Am I the only one that feels this way about Def Leppard?

Hysteria, Pyromania, High N Dry..Gee, three to one, not to bad

 

On Through the Night and High n' Dry are all the Def Leppard I need. Pyromania veered too closely to pop metal for my tastes. Of course, by the time that came out, I'd already started down the speed /thrash metal road.

 

That's a joke, right??

Def Leppard were good, Mutt Lange helped them become great...

But they've never put out an album close to AFD.

Hysteria comes close, but as someone posted, it lacks balls.

Pyromania is okay, High N Dry has some decent songs...but comparing it to AFD??

Come on.

 

how much of that did duff really write though? i can name 4 songs that he wrote zero % of because 3 were played before he joined and 1 axl and slash wrote

 

Duff wrote It's So Easy.

I'm talking about Izzy, who wrote damn near everything else.

 

opps misread. yup izzy wrote pretty much all of it except for i believe sweet child o mine he had no hand in or its so easy

 

Izzy put the chords and melody behind Slash's 'carnival riff' intro.

He absolutely had a hand in writing Sweet Child.

 

didn't know that. for some reason i thought axl arranged the rest. oh well then izzy wrote basically the rest of it. for some reason i thought duff was the one being talked about

 

You could argue GnR is over-rated, but Nirvana? No. It deserves all the credit and adoration it receives. That band essentially defined an entire genre and radically remade music in the 90s. Nirvana and its ilk are one reason GnR and Def Leppard became irrelevant. You don't have to like Nirvana, but you can't argue it didn't have a seismic impact on music.

Of course Def Leppard has more output. They've been at it for 30 years. GnR imploded after three (I'm counting Illusion as one double disc) albums and Cobain killed himself. More does not mean better.

 

i don't think nirvana had anything to do with GNR and def leppard becoming less popular

 

Izzy wrote or co-wrote the majority of Appetite for Destruction, which is better than anything Def Leppard recorded by a wide margin. He also is at least as good a rhythm guitarist as anyone in DL...

 

Grunge made arena rock and hair metal largely irrelevant. There was a definite decline in the popularity and marketability of those bands in the 90s...

 

well since GNR never released another album with slash, duff, matt, etc around 1995/1996 we can never prove that. def leppard making a sudden departure in sound with slang seemed to have been the cause of their demise since they had 3 fairly big hits from 1993-1995 (after nirvana) and then the next album spawned just 1 single that charted on the rock charts in america

 

I'm speaking more broadly than those two bands.

 

Guns was big enough and talented enough to withstand grunge (illusions came out around the same time as Nevermind, and Guns toured those records until 93) - "grunge" was just another tagline, it meant fashion to me. Soundgarden wasn't "grunge", and neither was Pearl Jam lol

Its just Axl's preening and LSD BS. Izzy just wanted to play rock and roll. And he wanted the shows to start on time, and he wanted the band to be somewhat sober when they went onstage.

He wasn't getting that, so he quit.

And THAT is what killed GNR.

 

Adrenalize was the last Def Leppard record to matter, and that was definitely lightweight fluff.

By that time, the Crowes, GNR, and the Seattle movement had firmly captured my youthful imagination...and Def Leppard was officially "old hat."

 

GNR are without a doubt, the most overrated biggest band that made it to the top. Axl's voice is like nails on a chalkboard, irritating as hell. And we'll just hve to agree to disagree. Besides 3 songs on Appetite, nothing else resonates to my ears as even being listenable.

 

oh ok. yeah labels also stopped backing the bigger bands like poison, warrant, etc because they no longer seemed marketable

 

slang destroys adrenalize. i always thought that one sounded liked bryan adams leftovers that mutt gave them

 

Cool story.

27 million others don't agree with you.

 

By the time Slang came out, it was over and Def Leppard was on the oldies circuit.

The people that would've liked Slang never heard it, and the Adrenalize fans hated it.

If they would have put that record out on 93, they may have still been relevant.

Putting it out 3 years late was a mistake.

 

A little inflated there aren't we? More like 21. I think you are confusing that with Hysteria, 28 million sold.

 

Says here, AFD - 21m worldwide
Hysteria - 20m worldwide

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums

 

I said overrated from a music standpoint not so much a significance one. I was 21 when they hit, and I was working in a music store too. So I am very aware of how things changed because of them. Still, to this day I don't think the change was good, but I do recognize that the kids coming up at the time needed something different other than the Hair Metal of the 80s. I'm just glad Adrenalize came out Spring 92, just before Grunge totally crushed that genre, lol, Adrenalize sold 3 million in the US. Not bad since the Grunge era was underway.

 

I think that DL hungered for superstardom at all costs. Once they tasted success after Pyromania they were fully prepared to enter the mainstream, thereby going "soft". Of course this alienated many fans. I would've kept buying DL records, along with Nirvana records, if they continued to make albums like High N Dry or Pyromania. But once they saw the bucks and the ladies lifting up their shirts at the shows, there was no looking back.
They've had a lot of setbacks and I do still have a soft spot for them, even though I haven't heard anything that they've released (besides Viva Hysteria) for over 20 years.

I know that they say that grunge killed the cock-rockers, but DL were a shadow of their former selves at that time.