only vaguely aware of anything other than music.
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A lot of that has to do with how much less latitude the record companies gave artists and producers in the '80s, versus the '70s. Prior to the '80s, labels were trying to capture something that already existed in the wild, so to speak. In the '80s, they began trying to manufacture it. They'd take some crap-ass metal band off the Sunset Strip, put them into the studio with Beau Hill or Ron Nevison, have professional songwriters and session musicians do most of the actual music work, and spend ten times the album budget on the video. Whatever the band was doing before getting signed often bore little relation to the Music Product that was on sale at the record store. It was Guns 'N Roses (whatever you think of them) that really ended that, since their album was a raw slice of what they were actually doing on stage.
My brother remembers seeing Saigon Kick before they had an album out, and was quite disappointed at how much "softer" they had become on record.
This is what makes it relevant: Back in the 80s, terms like "Progressive Metal" and sub-genre labels were understatements and usually were never communicated -- Queensryche had long poofy hair, guitars with pointy headstocks, and flamboyant videos to songs that were getting mainstream airplay. To many mainstream listeners (and record companies too, I imagine), there really wasn't a general-public difference between Queensryche and Poison. We, as audiophiles, musicians, or both, can plainly see the difference...to the avg 16-year-old in the 80s? It didnt matter: they were both on MTV
Quite simply, back in the 80s, if it was rock, if it was soft metal, if it had a catchy tune, if it was on the radio and MTV it was AOR - further pigeonholing was not only unnecessary, we just didn't bother wasting our time worrying about it.
That's what's so great about this thread, everything posted so far is valid, because AOR is what it is, radio/tv friendly rock with a memorable tune; nothing more, nothing less, and as such we all have our favourites.
Were Rainbow, Rush, Budgie AOR? On certain songs most definitely
Were Europe, MSG, Gillan, Bon Jovi AOR? Again on certain songs most definitely
Were Yes, Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac and BÖC AOR? Again on certain songs most definitely
Exactly, I'd go as far as to remove the "usually", we just didn't bother.
I, for one, was too busy partying, going to discos and gigs and listening to the music, not talking, reading or writing about it.
Have you ever owned a copy of Rage For Order? For you have, then did you ever look at the photos? Face it, QR was hair metal.
for the duration of that album’s campaign, yes. come “o:mindcrime” and they settled for a much more workmanlike image – apart from tate’s bouffant and rockenfield’s chains-style kit, that is... both albums, of course, are as far removed from any hair metal splendour as possible.Have you ever owned a copy of Rage For Order? For you have, then did you ever look at the photos? Face it, QR was hair metal.
Thats not the point. That was addressed:
This is the point:
^ apologies, but i think that point is valid. with the success of the L.A. glam bands at that time – and i was alive and well and correctly aged during that area (eg. one of those 16year olds in the 1980s) – QR were obviously shoehorned into that style for “rage for order” by the powers-that-be, especially in direct comparison to the back cover photo of “the warning” two years earlier. the band had voiced its disdain for that particular experiment many times since. by “empire” they were really just five long-haired louts in custom muso black, with the “tri-ryche” symbolism being employed to create a mythical band iconography. a wise move, because glam rock crashed roughly one year later.
no apology necessary and I totally agree with this
....the unspoken thing in this part of the thread is how the complexity of sub-genre labels affects the public mindset....I understand why ROCK should be broken down into sub-categories (Country Rock, Blues Rock,, Progressive Rock, etc) because its a HUGE umbrella. The Eagles didn't sound like Rush, etc, therefore distinctions had to be made.....It was when the advent of breaking down the sub-genres to smaller groups is when the confusion starts (Progressive Metal, Grind Metal, Techno-Pop, Math, EBM, etc). The irony is, as more bands started to sound the same, the more these sub-sub-genre labels started to appear (some of these broken down even more steps).
Im one of those that frowns at "microscoping genres with new labels" with disdain.
Metal was the worst, because bands would invent their own genre (usually with a "-core" suffix) to give the illusion of individualist identity. I remember in the early 90s when all the Death Metal bands, be it Grind Metal, Doom Metal, whatever, would always boast how their sound was "original" yet, to me, they sounded like every other dark metal band with the Cookie Monster for a vocalist. Grind Metal and Doom Metal? The only difference I hear between the two is BPM. I think its ludicrous that BPM should be a deciding factor between genres of which everything else is the same, but thats just my $.02
Last edited by klothos; 11-13-2013 at 01:54 AM.
FFS STOP!!! - just listen to the music & watch the videos already! Sheesh, you people!
What do you mean you people?Sheesh, you people!
Queensryche followed the same trends others did. When hair was high, so was theirs. When flashy 'n fringed leather jackets were worn, they wore them also. As more bands shifted back to black/leather, so did Queensryche.
In the end, what does it matter? If you like the music and not the image of the era, close your eyes.
stick-up-ass-prog-fans
I know this is from the '70s, but can I post it anyway since other people posted clips of late '70s songs?
I like that, tell me more about Trillion.
Okay, I will. Dennis "Fergie" Frederiksen, who later joined Toto, was their singer on their first album. Producer Patrick Leonard was their keyboardist.
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