BON JOVI: LOST HIGHWAY (2007)
1) Lost Highway; 2)
Summertime; 3) (You Want To) Make A Memory; 4) Whole Lot Of Leaving; 5) We Got
It Going On; 6) Any Other Day; 7) Seat Next To You; 8) Everybody's Broken; 9)
The Last Night; 10) Til We Ain't Strangers Anymore; 11) One Step Closer; 12) I
Love This Town.
And with this dusty cliché, Bon Jovi become Taylor
Swift. Twelve tracks of non-stop, completely interchangeable, instantly
forgettable, absolutely similar-sounding guitar drivel — just the kind of
music that gives «country pop» such a bad name among people who try to make
life more colorful these days. Up to now, Bon Jovi had been almost everything,
from dreadfully tasteless to surprisingly effective when they had their hooks
properly aligned to utterly dull when they just wanted to tell you how much
better they were than everybody else, but never before had they been so thoroughly embarrassing.
Then again, it was a long time coming: with «affairs
of the heart» occupying a central place in the Bon Jovi rulebook ever since Keep The Faith transformed them from
hair-clad cock-rockers into leather-clad spiritual heralds, the «Bon Jovi
country album» was imminent, sooner or later, because where else can your
spirit really find a safe place to
rest other than Mother Earth and those musical styles that grow right out of
it? This album should be played loud and proud — in a corn field, preferably.
With some rocks and rapids close by, so you and your loved one can wash that
road dust off your sexy bodies whenever you feel the need, as that trusty Bon
Jovi soundtrack serenades you with sounds that sound so natural, so organic,
you'd swear the creeks and the meadows themselves wrote them just for you and
your mate.
And I do stress «you and your mate», because
the majority of these songs are romantic — ballads or pop-rockers, they are all
about the protagonist's relations with that special someone, coming or going or
staying or leaving. No mentions of life on welfare or social unjustice, this
one's strictly for all you lovebirds out there. The exception being the tracks
that bookmark the album — ʽLost Highwayʼ and ʽI Love This Townʼ are both about
the will to live on this planet despite all the setbacks and troubles, so if
you feel like killing yourself, Lost
Highway will try to dissuade you from the task. (If you also feel like an
intelligent human being — it will probably fail, though). They are also the only
two genuinely catchy tunes on the album, even if the «happy» fiddle-and-banjo
arrangement of the title track makes me sick, and the gang-friendly atmosphere
of ʽI Love This Townʼ feels extremely contrived.
Oh, wait, there's one more exception —
somewhere in the middle of this wheatfield wasteland comes ʽWe Got It Going
Onʼ, a talkbox-adorned throwback to the good old dumb days of the 1980s if
there ever was one, a song that feels so utterly dumb and so completely out of
place that it had no choice but to become a highlight of the show for me,
clearly reminding why New Jersey, on
which this song would totally fit in, was really the pinnacle of this band's
career. Okay, so it's good to know that the old boys can still dress up in
gorilla furs when they feel like it. This band was born to party, not to cruise
lost highways.
Everything else hardly seems deserving of
wasting extra bytes of precious cyberspace, so I will be brief: pick out a
random Taylor Swift song, replace the gorgeously packaged young blond female
beauty with a gorgeously packaged not-so-young blond male hunk, and voilà, your
lost highway lies right before you. And it merits a thumbs down — I mean, highways
don't just get lost without a good reason, and I think this particular one got
lost sooner than it was put into actual operation.
"Bon Jovi become Taylor Swift" --> Is it grammatically right? Or should it be "Bon Jovi becomes Taylor Swift"?
ReplyDeleteBon Jovi is a group, so they become, not they becomes.
ReplyDeleteOk, that's fine!
Delete