Question: what kind of music was popular in the 1800s

title: American popular music
text: In the early 1970s , the first major American bands began appearing , like Blue Öyster Cult and Aerosmith , and musicians like Eddie Van Halen began their career . Heavy metal remained , however , a largely underground phenomenon . During the 1980s , a pop - based form of hard rock , with a party - hearty spirit and a glam - influenced visual aesthetic ( sometimes referred to as `` hair metal '' ) dominated the music charts , led by superstars like Poison , Bon Jovi , Mötley Crüe , and Ratt . The 1987 debut of Guns N ' Roses , a hard rock band whose image reflected the grittier underbelly of the Sunset Strip , was at least in part a reaction against the overly polished image of hair metal , but that band 's wild success was in many ways the last gasp of the hard - rock and metal scene . By the mid-1980s , as the term `` heavy metal '' became the subject of much contestation , the style had branched out in so many different directions that new classifications were created by fans , record companies , and fanzines , although sometimes the differences between various subgenres were unclear , even to the artists purportedly belonging to a given style . The most notable of the 1980s metal subgenres in the United States was the swift and aggressive thrash metal style , pioneered by bands like Anthrax , Megadeth , Metallica , and Slayer .