This Is Spinal Tap is a satirical take on the lifestyle and music of, fairly new wave, heavy metal bands rising in popularity throughout the 1980's. The film's poster itself reaches to an audience who are familiar with the genre of music. Signifiers can be seen such as the stereotypical 'glam/hair metal look' usually associated with the genre as well as the familiar font that looks very similar to the likes of Metallica. Rob Reiner aims to entertain not only those who do not quite understand the genre of music, but those who would use the poster's signifiers as merely a shortcut to meaning for a genre that in reality may seem fairly foreign to them. The preferred reading of the product The film satirizes the behaviour and musical pretensions of rock bands and the slightly hagiographic tendencies of rock documentaries such as The Song Remains the Same (1976) and The Last Waltz (1978), and follows the similar All You Need Is Cash (1978) by the Rutles.
Notably, This Is Spinal Tap was released in 1984 just one year after some of the great metal records we have today were released. 1983 put Metallica on the scene with their debut album 'Kill 'Em All', which featured their innovative thrash sound that went on to label them as part of 'the big four' and influence many other bands to take a similar sound. Dio, formed by Ronnie James Dio, the previous frontman for Black Sabbath in its slightly later years released Holy Diver, a now praised and highly respected album amongst many more. Metallica's target audience at the time was mainly teens or slightly older adults who had grown up on the initial heavy metal instigators, the likes of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. The initial teen audience of a lot of the metal bands would mean that Spinal Tap had the opportunity to mould itself towards that target audience. However, at the time it did neither of those things. It did not do astoundingly at the box office.
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