Jani Lane, the former lead singer for the band Warrant was found dead in his hotel room earlier this week. As far as rock stars deaths go, it's a fairly cliched and unremarkable one, but I still felt a twinge of grief when I read the news. Warrant was one of those bands that I was never really a fan of, but was part of the aural wallpaper of my teenage years. The late 80s was a culturally vapid era marked by acid wash, spandex, and the poofy metal bands that dominated radio and MTV. It definitely felt like we were biding our time until something better came along, but if you were a teenage girl in during that time with no access to whatever was bubbling up from the underground, hair bands were unavoidable.
It's easy to see why hair metal has become one of the most reviled sub-genres of popular music. It was easy-access, radio-friendly rock that was unchallenging and relied heavily on its image. It was "hard" music made non-threatening. Side-stepping the obvious misogyny for a moment (which is another post altogether), it was also largely marketed to girls. In a sense, the Poisons, Bon Jovis, Wingers and Poisons were our "boy bands." (Grab and old issue of Metal Edge and you'll see what I mean.) And of course anything with a mostly female audience automatically loses credibility.
Another thing that's easily overlooked is hair metal's class issues. Hard rock, and metal in general, working people's music, and not in the Bruce Springsteen, "tramps like us, baby we were born to run," kind of way. Turn on any college radio station in 1989, and there was a huge chasm between what was viable, critic approved "art," and crap tossed off for the masses. Nirvana and its ilk knocked metal off the charts with one ragged gasp, co-opting hard rock's sound, but gaining tons of credibility. And plenty of girls liked it too.
I feel sorry for guys like Jani Lane, who will be forever known as "the cherry pie guy." Judging from this video, it's was more of a curse than a blessing:
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