The Rise and Fall of 80s Hair Metal: What Nothing but a Good Time Got Right

Sep 22, 2024

So, I just finished watching the 80's documentary Nothing but a Good time on Paramount. A celebration of good times, and a reminder of the direction of industry control.

I have to start by stating that regardless of what rhetoric was ever spoken in the 90's, the 80's were a great time for rock and metal. Sure, as the 80's pushed on towards the 90's things got blah at times. But, there was still a great amount of rock music being created that wasn't from Seattle.

The chronology of this documentary was pretty spot on, however compressed in it's content. They hit on some major players but didn't get the whole picture framed as it should have been. The roll over from 70's bands was huge initially in the development of the 80's LA Scene. For reference to this check out the Inside Metal series by Bob Nalbanian(RIP).

Now, let's touch on some stuff. The 80's scene was a glorious shit show of great music, debauchery, and chaos. But, it was not unlike any other period of rock before it. The bigger microscope was the fact that most of these bands were blown up by the MTV Monster that helped create them. This was the time of all content now. MTV, CNN, News now, A Current Affair. It was a cultural thing that was seemingly disgusting as it appeared cool.

Anyway, Kudos to the writers for shining light on the cool factor from this period. The good music that came out of this is still cool, as demonstrated by the latter portion of the documentary where they shined light on the re-emergence of some of this fun music. It also explained how some acts where shit on by the industry that exploited them for their own needs.

The other portion of this was the discussion of the grunge explosion. As I mentioned, this too was an industry created thing. The fascinating part is if you evaluate it, grunge had about the same lifespan as the so called "hair metal" bands. And this doesn't factor in the acts that may have been impacted by this movement that had been creating great music well before the LA scene exploded onto our TV screens.

I think one of the factors that goes unmentioned is the same rampant drug use, perhaps even more so, by the grunge acts of the 90's. The industry likes to paint the 80's scene as the worst environment imaginable to be around for drug use, yet in the 90's the bands and to an extent the cultural scenes around them-movies, modelling, etc-all suffered equally or worse fates than what preceded them.

The shining light at the end of this was the commentary from people talking about the resurgence of this music and the requests from people old and young to experience this again. Nostalgia is a great thing and can bring with it some great feelings, and when times get crazy people need to feel good from time to time. The world we live in for the last 20 plus years has shown this for sure.

All in all, I think people of a certain age and wanting to relive some feelings of old will appreciate this documentary, as well as have feelings of regret. I think anyone from a younger generation will get a feel for what was going on and can see a connection to what occurred while they were alive as well.

My parting thoughts, this was another cool and informative glimpse into a time that I, personally, lived in. It also was a reminder that what happened back in the day was equally excellent and suspect at times. But we were all along for the ride, and it was wild and wonderful. Remember, we don't need nothing but a good time.

ROCK ON,

Marshall Rifflord

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