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Old 05-01-2021, 11:56 PM
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Supersonic Supersonic is offline
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Aloha !

Quote:
Originally Posted by Captain_jovi View Post
They did it in a more organic way but it's still the same idea.
I don't think so. I see it differently and I'll go into it a little bit deeper by bringing in other examples. Mind you, I'm an art teacher so I'll take examples close to my profession. So let's take the painters from the nineteenth century.

Vincent Van Gogh went to Paris to find out what was new and upcoming. Not because he wanted to sell stuff, but wanted to change and get better at what he was capable of. Van Gogh had always been unsuccesful. Excentric, odd and just plain rude. Art always went first and it never worked in his advantage. His creative drive went before anything else. The work Van Gogh has made has always been inspired by what was popular in Paris. I don't intened to compare Jon Bon Jovi to van Gogh as the complicated backstory to van Gogh is by no means similar to the simplicity of Bon Jovi's creative path. But there are other similiarities.

The way Destination Anywhere and bits and pieces of Crush were put together was done in the same way a painter like Van Gogh traveled to Paris and capture that creative outburst. It's why I think Destination Anywhere is just ao much better than anything that came after. By no means is every song an instant classic or utterly fantastic. But the songs do seem to come from an honest place. Jon just happened to be in London and seemed to be immersing himself in what was on the radio and popular out there. It's just so different from the American charts at that time. After Grunge, America no longer dictated what was on the radio and Jon happened to be living in the epicenter. Just listen to everything that was big in the UK charts back then that had any longevity to it. Garbage, Bush, Oasis, Radiohead, The Smashing Pumpkins. It's all there but the album doesn't sound like any of these bands in particular. It's just a blend of all these influences.

So every artist steals. But a true artist changes it to something to capture his own vision. Has a drive to create something unique. To change it into something new. Michael Jackson was fantastic at this. By no means original, but capable of taking all influences of what was then popular and changing it into his own thing, creating something new altogether. For 2 decades straight he did what most artists struggle with in just one song. Once Michael Jackson started stealing music his career went down the drain. Very much the same way Bon Jovi's career lost steam. Bon Jovi went from capturing a bit of the spirit of Britpop to full on copying several songs. Instead of continuing down a path of just trying to make good music they started copying as being influenced wasn't good enough. Their drive wasn't to create music they believed in, their drive became to be the biggest.

So the biggest artists weren't used as influences. The biggest artists were copied. The same drumbeats, the same guitar sounds, the same chord progrssions and the same dumbed down music that became so popular in the early zero's. And when it didn't work, the melodies were then copied as well. Have A Nice Day did some things right compared to Bounce, but also a lot of things wrong. They didn't go to work like artists, they went to work to sell a product. They went from being Spielberg to being Michael Bay. First Transformers wasn't good enough? Let's increase the parts people like. Keep the things people didn't like very much the same, but make sure we'll add more explosions. More silly jokes. More flashy cars. More, more more! But absolutely no substance.

In order to be the biggest you've got to have a story to tell. Michael Bay has nothing to tell. What he offers is more of the same. The same way Bon Jovi does. But Bon Jovi has a second thing to worry about; what they're doing now has been done before. So instead of hearing nowadays pop-music you're essentially hearing the same song, but re-written with parts of the same melody.

So no, I don't think it's the same. I think what they're doing now is different from incorporating a various amount of influences. Nowadays due to the the constant overkill of adding outside influences they're so out of touch with nowadays music in general that it's hard to find out what a Bon Jovi song would sound like nowadays. Bon Jovi were never the most original act but Bon Jovi were also a band easy to identify. I remember when Real Life hit the radio long before the internet gave out samples. You just knew it was Bon Jovi, even when Jon wasn't singing. Compare this to stuff from the Circle. What About Now. This House Is Not For Sale. Take away Jon's voice and you're left with something completely generic and unidentifyable.

I can understand the band not wanting to sound the same. I don't mind the change in sound if the songs are there. These Days doesn't sound like New Jersey, Crush doesn't sound like These Days. These are good steps. But unlike with the first 2, since Crush, the songs just aren't there anymore.

With every subsequent release they're stripped further from their own identity and I don't think the band has ever played a song together in the past 10 years they just enjoyed playing. They're going through the motions. The band sounds tired of just playing what is ultimately Bon Jovi light. "Oh, here's that thing that other artist did before". "Oh here's that intro done by that other artist". The lack of own input is what's halted the creative output and what's ultimately caused Jon's river to run dry.

Salaam Aleikum,
Sebastiaan
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Last edited by Supersonic; 05-02-2021 at 09:54 AM..
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