So why is Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
Sometimes you just want something loud, dumb, and hair metal-y.Girls, Girls, Girls is custom made to order for such situations.
And the thing is, for a hair metal band, Mötley Crüe serves up enough metal to pair with its… hairier side that at their best they are more Guns ‘n Roses in their prime than, let’s say, Mr. Big or Extreme*.
* Bands who offer their own very specific cheese/hair metal pleasures in their own rights!
That’s a long way around to saying that songs like “Wild Side” and title track “Girls, Girls, Girls”… you know, rock and stuff.
Before GnR took over LA’s sunset strip – debut album Appetite for Destruction blew up and recreated what it meant to be a hard rock band out of LA with its release just two months after Girls, Girls, Girls – the Crüe serves up a tasty riff to kick off “Wild Side,” the album’s opening track. And there’s just enough sleazy glam and polish to the production to allow this song to both rock hard and appeal to the mainstream demo circa 1987.
There is zero percent chance that you can listen to “Girls, Girls, Girls” and a) not be able to sing along to the chorus after hearing it for precisely one time and b) understand the band’s philosophy vis a vis the topic of girls. Bonus: a number of popular gentlemen’s clubs of the era get named dropped.
While many wannabe hair metal bands attempted to climb the radio and MTV charts by way of a classic hair metal ballad, it gets a little lost that Mötley Crüe could pull off the form better than most. “You’re All I Need” is a great example.
That being said, the spectacular “Home Sweet Home” is their best of that sub-genre, off their Theatre of Pain LP from 1985.
Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls
Over the “o” in Mötley and the “u” in Crüe sits the umlaut, which is “… a mark used over a vowel, as in German or Hungarian, to indicate a different vowel quality usually through fronting or rounding.”
Why does the Los Angeles-based Crüe use it? Take it away, Vince Neil:
During a brainstorming session in their formative days, the members of Mötley Crüe were drinking Löwenbräu beer — and felt a genuine moment of inspiration (as well as thirst). “When we decided to call ourselves Mötley Crüe,” Vince Neil has said, “we put some umlauts in there because we thought it made us look European.” Things could’ve turned out very differently had they been chugging domestic beer at the time.
Some stats & info about Mötley Crüe – Girls, Girls, Girls
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? SoCal Bands, Hair Metal, Hard Rock, Rock Music
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4 out of 5 stars
- When was Girls, Girls, Girls released? 1987
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #596 out of 1,000
Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
This love that I tell now feels lonely as hell from this padded prison cell.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.