Miss Piggy Lunchbox

I consider Bon Jovi to be one of the larger gaps in my collection. But that gap is large because of importance, not size, and it can only be filled by Slippery When Wet. New Jersey, the band’s follow-up to that mega-hit, doesn’t change the size of the gap one iota. This blows.

I remember this being a lot better, but I guess in 1988 I was just a lot stupider. I remember, in particular, liking “Bad Medicine,” but I think I just liked the concert footage of girls in, well, concert attire. Not only is the song just not very good (why does the whole band have to sing the whole chorus?), the lyrics are ridiculous. Is the medicine supposed to cure you…from the love of a woman? Or the desire of a woman? And why, then, is her love also the medicine? And why would one “shake it up, just like bad medicine”? Does the act of shaking make medicine, at least of the bad variety, more effective?

That’s not the only place the lyrics are awful. You’ve also got cheesy, worn-out double-entendres in “Homebound Train,” and in “Stick To Your Guns,” Bon Jovi tells us what it’s like to be a real cowboy: “So you want to be a cowboy/Well you know it’s more than just a ride/Guess you got to know the real thing.” ‘Cuz if I ever wanted cowboy lessons, the first guy I would go to would be Jon Bon Jovi. I mean, maybe he’s talking about a motorcycle, and maybe I’m willing to grant he has some expertise there, but then he’s talking about love and aiming for the heart and going to war only if you have to and WTF, Jon? Can’t you keep a single analogy going for five stinking minutes?

This is the album where Bon Jovi decided they were going to try to be the E Street Band. Here’s the deal, though: despite hailing from the same state, they’re not the E Street Band. There’s a certain level of awesomeness that nobody should try to pay tribute to through imitation because it just looks silly. That’s the case here, as Bon Jovi’s earnest pleas to the band to keep rocking at the end of “Bad Medicine” fall short of even the kind of silliness you’d get on SNL. Then there’s the stupid friends song, “Blood On Blood,” which is Springsteen’s “Backstreets” minus the poetry (though it does feature a great piano part and gets kept as a result), and “99 In The Shade” is just Springsteen Mad-Libs with its plethora of first names, a señorita, and a Chevrolet.

The worst, though, is “I’ll Be There For You.” You know it…”These five words I swear to you,” and so on. By coincidence, I heard this on the juke recently, just before picking this album up to review, and I thought it was that awful Bryan Adams song from the Kevin Costner Robin Hood movie. That’s how bad it is.

“Wild Is The Wind” is the only song on here I can listen to from start to finish without cringing. The album does feature a lot of listenable moments, it just can’t put them together into entire good songs. You’ve got the “Baby can you tell me” part of “Living In Sin,” the fun, rocking guitar riff of “Lay Your Hands On Me” along with the celebratory pomposity that begins that track (so obviously meant to start an arena concert), and the forceful beginning of the awful “Stick To Your Guns.” Throw in David Bryan’s great keyboard work on “Blood To Blood,” and it all adds up to the merely quite bad rating of two lunchboxes.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Lay Your Hands On Me,” “Blood On Blood,” “Wild Is The Wind”
Filed Between: Bohren & Der Club Of Gore (Black Earth) and Boneclub (BELLOWest)

Tags: 1988, 2 lunchboxes, CD reviews, J-mez' collection, music

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 10:31 am and is filed under CD reviews, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.