With the exception of whichever one Mase was in, perhaps no musical genre has endured a swifter or less celebrated mainstream extermination than Hair Metal, whose predominant 1980s celebrants – generally uncomplicated fellows who came to town with nothing more than hearts of gold, dreams of fame and lady makeup – wanted nothing more than to have a good time, even if you couldn’t get one to write a decent lyric about it by electro-shocking him in the shoulder pads.

Once that floating naked baby record and the flannel people materialized, of course, such bands couldn’t do much but struggle to quote-fingers evolve (anyone remember Poison’s gospel-tinged ode to individuality “Stand?” Pfft.), but surprisingly, most fans resisted the abruptly spiritual carpe-diem stuff emerging from the very same people who just minutes prior were panting out songs like “The Hunter” and “Wanted Man” and “Slip of the Lip” and “You Are The Saint, I Am The Sinner” while thrusting, into the MTV cameras, anything attached to them that was thrustable. Eight minutes later “Beavis and Butthead” put a dingus named Stuart in a Winger T-shirt and the coffin was closed. For a while.

Because these days, a great many hairtacular bands have circled their wagons on the middle-tier nostalgia package-tour circuit looking, if not to conquer the Earth, to at least ruin some more of its ozone. These are the lucky ones, of course, as some are surely moving used cars in Lexington, some are assembling weird simulacrums of their former bands and releasing “Chinese Democracy” and still others are smacking their noses into parts of the Tony Awards. It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. But regardless, somewhere on its plummet down from the wild ’80s schmaltz-glitz years of Bon Jovi, Poison, Motley Crue and the 250 bands that started with W, hair metal — and this was really nice of it — forgot to die. (more…)