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Michael Bolton Was in an '80s Hair Metal Band
Sony BMG Music Entertainment
The Artist You Know:
Michael Bolton has enjoyed a long career of making inoffensive soft-rock ballads for middle-aged white people. He co-wrote chart-topping adult contemporary hits with Cher and Laura Branigan before going on to win a Grammy for doing a karaoke version of a powerful R&B hit from the 1960s, because the best way to make a chart-topping single is to redo a song that already topped the charts 30 years ago.
Sony/Columbia
In his defense, you cannot argue with that logic.
In general, Michael Bolton has become a pop culture punchline for producing music that your grandma complains about because it doesn't rock hard enough.
The Artist You Don't Know:
If you actually clicked that link and listened to Bolton's music, you probably noticed two things:
1. Your soul being violently expelled from your body once the sound of his dull, lifeless saxophone filled the room.
2. Michael Bolton is actually a pretty strong singer.
Bolton's got some real vocal power, way more than his watered-down elevator music requires. So why doesn't he use it to rock the world's face off? The answer is he already tried that, and nobody cared.
Sony BMG Music Entertainment
We can't imagine why.
Bolton tried his hand at hair metal in the mid-'80s, and the end result sounds a lot like Sammy Hagar and Whitesnake in a shouting match over a fender bender in a Chili's parking lot. It's certainly not any worse than the rest of the music in the genre at the time, and he actually made the sort-of bold decision not to go full glam like the majority of the other bands we inexplicably decided to call "metal" in the 1980s.
Bolton's video for his song "Everybody's Crazy" even has a bit of an edge to it, in spite of the stout layer of cheese that he apparently cannot resist, with images of nuclear war and women having bracing freak-outs over venomous snakes. None of that stuff made the cut for his Grammy-winning video six years later.
Youtube
When a mamba loves a woman.