Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1981

Glam metal

Emerged 1981 Origin Los Angeles, USA Subgenres — Vocals Sung
Heaviness
5
Speed
6
Melody
10

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

Hard rock with hairspray, a radio chorus and a mandatory power ballad. It ruled MTV until 1991.

How it sounds

  • Simple hard rock riffs with glossy production and gated reverb on the drums.
  • Choruses with multiple vocal harmonies, built for radio and MTV.
  • A mandatory ballad on every album, usually the hit single.

Hear what that means

  • Gated reverb from 4:28

    Mötley Crüe - Shout at the Devil

    The snare hits, blooms into a huge room, and is cut off dead by a noise gate. It is the most identifiable production sound of the decade and it is on nearly every record in this genre.

    Open on YouTube at 4:28
  • Craft under the hairspray from 7:01

    Ratt - Out of the Cellar

    Two guitars trading worked-out harmony parts, a pentatonic solo played cleanly at speed, and a chorus engineered to be inescapable. The playing standard is much higher than the genre's reputation admits.

    Open on YouTube at 7:01
  • When it got heavy and it was too late

    Skid Row - Slave to the Grind

    Down-tuned, genuinely aggressive, and released in 1991 into an audience that had already left. A useful record for hearing what the genre could do once it stopped being obliged to be fun.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
120-160 bpm
Song length
3.5-5 min
Tuning
E flat standard almost universally — a semitone down, which flatters a singer at the top of his range and is the tuning the entire genre lives in.
Production
Enormous, expensive and gated: the snare hits and then stops dead, the guitars are quad-tracked, and the vocals are stacked into choirs. These are pop records with distortion on them, made by people who knew exactly what they were making.
Written about
Sex, Los Angeles, Excess, The ballad, obligatory and sincere

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Written hooks rather than riffs, with pentatonic solos, wide vibrato and dive-bombs off a locking tremolo. The technical standard is much higher than the genre's reputation admits.
  • Bass Simple and locked to the kick, doing nothing that would distract from the vocal. It is a pop arrangement's bass.
  • Drums Gated reverb on the snare — the reverb cut off abruptly by a noise gate — which is the single most identifiable production sound of the 1980s.
  • Vocals High, raspy, and stacked into layered harmony on every chorus. The lead singer is a frontman in the theatrical sense, and the songs are written around that.

What it isn't

That it was manufactured and cynical. Some of it was, and the same is true of every commercially successful genre. What the sneer misses is craft: these records are extraordinarily well made, the playing is frequently virtuosic, and writing a chorus that large is a difficult and unfashionable skill. The genre is disliked for its sincerity about pleasure, which is a matter of taste rather than a technical charge.

Told apart from

  • Traditional heavy metal Traditional metal takes itself seriously as metal. Glam metal is a pop genre wearing metal's instrumentation, and it is much better at choruses.
  • Hard rock The distinction is mostly one of era and hairspray. Glam metal is what the Sunset Strip did to hard rock between 1981 and 1991.
  • Grunge The genre that displaced it, and deliberately: grunge's whole affect is a rejection of this one's. They share a decade and nothing else.
  • Pop punk A later genre solving the same problem — how to write an enormous chorus over distorted guitars — from the punk side rather than the metal side.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

On the Sunset Strip in the early 1980s, image counted as much as music: hair, spandex, publicly documented excess. Mötley Crüe and Ratt opened the way, and between 1986 and 1990 the genre owned the American charts. In 1991 Nevermind changed public taste practically overnight and dozens of bands vanished within a year.

Descended from

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.