10 Perfect Rock Songs Wasted On Terrible Albums

Every single hair metal band really had to do some soul searching once the ‘90s really kicked in. It might be easy to just blame the downfall of the Sunset Strip rock down to Nirvana rising to prominence, but there were still bands like Bon Jovi and Def Leppard that were killing it on the circuit before grunge came in, and even U2 were starting to distance themselves from their over the top image. There was a way forward, but Motley Crue convinced themselves that they needed to take every single road at exactly the same time.

For most of Generation Swine, you can hear the band grappling with every single genre they can get their hands on, sounding like Stone Temple Pilots on one song and then trying their hand at Marilyn Manson on the next. For a brief moment though, Afraid actually sounds a lot more in line with what someone like U2 were trying to do, having a more digitized touch to their music and making a song that was a lot more downtempo than their previous material.

Being Vince Neil’s first record back with the band, this is probably the best foot forward that the album could have made, with a slithering vocal melody and Nikki Sixx writing lyrics about a girl being afraid of love with someone who might be slightly out of his mind. If you wanted something a little more nuanced than this though, you didn’t really need to look very far, with bands like Nine Inch Nails doing this exact same thing but better in the next few years on albums like The Fragile. Every band is going to want to change their style eventually, but the world of Motley might be more suited to the Strip than anything alternative.