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tomorrow and asked me what heavy metal sounded like, I’d probably play “Let It Go” off High N’ Dry. “Let It Go” is not my favorite song (or even my favorite track off that album), but the main riff has the indisputable (yet completely intangible) “feel” of what heavy metal is. Moreover, Joe Elliott’s voice epitomizes the strain of melodic arena rock, which is probably the best synonym for prototypical heavy metal.
    Still, Def Lep was constantly under suspicion of being “poseurs,” the ultimate attack leveled by any metal maniac.Here’s the opening line from a letter to the magazine Hit Parader from March of 1985: “I would like to know why so many people are so obsessed with groups like Duran Duran, Culture Club, the Thompson Twins and Def Leppard,” asks a reader from Denham Springs, Louisiana. What we were too dumb to realize was that the guys in Def Leppard hated the term “heavy metal,” and any member of the band would have given his right arm to avoid the label (except for Rick Allen, I suppose).
    But before we try to explain why Def Leppard wanted to avoid the metal label, let’s try to understand why some of my friends were unwilling to grant them the title (and—as ashamed as I am to admit this— I was part of the anti-Def Leppard contingent! ). We didn’t think Def Lep was worthy of respect for lots of reasons, all of which were about as sensible as the reasons for believing in the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. But here were two of them:
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    â€¢ Def Leppard made a great album, and then they made a bad one that was even more popular. Everyone loved Pyromania, including antimetal people. It was the single biggest reason metal sales jumped from 8 percent of the market in 1983 to 20 percent in 1984. At the time, the only bigger album in the universe was Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Pyromania was one of the cornerstones of the genre. But then Def Lep released Hysteria. Ultimately, Hysteria would sell even more units, but success wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Pyromania seemed like a metal record that crossed into a lot of other demographics because it was so damn good. However, Hysteria seemed like it had been specifically made for nonmetal fans. “Pour Some Sugar On Me” sounded like a paint-by-number portrait of what producer Mutt Lange assumed would pass for heavy metal. Even worse, the rest of the record was one long power ballad, which points directly to the main reason Def Leppard couldn’t be trusted.
    â€¢ Girls liked it way, way too much. With the possible exception of Floridian porn rap, no genre of music was ever more obsessedwith getting snatch than ’80s glam metal. The Los Angeles scene (Mötley Crüe, W.A.S.P., Faster Pussycat, et al.) was particularly pedantic about this pursuit. And since teenage glam audiences were almost entirely composed of horny teenage males, it made for an effective marriage of ideas. The painfully obvious irony is that fans only liked the image of women in the scope of metal. Feminists would say the young males were “threatened” by the idea of girls digging hard rock, but—in reality—that had almost nothing to do with it. The distaste came from what a female audience reflected. Since no one could agree on what metal was (or which bands qualified), the only gauge was to look around and see who was standing next to you at a concert. That became your peer group; for all practical purposes, you were the people standing next to you. The metal genre is fundamentally about its audience and always has been. So when girls named Danielle who wore Esprit tank tops suddenly embodied the Def Leppard Lifestyle, it clearly indicated that Def Leppard no longer represented the people who had comprised the core audience for On Through the Night. As a shooting guard on our high school basketball team, I recall traveling to an away game and