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When heavy metal was spawned from the twisted minds of Ozzy and Black Sabbath in the seventies, a completely new and different sound was born. Metal's gut-wrenching, head-thrashing angst flew in the face of the soft rock and disco staples of the 70s. True heavy metal represented everything anti-establishment, a "we're not going to take it" (to quote Dee Snider) attitude of the youth towards adults and society in general. Bands like AC/DC, Judas Priest and later Metallica and Megadeth spewed forth a harsher and grittier sound than was ever heard before. It wasn't rock, it wasn't pop, and it certainly wasn't pretty.

Metallica and Co. kept metal pure and alive into the eighties, but by the end of the decade, metal's unique sound had mutated. The genre was fast becoming diluted by pop/rock bands calling themselves metal bands, who blow-dried and teased their long hair and wore pants so tight their spleens were spilling out. KISS wore make-up; these guys wore lip gloss. The sparkly kind. They called themselves RATT and Enuff Z'Nuff and White Lion and, one of my personal favorites, Def Leppard. Dokken and Winger and Poison, oh my! The "hair band" was here, its name was umlauted (sometimes twice), and it screamed a power ballad as if its very life depended on it. Some of these bands were actually pretty good; maybe they weren't as hard as traditional metal, but they did have some catchy songs. But the common denominator, the piece d'resistance of these hairspray-worshipping gods of glam, was the power ballad. Not just any ballad. No, that was too tame, something for the likes of Billy Ocean or Peter Cetera. The power ballad was a soaring ode to some chick somewhere who meant more than just a one-night stand. The power ballad was proof that these bad boys had a softer side (at least for 5 minutes 30 seconds), and they either turned off the amp to go acoustic or ramped it up and screeched to the heavens and beyond (taking our woofers and tweeters with them). Ripped from the throats of REO Speedwagon and Journey, the power ballad nailed the lid on metal's coffin by making "metal" accessible to everyone, including your little sister and all her friends.

The harsh truth is that back in the 80s, the power ballad meant money. If a band wanted to become successful in the glutted pop/rock/metal market, it had to reach a massive audience. Power ballad = mainstream acceptance = record deal = cash. The unforseen side-effect of this equation is that Slayer and Slaughter were now

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