Some critics ripped those themes as clichГ©s, and maybe they were, but they were clichГ©s that were appealing to millions of fans-especially female fans, who had previously shown little or no interest in most hard rock acts. As the band reached the apex of its 1980s popularity with the legendary 1986 album Slippery When Wet, the songwriting turned even farther away from traditional heavy metal themes to embrace an almost cinematic kind of romanticism-the lonely cowboy of 'Wanted Dead or Alive,' the unrequited lover of 'You Give Love a Bad Name,' the hard-luck couple of 'Livin' on a Prayer.' So, Bon Jovi always tempered its brand of metal with something of a classic rock-or even classic pop-sensibility. (Springsteen's keyboardist, Roy Bittan, played the keys on 'Runaway,' the song that first won Bon Jovi radio airplay and a record contract in 1983.) Guitarist Richie Sambora grew up loving Led Zeppelin and Bad Company but also idolized the Beatles. Jon Bon Jovi got his start playing Rolling Stones-style rhythm and blues back when he was a young teenager still known as John Bongiovi, and he had long been a fan of rock and roll storytellers like Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and fellow New Jersey icon Bruce Springsteen. Bon Jovi emerged, in part, out of this tradition the first Bon Jovi album featured a more typical metal sound than its later offerings, and in its early days the band often sported the classic leather-and-black-eyeliner look, too.Д«ut as much as it might have looked the part of a typical heavy metal outfit, Bon Jovi always drew upon a wider set of musical influences. With its typically dark lyrical themes, its aggressive and often abrasive sound, and even its odd comic-book-hero-gone-mad aesthetic of leather, spandex, and caked-on makeup, heavy metal was a music self-consciously designed to challenge (or even offend) mainstream pop music sensibilities rather than appeal to them. In its early days, heavy metal was, broadly speaking, music by and for adolescent boys and young men. The secret of Bon Jovi's success lay in merging the previously divergent musical sensibilities of heavy metal and pop. The world, quite simply, still loves 'Livin' on a Prayer.' Fueled largely by strong ongoing sales of iTunes downloads, the song has recently reentered the contemporary pop charts in New Zealand and Great Britain, despite being more than 20 years old. 'Livin' on a Prayer' is one of the most popular hard-rock songs of all time, a high point of every Bon Jovi concert and an unavoidable presence in rock radio, barroom jukeboxes, karaoke playlists, and sports-arena timeout entertainments. The story of Bon Jovi's transcendence can be told, in part, through the story of the band's signature song, 'Livin' on a Prayer.' What explains Bon Jovi's long-running, intergenerational popularity? How did the band break through the boundaries of a pop-metal genre that otherwise seemed deeply played out by the end of the 1980s? The band is arguably more popular today than it ever has been, even at the peak of its 1980s heyday. In the early years of the 21st century, Bon Jovi released a string of hit records the album Bounce (2002) debuted higher on the Billboard chart than the legendary Slippery When Wet did back in 1986, and Bon Jovi had an album debut at #1 on the charts for the first time ever only in 2007. Bon Jovi continued to release critically acclaimed and commercially successful new music through the 1990s, even while a shift in pop-culture tastes made the ironical stylings of Gen X grunge the dominant force in rock music and made just about every other remnant of the power-ballad-and-glam-metal '80s seem deeply uncool.

(While Bon Jovi continues to sell out huge arena shows around the world, for example, former Poison frontman Bret Michaels-who once cast himself as Jon Bon Jovi's rival-has even starred in a rather embarrassing dating reality show on VH1.)Д«ut if Bon Jovi was surely the greatest of the hair bands, it was never merely a hair band. Through decades of producing crowd-pleasing hard rock hits, Bon Jovi has sold more than 120 million records worldwide and cemented its reputation as one of the biggest bands ever.ДЄfter first rocketing to popularity during the hairspray-and-spandex 1980s, Bon Jovi survived and thrived long after most of their original contemporaries in the 'hair band' movement faded into 'where are they now?' obscurity.

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