hair band

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 06:58:57 -0800, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

>This kind of hair band is missing from OED :
>
>1993  Pantera   (Usenet: alt.rock-n-roll.metal ) (May 6) : Pantera...had
>the image of a "hair band" but their music was still much heavier than
>the typical glam stuff.
>
>Thousands of Google hits.  A 'hair band" is a metal band of a kind
>popular in the 1980s whose male musicians wore very long and carefully
>styled hair, and typically sang songs in harmony.

Nexis takes it back to 1991 (makes sense-- that's the year that the "hair
bands" began losing out to the alternative/grunge movement)...

-----
St. Petersburg Times, June 17, 1991, p. 1D
Are hard rockers going soft, wimping out? Nah. Don't expect crunching
power chords to vanish any time this millennium. But the better groups are
breaking from the pack, looking to expand the perception of what a
pop-metal "hair band" can do, plumbing new dynamics for the style.
-----
Boston Globe, Nov 3, 1991, p. 77
Devotees can argue forever about these genre differences, or for that
matter about how to separate metal and hard rock - as in, say, AC/DC, Skid
Row and Aerosmith. "The line is very hazy between hard rock and heavy
metal," said Aerosmith's Joe Perry before a recent Boston show. "But it
all comes down to hard rock to me. "Whatever you want to call it, I think
there's a backlash against the hair bands," Perry said.
-----
St. Petersburg Times, Dec 6, 1991, p. 21
Rhino's Never Mind the Mainstream (66:42), even though the tie-in with
MTV's alternative program 120 Minutes comes off as a bit cheesy,
effectively chronicles rock's fringe of recent years. It also serves as a
good primer if you've locked your dial on rock radio for the last
half-decade and listened to all those hair bands.
-----


--Ben Zimmer