What would you say is the difference between pop metal and glam metal if any? These are both terms actually used in the 80s to describe certain bands as opposed to “hair metal” which NOBODY described any band as during the 80s. The term “hair metal” literally didn’t exist in the 80s. That’s one why you can tell which people on YouTube in the comments section actually were part of the 80s metal scene and which people were either not born yet or weren’t old enough yet to be part of the 80s metal scene. If they use the term “hair metal” to describe a glam metal or pop metal band, they weren’t there!
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Glam metal = makeup and costumes. The glam metal bands wanted to be like T-Rex, the New York Dolls, Kiss, Alice Cooper. There were even some glam bands like Vain that were harder than most of the scene. I don’t recall anyone being called pop metal back then. If Ghost was teleported back to the 80s they might have been called a glam band 
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…except me and every person I knew in high school!
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I recall some bands being either called pop metal or melodic metal. Actually I was talking to a female friend of mine who is just one year younger than me so she remembers the 80s scene very well. She said she didn’t remember any bands being called “melodic metal” but she remembered some bands being called “pop metal.” She asked me what the difference was between glam metal and pop metal.
I said the way I looked at it, bands like Def Leppard and Whitesnake were pop metal. A song like “Here I Go Again” is certainly not very heavy and kind of a pop song. If all their songs were like that, they wouldn’t have even been called a metal band at all. But they also had heavier songs like “Still Of The Night.” bands like Def Leppard and Whitesnake were more likely to sing love songs while Glam Metal bands were more likely to sing about one night stands with girls who were high on cocaine or heroin. Glam was singing about a very sleazy lifestyle and the clothing was very sleazy as well. They wore lots of makeup too. Glam makes me think of bands like L.A. Guns, Roxx Gang, and the band that started glam metal, for our generation anyway - Motley Crue. While Def Leppard sang about ““Bringing On The Heartbreak”, Motley Crue sang about “Piece Of Your Action” and"Ten Seconds To Love.”
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Could this be an East Coast/West Coast thing?
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Maybe you were already going to the rock 'n roll clubs when you were still a high school kid, but for the most part the clubs didn’t let you in unless you were either 21, or 18 if you got your hand stamped so you couldn’t buy drinks and the club allowed people in who were 18 and over.
I was on the west coast…of Florida at the time I turned 18 and started going to the rock clubs. Tampa had a scene that was only surpassed by Los Angeles and even they didn’t have the diversity of metal bands we did. It was an amazing scene to be part of!
Some friends were but I was not. I thought you were asking about terminology. We definitely said “hair band” and “hair metal”. And we also said “poseurs”. And in fact people I knew who were in that scene, actually called themselves “poseurs”. That sounds pretty weird and even then I didn’t know where the term came from. We had no knowledge of any negative connotations of this. We were just kids and that’s what we said.
Maybe! Did you guys say “poseur”?
Oh yeah, that was probably one of the worst insults you could give someone. It was way better to suck than to be a poseur.
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I think the term hair metal is shallow because it doesn’t accurately describe the sound of most of the bands, similar to how “grunge” became a catch all 90s. Using costumes as the delineation isn’t super helpful as every band “dressed up” to some extent in the MTV fueled 80s. I guess Metallica is the ultimate hair band since they had long hair in the 80s and half of them don’t now. Hair metal also becomes a bit crazy of a descriptor because people lump in any metal band that was on regular MTV rotation in the 80s or a had a ballad. Queensryche is the best example of this.
Glam would be the more image based bands and the ones influenced by 70s glam rock or those that put image at the forefront they tend to have more of a punk rock inlfuence like bands like Hanoi Rocks, Motley Crue, Stryper, Poison, Steel Panther, Twisted Sister etc.
Pop metal would be the bands that might be considered 80s hard rock by some people. Heavier than 70s hard rock but still light on the metal spectrum. Van Halen, GNR, Def Leppard, Winger, Warrant, Extreme, Europe, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, Great White, Tesla, etc.
I’d consider glam to be a subset of pop metal.
Glam metal
Pop metal
Bonus, the 80s were a weird time (that’s Celtic Frost btw)
Pretty much every 80s metal band that made videos had some ridiculous videos
TLDR
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I asked what people thought the difference was (if any) between glam metal and pop metal. Regarding the term “hair metal” I wasn’t asking anything. I wrote “…you can tell which people on YouTube in the comments section actually were part of the 80s metal scene and which people were either not born yet or weren’t old enough yet to be part of the 80s metal scene. If they use the term “hair metal” to describe a glam metal or pop metal band, they weren’t there!”
We had the term posers in Tampa as well. It was used to describe someone who posed as if they were part of something they were not. Kanye West wearing a Testament t-shirt brings to mind the term “poser.”
In tampa we had everything from glam metal bands to death metal. The Rock-It Club was my favorite club in the Tampa Bay area (Tampa, St. Pete, and Clearwater) and they had everything from local bands like Roxx Gang to National bands like Skid Row. The had heavier bands there too like Savatage. I aw them there twice when Criss Oliva was still alive. Then there were clubs that specialized in thrash and death metal. My friends in Blackkout played at clubs like The Sunset Club and Club 19. They were a progressive, power metal - almost thrash band. Here’s a song by them. Richard Elliott is the vocalist and guitarist. He also plays the flute on this song. Someone misspelled their name as “Blackout” in the description of this video, but anyway, this is Blackkout - by far my favorite local level Tampa Bay metal band at the time!
Here’a a song with more of a guitar solo:
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I’m 46. We said everything I said we said, and people who dressed that way and played in bands and went to the clubs actually called themselves posers. The US is a damn big place, and big blanket statements about what it is and isn’t usually fall short.
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I just remember ‘glam’ used to be sorta a cool label in the late 70’s/early 80’s… and by the time Poison came into the scene… it became sorta a sissy label. But it was a terrible way to group music… because many had totally different sounds… and the only thing they had in common was makeup.
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That’s a very accurate description of how things were in the 80s. All the metal bands from the 80s that come to mind now had long hair. Some bands had more volume to their hair which often gets called “big hair” but that was the style in the 80s. So if you were going to try to categorize a band based solely on the length and/or volume of their hair, good luck! Musicians that previously didn’t have “big hair” prior to the 80s often did during the 80s because that was just what was in style. Ozzy had it. The guys in Judas Priest (except Halford) did. KISS did. I could name examples all day. It was the look - not necessarily the music that changed. Then in the 90s it went back to hairstyles with less volume. It has little or nothing to do with the music they played which is why there would have been no point in calling some metal bands “hair bands” at the time. There was thrash metal. “Thrash” was a musical style. There was glam metal. “Glam” was a musical style. “Hair” was not a musical style.
Like pop vs. soda
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Nearly everyone in the south calls it coke.
Indeed. I just texted my friend who bartended at these clubs and did so into the '90s industrial scene, what terms he remembers being used and when. It’s possible I’m misremembering.
Pop Metal is all the rich daddy’s boys on the hard rock stations with PRS and Schecter guitars. Daddy’s payola gets their no-talent ass on the air and promotes them.
Glam Metal is dudes that look like chics.
First time I ever encountered that was Parker Posey’s character in the movie “Waiting for Guffman”.
And this map made the rounds online a few years ago:
Most interesting part to me is the island of “soda” radiating from St. Louis.
Edit: Someone wrote an article about the St. Louis thing:
And I stumbled across a forum post that claims the explanation is that the term “pop” was popularized by the Detroit brand “Faygo”, which expanded it’s distribution across the midwest once the food-science wizards figured out how to give the drinks a longer shelf-life. But Faygo failed to crack the market in St. Louis due to the strength of the local “Vess” brand. Hence St. Louis didn’t join the “pop” linguistic movement. I suppose the strength of Vess also fended off the southern “Coke” influence.
http://www.urbanreviewstl.com/2012/02/st-louis-more-an-island-than-i-thought/
(And I think it’s already widely known that the generic use of “Coke” in the south is connected to Coca-Cola’s roots in Atlanta. Though I personally didn’t learn about it until Atlanta hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics.)
I really want to know what the “other” is.
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