the 1980s, and bands from other parts of the country, among them Poison and Guns N’ Roses, flocked to Los Angeles in hopes of getting signed to a major label contract. In 1983, Def Leppard released Pyromania, the album that brought them stardom, leading the metal boom of the following year. In 1983, heavy metal records accounted for only 8 percent of all recordings sold in the United States; one year later, that share had increased phenomenally, to 20 percent.33 Dokken, Iron Maiden, Motley Crüe, Ratt, Twisted Sister, and Scorpions rode the crest of this new success.
The following year, bands from around the world joined in the metal boom: Japan’s Loudness, Sweden’s Europe, and Germany’s Scorpions all achieved widespread acceptance, not only in their homelands but also among English-speaking fans. Swedish guitar virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen had comparatively less commercial success with his albums of 1984–88, but his extension of metal’s neoclassical tendencies greatly influenced other heavy metal guitarists. Malmsteen’s fusion of heavy metal with Baroque musical rhetoric upped the ante for technical prowess and inspired legions of young imitators.34 Heavy metal fan magazines proliferated in France (Hard Force, Hard Rock), Italy (HM, Heavy Metal, Rockstar, Flash), and Germany (Rock Hard, Horror Infernal, Metalstar, Breakout, Metal Hammer), just as new magazines appeared in the United States and Britain (RIP and many others), and already established rock and pop magazines began focusing exclusively on metal (Hit Parader, Circus).
The popularity of heavy metal continued to increase throughout the decade. Billboard attributed this trend in the economy of American popular music to a shift in the subcultural support of metal: “Metal has broadened its audience base. Metal music is no longer the exclusive domain of male teenagers. The metal audience has become older (college-aged), younger (pre-teen), and more female.”35 The release of Bon Jovi’s third album, Slippery When Wet, in 1986 was an important moment in this transformation of the metal audience, for Bon Jovi fused the intensity and heaviness of metal with the romantic sincerity of pop and the “authenticity” of rock, helping to create a huge new gender-balanced audience for heavy metal.36 Bon Jovi’s success not only reshaped metal’s musical discourse and sparked imitations and extensions, but it also gained metal substantial radio airplay for the first time. A Billboard writer summarized: “Many credit the mass-appeal success of Bon Jovi’s ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ last summer with opening programmers’ ears to the merits of metal. Others give a nod to Mötley Crüe’s “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” for dispelling the notion that top 40 and hard rock don’t mix. Metal and hard rock have fallen between the programming cracks because of their predominantly teen appeal.”37
In December 1986, MTV significantly increased the amount of heavy metal it programmed, initiating a special program called “Headbangers’ Ball” and putting more metal videos into their regular rotation. The response was tremendous; “Headbangers’ Ball” became MTV’s most popular show, with 1.3 million viewers each week.38 Heavy metal’s spectacular live shows made it a natural for television, where its important visual dimension could be exploited and presented virtually unchanged. Once heavy metal achieved access to the airwaves, its popularity and influence increased sharply. In June 1987, the number-one album on the Billboard charts was by U2, but the next five places were held by metal bands: Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Ozzy Osbourne/Randy Rhoads. For the rest of the decade, metal usually accounted for at least half of the top twenty albums on the charts.39
The expansion of the metal scene during the 1980s, however, was accompanied by its fragmentation. Genres proliferated: magazine writers and record marketers began referring to thrash metal, commercial metal, lite metal, power metal, American metal, black (satanic) metal, white (Christian) metal, death metal, speed metal, glam metal—each of which bears a particular relationship to that older, vaguer, more prestigious term “heavy metal.”40 Just as one of the major musical debates of nineteenth-century Europe was over who should be considered Beethoven’s musical heir (Wagner versus Brahms), metal bands and fans continually position the music they care about with respect to a lineage dating back to the late 1960s founders: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple. Though allegiances were often complex and genre boundaries blurred, two main camps formed during the 1980s.
On the one hand, there was the metal of the broad new audience forged during the mid-1980s by bands like Motley Crüe and Bon Jovi, This was the heavy metal on the sales charts, with radio play, the metal seen on MTV and at huge arena concerts. On the other hand, a different camp disparaged the newfound popularity of what they call lite metal or the music of “posers.” These fans and bands attempted to sustain the marginal status metal enjoyed during the 1970s; they shunned the broad popularity that they saw as necessarily linked to musical vapidity and subcultural dispersion. The “underground” metal scene was, until the late 1980s, based in clubs rather than arenas, in subcultural activity rather than mass-mediated identity. Its literature often took the form of local, self-published fanzines instead of slick, full-color, national publications like Hit Parader or Circus. Sometimes lumped together as “speed metal” or “thrash,” these underground styles of metal tended to be more deliberately transgressive, violent, and noisy.
The thrash metal style coalesced in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles in the early 1980s, with groups like Metallica, Slayer, Testament, Exodus, Megadeth, and Possessed. The musicians who created thrash were influenced by both heavy metal and punk; Motörhead, an important pioneer of speed metal, has played for both punk and metal audiences since the 1970s. The punk influence shows up in the music’s fast tempos and frenetic aggressiveness and in critical or sarcastic lyrics delivered in a menacing growl. From heavy metal, thrash musicians took an emphasis on guitar virtuosity, which is usually applied more generally to the whole band. Thrash bands negotiate fast tempos, meter changes, and complicated arrangements with precise ensemble coordination. Speed metal was in part a reaction against the spectacular dimension of other metal styles; thrash bands appealed to “a new generation for whom Zeppelin and Sabbath were granddads but Quiet Riot and Motley Crüe were too glam.”41 However, though it is often compared to punk rock because of its speed, noise, and violence, thrash metal contrasts with punk’s simplicity and nihilism, both lyrically and musically. The Ramones and the Sex Pistols placed musical amateurism at the aesthetic core of punk rock; but to be considered metal, bands must demonstrate some amount of virtuosity and control.
Bubbling underground since the mid-1970s, thrash or speed metal broke through to the surface of popular music in the late 1980s, with successful major-label releases by Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer, at that time the Big Four of thrash metal.42 The breakthrough came in 1986, when Metallica’s Master of Puppets, their first album on a major record label, began to receive the acclaim that would make it thrash metal’s first platinum album. Metallica’s success sparked increased interest in speed metal among the major record companies, who developed promotional tactics to help bring underground bands to mainstream attention. Until then, speed metal bands had recorded on independent labels like Combat, Megaforce, and Metal Blade, relying on a loyal underground of fans to spread the word. In 1989, MTV sponsored their “Headbanger’s Ball Tour,” which gained wide exposure for Anthrax, Exodus, and Helloween.
By the end of the decade, thrash metal had successfully challenged the mainstream of metal and redefined it. Metallica and a few other bands were able to headline arena concerts and appear regularly on MTV, although radio play remained incommensurate with their popularity. Other styles of metal coexisted, despite a slump in heavy metal record and ticket sales in 1990, which was explained by music industry figures as the result of the economic recession and overexploitation of the metal market—too many bands signed, too many records released, too many concert tours—as the industry scrambled to cash in on the boom of the late 1980s.43
Throughout the 1980s, the influence of heavy metal on other kinds of popular music was pervasive and substantial. On what became the best-selling record of all time, Michael Jackson (or his producer Quincy Jones) brought in guitarist Eddie Van Halen for a cameo heavy metal solo on the song “Beat
