Meetzorp

In other news, the earworm that had been plaguing me, Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name” has been purged by yet another Bon Jovi hit Bad Medicine. 

I am forced to realize that these two songs share remarkable similarities in both sound and meaning.  In both songs the protagonist is driving himself crazy over a gorgeous but fickle vixen who is superficially lovely but who is in fact a vile tormentress.

I listened to so much insanely misogynistic music as a schoolgirl, yet somehow it utterly failed to warp me.  I really didn’t read much into the lyrics, nor into the few music videos I managed to see.  I think I absorbed that it is sexy to have enormous hair and wear tight, acid washed jeans, but the other trappings of hard-rockin’ heartbreak flew over my youthful head.   I spent hours hanging upside down off my bed filling my hair with that pump-action Suave hairspray and attacking it with the crimper, then teasing the shit out of the resultant haystack.  I’d get incredibly insulted when my mom laughed at my upside-down straw broom appearance.

I was awfully fond of Bon Jovi when I was in junior high.  Not because I thought he or his bandmates were “cute” or “hot,” because to me, back then, they weren’t.  They were grownups and therefore out of the running, desire-wise.   When my friends and I pored over the Star News pages of our Teen magazines and talked about “cute boys” the topics ranged from NKOTB (never a favorite of mine – I considered them sissies because they didn’t rock hard like Bon Jovi) to Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser) and Fred Savage, the boy from The Wonder Years.  When we arbitrarily chose movie and tv stars to have crushes on, I decided I’d pin my flag on Fred Savage.  I liked the show he was on, and thought he looked pleasant and normal enough.  He seemed like a not-too-unrealistic choice for a TV crush.  He was around my age, cute, and not unnecessarily glamorous. 

I thought Johnny Depp was awfully pretty, but too old for me to have a crush on.  I had a real mental block about having crushes on anyone more than a couple of years older than myself, and there wasn’t really a big selection of teen idol boys back in the late 1980s, at least not from what I can remember.

I think I am now paying my penance for being such a big-haired buttrock fan as a young girl, as my old favorites come back to haunt me, many times more annoying that I ever remembered them being.

Also…geez, I haven’t heard the damn song in like 15 years and I can sing the whole thing from end to end.  Why do I remember this kind of shit?