Hyundai Diver: Rock N' Roll In Advertising

Hyundai in Australia recently launched a new commercial that takes place in an alternate dimension, where coin operated look-out binoculars are sentient beings that steal family SUV’s for joy rides around the city while blasting ‘’Holy Diver’’ by Dio.

In case you’re not familiar with the song or singer, Holy Diver is regarded as a quintessential heavy metal anthem containing one of the greatest guitar riffs of all time and Ronnie James Dio himself is revered by many as the greatest heavy metal vocalist that ever walked the Earth. Many of my friends, band mates and social media followers seemed to be pleasantly taken aback by Hyundai’s choice to use this song for their advertisement. Other reactions weren’t as beguiled. Some folk thought this was a sign of metal once and for all truly being dead; With its corpse now only being dug up from the grave to help a huge corporation cater to an older demographic of consumerists (i.e. old school metalheads) so that they might be able to sell a few extra extremely un-metal cars. Many of the pissed off metalheads pondered as to whether Dio would be rolling in his grave if he knew his music was being used for soulless advertisements, but alas this was not the first time his music had been used in advertising. Not by a long shot.

Grunge Albums Made By Hair Metal Bands

If you’ve ever seen any  documentaries on 80’s hair metal or read any autobiographies by rock stars from that era, you’ll know that 98% of them (and most of their fans) blame the downfall of their genre on the rise of the Seattle Grunge scene, specifically Nirvana’s sophomore album ‘’Nevermind’’ being  the last nail in the coffin. In this article I’m going to talk about some albums where the glam metal stars decided  basically to say ‘’fuck it, if you can’t beat them, join them’’ and swapped out the aqua-net hair spray, falsetto screams and leather pants for the dirty jeans, flannel shirts and yarl vocal style.

That being said though, I don’t think all of the artists mentioned here changed their sound and image to fit with the times, for some of them it was a natural progression, artists change their style up all the time, take David Bowie or Madonna for example. People grow and their tastes change.  A lot of these albums are overlooked by both grunge fans and glam metal fans. The hardcore glam metal fans probably ignored them because they think if they enjoy anything that isn’t about the devil, cocaine or tits they’ll have an allergic reaction and break out into a rash whereas the grunge fans most likely ignored them because they were made by bands who were initially glam metal at the height of their popularity, which wasn’t cool (apparently it was overlooked if you weren’t popular or successful as a glam band cough Alice In Chains cough) or they just weren’t aware these albums existed at the time.