If you were watching rock TV in 1991, you remember how fast the air changed. One minute, big hooks, louder guitars, and glam attitude were everywhere. Then the industry decided the whole thing was “out of style,” and pushed a new look and sound to the front.
Bands like Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Whitesnake went from being automatic adds to being treated like yesterday’s news, while Jane’s Addiction, Nirvana, and Nine Inch Nails got the spotlight. For a lot of hard rock and metal acts who came up right at the end of the ’80s boom, that timing was brutal.
One of the bands that felt that shift firsthand was Dangerous Toys. They broke through with their gold-certified self-titled debut, Dangerous Toys, in 1989. But when Hellacious Acres landed in 1991 and Pissed followed in 1994, the ground had already moved under them.
Talking about that moment, Jason McMaster framed it less like an enemy takeover and more like the business doing what it always does: signing anything that looks like it might sell until the audience gets sick of the template.
“There were a lot of bands such as us. I call it ‘The class of ’89,’ where a bunch of bands on the coattails of Guns N’ Roses got signed because their singer had long hair, tattoos, and sang really high. So, which brings me to the point that I’ve been making lately that I feel grunge did not kill hair metal, hair metal killed hair metal,” McMaster told Rock Interview Series (via Ultimate Guitar).
“And, as a matter of fact, not trying to one-up anything or be a pundit here, but grunge also killed grunge for the same reason. Grunge killed grunge, and hair metal killed hair metal. It’s the over-saturation of a market until the climate changes, until somebody just goes, ‘It doesn’t matter what you wear or what you sound like. If the music is good, listen to it and buy it and support [it].'”
McMaster also pointed to the culture machine around the music, especially MTV, because back then, that pipeline could make or break a band’s reach. If you weren’t in the rotation, you were fighting uphill, no matter how tight the band was live.
He described the early ’90s as a weird stretch where critics and outlets acted like the debate was settled, and anyone who looked like a late-’80s hard rock band had already missed the boat.
“Between the Hellacious Acres tour and the release of Pissed, which was a crazy time for what it is that we’re sort of talking about, when everybody at Rolling Stone magazine or everybody who had a pen and called himself a music journalist had an opinion about the Seattle sound, versus what was hot on MTV,” he recalled.
“And how anybody resembling Guns N’ Roses may not have a chance. We’ll play Guns N’ Roses because they sell records, but everybody else that came right after that, they’re dead. For them to be able to just like, say that and call it law was a trip.”
