Up All Night – Slaughter

Another grand standing opening number. Up All Night has layers and layers of studio trickery and FX all over it. When people look back on the Hair Metal Boom and refer to it as ‘Over Produced’ it’s songs like Up All Night that prove the point.

I do love this record though. I love it’s parent album Stick It To Ya and I love the slick Hollywood sheen over everything. If you’re going to have a genre trope of ‘too much studio’ it makes sense for it to come from some studio veterans.

Slaughter were a Kiss solo side project minus the offending member of Kiss. In this instance both Dana Strum and Mark Slaughter were contracted to deliver the Vinnie Vincent Invasion’s next album to Chrysalis Records along with the old Ahnker himself. When Vinnie overspent, the label cut him loose and created a sort of Soft Metal Boy Band hybrid.

Slaughter were the cynical side of the old music industry model made flesh. And yet. They made a great genre staple with this layer cake of studio trickery, sexy air brushed album sleeves, warehouse shot babes with sequins and shoulder pads and slow mo mane tosses all over their video.

It’s all too slick. It’s all fake as hell and it’s only kinda cool because it knows exactly what it’s doing. This is a perfect example of the reason it all fell apart.

The Hair Metal Bubble was still a couple of years from bursting. There was still time for these guys to shift 2 million units of this stuff wrapped up in nice packaging and covered in playboy models. I look back on Up All Night the way some adults remember a trip to Disneyland from their childhood.