Okay boys and girls, sit down. Let Uncle Jaq tell you a story.
No, not one of those, Kev, hush.
See, it's like this.
The notion that the 80s was all "scenes" and people abandoned subgenre x for the purity of subgenre y? Is totally an invention of the post-80s explosion of subgenres. Oh, sure, you had elitists back then that insisted that certain bands were better, or more "true", or more whatever, but in the 80s? We were heavy metal fans. The stark delineations of "glam" and "thrash" and all that which people insist was a thing? Didn't happen. You could have in your collection Poison's Look What The Cat Dragged In, the first Vinnie Vincent Invasion album, Diamond Head's Lightning to the Nations, Master of Puppets, and Quiet Riot's Metal Health, and people wouldn't even bat an eye at you.
I know, because I owned every one of those albums.
Yeah, back then you had people who liked a band and thought people who liked other bands were poseurs and wimps and whatnot. That's never going to change. But back in 1987, every metal head I knew-every fucking one of them-liked Whitesnake's self titled, and not just for the videos. The war between thrash and glam was largely created after the fact by a few journalists and guys in bands trying to overstate the importance of their legacies. Truth was, in the actual world of metal, you could and did like both Slayer and Ratt.
Thrash had nothing to do with killing glam metal, for what it's worth. For one thing, the number of thrash bands with legitimate, chart topping success could be counted on your fingers. The reason why the Big Four was the Big Four? They were successful. For another, the supposed death of glam by grunge was simply record labels finally finding something else to move on to. Glam as a commercial force largely was spent by 1990, with only a few bands having the success of the bands in the mid-80s. Grunge finally gave them an excuse to jettison the dozens of big hair metallers that hadn't been making them money. The writing was on the wall for Glam by 1990, it just took the labels two years to see it.
Trust me, guys. I was there. Anyone who was there and says different is a minority. Metal really was different back then. And oddly enough, far more open minded.