Is it coincidence that Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap was released the same year as Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry? We think not. The MTV generation will recall Twisted Sister parading through high school hallways inciting anarchy for the anthemic "I Wanna Rock" video, which catapulted TS into infamy. The video also captured the comedic side of the group's distorted pop metal, which is where the Spinal Tap comparison comes in to play. The song "Burn in Hell" typifies the fake Satanic ritualism that lends itself to scenes from Spinal Tap, such as the band (Spinal Tap) emerging from alien pods or dancing around miniature druid monuments.

One has to wonder how seriously Twisted Sister took its meticulously crafted mangy image. The group borrowed its style from fellow New Yorkers the New York Dolls, but with the exception of singer Dee Snider, the group never looked comfortable. Snider wore his burlesque-street walker fashion with ease, while the remainder of the band looked like pissed off Dee Dee Ramones...angry because Mother had dressed them in something other than jeans and leather. Fortunately, Twisted Sister's drag show complemented its campy pop metal, producing quite possibly the cheesiest metal ever recorded. If you doubt us, listen to the cornball epic "Horror-Teria: Captain Howdy/Street Justice."

Leave it to the Germans to teach Americans how to rock. I can just imagine Poison guitarist C.C. DeVille prancing around his salon worshipping every lick and riff produced by the Motherland's greatest export. Actually, that's no joke, as the Scorpions have sold more than 30 million albums, securing the band in the ranks of continental Europe's biggest rock sellers. Despite releasing albums as early as 1973, the Scorpions didn't score it big in America until Love at First Sting hit the streets. And hit it big the band did. The album offered the metallic-riffed megahit "Rock You Like a Hurricane," which shell-shocked US charts, making Love at First Sting one of 1984's best sellers.

Unlike many other metal acts, which diluted their sounds for the hair metal cash cow, the Scorpions stayed the course. In fact, many consider Love at First Sting to be the group's finest work. And we must agree. Right out of the gate, "Bad Boys Running Wild" offers a dizzying descent into fist-pumping rock, as it's mixed with lyrics soaked in sexual innuendo that's perfect for teenagers suffering from hormone overload. The album suffers from a few power ballads but closes with what may, in fact, be the quintessential '80s ballad, "Still Loving You." Even with these soft rock moments, Love at First Sting kicks ass and proves this band influences every other one on this list.

Theatre of Pain finds the Crüe spiraling deeper into hedonistic sleaze while simultaneously shedding the half-assed Satanic imagery of its preceding effort, Shout at the Devil. While Shout set the aesthetic pace for the glam revival, it was Theatre of Pain that introduced a nation of MTV-addicted teens to the era of hair metal. The album delivered the power ballad "Home Sweet Home" and a cover of Brownsville Station's "Smokin' in the Boys' Room." Both ensured a legion of hair spray-saturated fans.

Theatre of Pain dished out a more polished and radio-ready Crüe, but it refined the image of four menacing badasses. No one wanted to deny the authenticity of the Crüe's gluttonous, pleasure-seeking ways, which percolated through urban legend. Later, the group's exploits would be documented in a tell-all biography, The Dirt, which makes the myths seem like a Disney film compared to the realities.

Bon Jovi owe its success to singer Jon Bon Jovi. Jon's long golden hair, both on his head and chest, mesmerized a nation of teenage girls hungry for the ultimate pop metal pinup boy. Of course, where there are young girls, there are young boys. Fortunately, Bon Jovi catered to them as well by offering generic guitar riffs borrowed from Def Leppard and Van Halen. Slippery When Wet not only fulfilled its basic hair metal prerequisites, but also offered up the wildly popular anthem "You Give Love a Bad Name" and the every-man-can relate "Livin' on a Prayer."

Without question, Bon Jovi outdid itself with the Western-inspired six-string orgy, "Wanted Dead or Alive." Wow! There isn't a karaoke machine in the universe that doesn't include this working man's epic. Sing along with us: "I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride. Blah, blah, blah. I'm wanted dead or alive." Sure, Jon Bon Jovi owes his husky bravado to fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, and guitarist Richie Sambora couldn't exist without Eddie Van Halen, but Bon Jovi managed to forge its synth-heavy metal straight to the top of the charts, ensuring its place in the hair metal hall of fame.

The worst offenders of the glam metal lifestyle, Poison burst onto the scene with Look What the Cat Dragged In in 1986. After checking out the album cover, one can only assume the cat dragged in a bunch of girls.

Poison took the glam look to the extreme with poofy perms, cat's-eye makeup, and pouty lips that would make Angelina Jolie jealous. Unlike the glam of '70s Bowie, Poison avoided the androgyny of the makeup with the screeching male sexuality of songs like "I Want Action" and "Talk Dirty to Me." In fact, the entire album is kind of a 40-minute horrible pickup line for sleazy girls in LA.

Having the tighest spandex of any of their peers, Poison was quick to rocket up the charts with Look What the Cat Dragged In. The band's music videos became a staple on MTV, and only Def Leppard and Bon Jovi could claim more record sales and influence.

Guns N' Roses rewrote the book on pop/hair metal. The band's members weren't about prissy glamour, but rather, they were about ugly, backroom, sex-and-drug-charged rock-and-roll...and people loved it. Appetite for Destruction hit the global music charts like an atom bomb in 1987, the year of Guns N' Roses. Appetite for Destruction reintroduced sleaze-based blues rock. And quite honestly, it rocked so hard that after all these years, it still begs to be played at top volume.

The difference between Guns N' Roses and its contemporaries reached beyond the band's addictive trash metal leanings and into Axl Rose's lyricism. Sure, other hair metal bands wrote about girls, drugs, and liquor, but Axl dealt with the stark realities of urban life. Heroin addiction, misogyny, questionable sexual practices, cocaine, and excessive alcohol abuse were all funneled into G N' R's vision of the world...all through the lens of Los Angeles-bred rock.

Calling out specific songs on the album is useless, because Appetite for Destruction feels more like a greatest hits collection than an album. Just strap on a headband, crank the album to maximum neighbor-annoying volume, and trash around while imitating Axl's trademark snakelike dance.

White Lion, a band that had a downright virtuoso in guitarist Vito Bratta, stood out from its contemporaries with its distinctive harmonic sound and weirdly positive lyrics. Really, how many metal bands of this era could write songs titled "When the Children Cry" and "Lady of the Valley"?

There's nary a nasty word, nor a mention of sex, booze, or drugs in Pride, the band's most successful album. Maybe that's because lead singer Mike Tramp hailed from Denmark, where such vices are only folk tales told to scare tiny children (hence all the crying, we suspect).

The real "pride" of White Lion was guitarist Bratta, whose layered speed dirges many guitar magazines proclaimed better than Eddie Van Halen's. It was surprising, then, that when the group dissolved in 1992, Bratta disappeared from the music scene, never to heard from again. Some say if you cup your ears and point them toward the East Coast, you can still hear a couple of 38-year-old dockworkers who clamor for his return. (...and one member of the MP3.com staff does likewise.)

Although the band, like many in this list, was a simple clone of Van Halen, White Lion seemed to be much more polished musically than its Sunset Strip contemperaries. Still, anyone who saw the black-and-white videos from Pride knew the band induldged in just as much hair spray abuse as the rest of 'em. In any case, any fan of the pop metal movement would be shamed for not checking out this oft-forgotten gem of an album.

One of the finest pop metal albums ever recorded, Hysteria is now seen as the high point of the era, both sonically and commercially. The album spawned seven hit singles and became one of the highest-selling LPs of the '80s. In 1987, when you turned on the radio, you were either listening to Michael Jackson or Def Leppard. Hysteria was that big.

The Album was a monster of production and a labor of love for the band. While Pyromania proved the band knew how to write catchy pop metal songs, Hysteria showed it had perfected the proccess and made it an actual craft. The "scream harmony,"¬ a process involving layered and overdubbed vocals to create a high-pitched angelic scream, ¬would never again sound as good.

The album's songs are all over the place. It pitched anti-Reagan politics and Beatles deconstructions (take, for example, "Gods of War," ¬ a pseudo-cover of "I Want You") into the pot and somehow produced radio-friendly material.

"Pour Some Sugar on Me" and "Rocket" are the type of '80s anthems that get the MP3 staff performing scissor kicks at local bars. We kid you not. While many purists didn't like the overproduced sound of Hysteria (possibly because of the electronic drum kit that one-armed drummer Rick Allen used), and instead cited Pyromania as the band's best work, it's hard to deny the sheer sales and impact the album made in the late '80s.

Whitesnake was no stranger to metal. The group emerged from late '70s London as a Led Zeppelin clone and owed its moderate success to singer David Coverdale's days with Deep Purple. Pop metal-obsessed America offered Whitesnake the perfect opportunity to make some fast cash, so the band revamped its sound--by basically ripping off the Scorpions--and then released the creatively titled Whitesnake. In all honesty, the album is nothing more than a stew made from every rock/metal cliché known to man. Whitesnake would have never found success without the video that accompanied the single "Here I Go Again." In it, Robert Plant-facsimile Coverdale offers up Tawny Kitaen (an actress who soon thereafter became his wife...for a brief two-year period) to adolescent males the world over. The video basically features a scantily clad Kitaen dancing atop a pair of British luxury automobiles.

Actually, in retrospect, the only reason we chose Whitesnake for this list was because of its band photo. Decidedly, Whitesnake offers more hair, pound for pound, than any other band on this list.

Skid Row slid in just as the door was closing on hair metal. Skid Row was released the same year as Nirvana's Bleach...and just a year and a half before grunge would change America's musical landscape for the next decade to come. This self-titled debut featured pop metal that was painted by the numbers. The band did have an outspoken, outlandish front man in the form of Sebastian Bach, who offered an aggressive delivery that could only be matched by his backstage antics.

Despite the group's cookie-cutter approach to metal, Skid Row managed to propel itself into massive MTV success on the backs of two songs. The first was "Youth Gone Wild," which, as the title suggests, spoke to misdirected angst-filled teens. The second was "18 and Life," which supplied the album with an obligatory power ballad (although "I Remember You" was actually a genuine power ballad). What differentiated "18" from the piles of crap ballads released by other hair bands was Bach's fierce performance.