Bon Jovi--More Mass Pop - Los Angeles Times
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Bon Jovi--More Mass Pop

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* 1/2BON JOVI. “New Jersey.†Mercury.

Bon Jovi’s latest teen-oriented pop-metal product is the kind of album that doesn’t call for a review so much as a sales projection. Our prognostication: If the band’s last effort, 1986’s “Slippery When Wet,†sold almost 9 million units in the United States, this one ought to be good for at least 5 or 6 million.

The album figures to be the fall sound track for tens of millions of young lives between here and N.Y.C. Bon Jovi speaks the language of the semi-educated teen heartland, a peculiar vocabulary where “my old man†(as in “I got the radio blastin’ in my old man’s Chevroletâ€) means “my father,†and “my old lady†means “my girlfriend.â€

Though one’s propensity for pain presumably drops a little after 9 million units, Bon Jovi has apparently been stung by criticism from heavy-metal fans that the last album was too wimpy and girl-oriented. So Side 1 of “New Jersey†offers more severe bombast, metal machismo and power chords up the wazoo, with Jon Bon Jovi yelping like D. L. Roth. It ends with “Blood on Blood,†a sickly Springsteen-via-John-Cafferty rip-off memorializing the days of fake IDs and a “white trash girl†in a cheap motel who “turned us into men.â€

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That’s the boys’ side, basically. The girls still have Side 2 and its more sentimental ballads and love songs like “Living in Sin.†“I don’t need your daddy tellin’ us what we should do. . . . I call it love / They call it living in sin,†offer our well-coiffed rebels, sure to send chills down the spines of smoking girls in down jackets wherever better high school post-football-game parties are found.

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