Thursday, 24 May 2012

Jon Bon Jovi

Jon Bon Jovi’s life is so built on weary cliché that you have to assume he smells permanently of cheese. He must be fucking infused with the stuff after a life spent peddling it. He’s a bit like one of those maggots that live in casu marzu (the fausty cheese eaten by Sardinian villagers and plucky tourists in which flies are encouraged to lay their eggs, their maggoty offpring burrowing through the stuff, subsisting on their surroundings and in the process, becoming “living cheese”). If one of these maggots were to grow to around six feet in length, sport a bubble perm and a black vest, and make ladies go weak at the knees with a flash of its pearly whites, it would be Jon Bon Jovi.

The epicentre of thousands of buttock-clenchingly embarrassing formulaic ‘rock’ moments, the immensely popular JBJ has spearheaded the radio-friendliness of the genre for almost three decades, in all this time managing to contribute nothing new, exciting or groundbreaking to it. Rather than push the envelope, he’s firmly sealed himself inside it. It’s almost as if the young Jon Bongiovi Jr. sat down when he was 15 and read an encyclopaedia on how to be a rock star, producing singularly unimaginative song after song, performance after performance. Being the finest exponent of cock rock in the business is nothing to be proud of. It’s rock by numbers.

John’s prescription for success runs thus: Big hair? Check. Leather jackets with tassels? Check. Bombastic singalonga choruses? Check. Loud guitars for the boys and a smile and a wink for the ladies? Check. Referring to a motorbike as a “steel horse”? Fucking check. He’s spent half a lifetime producing music for mongs and is so outdated, he’s even coming back into fashion again. He’s the ultimate conservative rock star. While true artists bare their souls and bleed for their music, Jon has nothing more than Dairylea running through his veins. And Dairylea Light at that.

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