5/31/2023 0 Comments Ill be there for youApparently, Bon Jovi sincerely believed that people were genuinely hungering for multiple six-minute Bon Jovi songs. The album also has a generally appalling lack of restraint. It has hits - a lot of hits, it would turn out - but it also has pretensions at blues-rock classicism that don’t work for a band as ecstatically plastic as Bon Jovi. New Jersey is rough going - an overlong obligatory blockbuster sequel without the same energy and hunger as the original. “I’ll Be There For You” shows up late in the New Jersey tracklist, and it works as a kind of respite. Maybe that’s the reason that Bon Jovi followed that single up with an actual power ballad. Maybe “Born To Be My Baby” should’ve been a power ballad. 1 Hits, Child says, “Boy, should have been #1.” (It’s a 5.) For apex-era Bon Jovi, this was a relative disappointment. But producer Bruce Fairbairn convinced them to record it as a big, clean rocker, and that’s what they did. After that hit, the band’s follow-up single was the charged-up love song “Born To Be My Baby.” Co-writer Desmond Child, the pop mastermind who’d helped turn Bon Jovi into a pop-chart force, envisioned “Born To Be My Baby” as a relatively stripped-down folk-rock experiment, and the band toyed with the idea of releasing it as an acoustic song. Bon Jovi’s timing was still on point.Ī few months before that week, Bon Jovi had reached #1 with the extremely glam “ Bad Medicine,” the first single from New Jersey. The week that “I’ll Be There For You” topped the Hot 100, there was a whole lot more hard rock in the top 40: Guns N’ Roses, Living Colour, Lita Ford and Ozzy Osbourne, Winger, Def Leppard, arguably 38 Special. The sound that they’d helped usher into pop dominance was still cresting. They recorded at the same studio, with the same producer and the same mixer, and they wrote a lot of their songs with the same co-writer who’d helped them come up with two #1 hits. Bon Jovi had just made a world-crushing breakthrough with Slippery When Wet, and when they followed that album up with 1988’s New Jersey, they did everything they could to re-bottle that lightning. You can’t blame Bon Jovi for putting out a song like “I’ll Be There For You” when they did. But in the context of its moment, there was nothing exciting about the song. “I’ll Be There For You,” Bon Jovi’s fourth and final #1 hit, is a perfectly satisfying arena-rock jam, a song that can still incite mass singalongs. The band was still hugely popular, and they were still cranking out hits more reliably than their poodle-haired peers, but they weren’t surfing on the zeitgeist anymore. In that context, less than three years after their big breakthrough, Bon Jovi sounded tired. Bobby Brown and Paula Abdul and Roxette and Fine Young Cannibals and a reenergized Madonna all made #1 hits with songs that felt fresh and new and exciting. Many of those great songs spoke of changing times. There are some deeply wack chart-toppers in that era, but there are plenty of great songs, too. New and different sounds - new jack swing, house, rap - started making serious inroads into pop consciousness. One of those beautiful moments came along in the first half of 1989. But when those moments happen, they’re beautiful. You can’t forecast them, and you don’t know when they’re going to arrive. Those moments of pop inspiration, where the charts suddenly seem fully energized, happen for all sorts of different reasons. Maybe a few one-hit wonders channel fresh sounds into mass entertainment and then disappear, their jobs done. Maybe a few established stars switch their styles up and find new life. Sometimes, we get these brief and glorious flurries of action and activity, where ideas that have spent years building under the surface suddenly break through and take over. Other times, though, pop music moves fast. That breakthrough, combined with the similarly game-changing success of Janet Jackson’s Control, signaled that a whole new generation was about to start deciding the fate of the Hot 100. After Bon Jovi, Whitesnake and Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard and Poison all had their own #1 hits, and a new era began. Their monster hit Slippery When Wet blew the doors open for glam metal and for a particular kind of rowdy energy that simply hadn’t had a real shot to conquer the Hot 100 before. This was an era of gloopy balladry and self-satisfied smarm, of Starship and Mr. That, I would argue, is what was happening in 1986, before Bon Jovi came blasting through with “ You Give Love A Bad Name.” That year, most of the dominant pop hits were overblown treacle. Sometimes, the pop charts go through periods of deep, stultifying stasis, just waiting for something new to come along and kick some dust up. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |