On the Couch
So, my morning routine involves watching MTV. Okay, actually VH-1 Classic,
that's how old I am, but I'll occasionally cruise through the other music
video channels when there's nothing I'm interested in watching. Generally,
this makes me grumpy, since they'll play the same damn crappy videos on four
of the five channels I tend to cycle between, and the only thing worse than
seeing a crappy video is to see the same crappy video being pushed all over
the place. Which brings me to Bon Jovi.
I hated Bon Jovi back in the 80's. They were the poster children for
metal-pop, hair metal, whatever you want to call all those cookie-cutter
bands singing insipid need-you-girl and fuck-the-man lyrics over power chords,
with the inevitable ballad about how full of despair a life consisting of
getting paid millions of dollars for dicking around on stage and sleeping
with underage groupies can be. The worst part of which is that you
simply couldn't get away from it; it was on every radio station, on all the
video music programs (yes, there were more than just MTV), hell they even
used them at school events. Over time, culture moved on, and Bon Jovi
faded into the background, thankfully.
As the band slid into irrelevance, and the lead singer went on to become
a B-movie actor, and the lead guitarist became famous more for marrying some
bimbo actress than for making music, my hatred faded as well, and a grudging
respect evolved, because after all, they were kings of the world in their
day. They must have been doing something right.
Which makes me wonder all the more what the hell they were thinking when
they decided to make a comeback album with an eponymously titled first single,
"Have a Nice Day". I mean, I get how their tales of drunken debauchery
appealed to kids whose only escape was getting bombed on cheap beer on the
weekends; while the message of how it sucks to work for the man never meant
much to me, I could see that kids with high-school diplomas working soul-killing
retail and food-service jobs might want to screw with their pencil-necked
even more dead-ended managers; when the most exciting thing in your day was
seeing some halfway-hot girl come through the drive-through, ballads about
running away from it all with the girl of your dreams make sense. It
was the rebellion of the service economy, mass-consumer culture. I
get it.
What I don't get, at all, is how you can make "have a nice day" into a slogan,
a chant, a rallying cry of rebellion against the very culture that produced
it. If you have to say it every day at your job, how do you go to a
concert at night to get away from it all and chant in sycophantic unison,
the very phrase that epitomizes your reduction to a tool of the culture that
is selling you not only your oppression, but your supposed escape from it.
Is this the ultimate irony? What does it even mean? When
Bon Jovi sings with his full theatrical approximation of passion "When the
world gets in your way/ I say/ Have a nice day!", what the hell does that
mean? The best revenge is to tell your antagonists that you hope they're
living well? It's not just bad music; it's not just stupid lyrics;
the damn song makes no sense on a literal level, and as a metaphor, it's
got to be the strangest, most twisted irony pop music has ever produced.
Yet, it's on every channel, every morning. I don't know who does their
marketing, but whoever it is, they deserve every dollar. I just hope
that there is some justice, if not in this world, then in the next, and that
in whatever afterlife there may be, the members of Bon Jovi, and their marketing
staff, and every fool who gave them money by buying their albums, I hope
they spend eternity having to listen to this damn song. And Warrant's
"Cherry Pie", too, just because I'm a sick fuck.
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