SIEGE OF TROY

Slippery When Wet Sign, Caution, Floor, 1/2015 by MikeMozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube THE STANDARD INTRO: ROCK SOLID is my semi-regular music column. Its Mission: To re-examine acts and songs to find stuff that’s, if not critically good, at least entertaining or enjoyable. Am I going to find charitable things to say about acts that have been marginalized or maligned? Sure. Am I going to take up for acts that have just one good song? Sure again. We should always be re-examining or re-evaluating. You might find that something you shied away from is something that you actually like. (But not Imagine fucking Dragons). This time, we’re tackling something that I like to call “The Betrayal of Bon Jovi.” Essentially, I’ll be saying good things about a segment of the catalog, but not the rest of it. And part of that ties into a couple of central problems that I have with the concept of “Bon Jovi” in total. The first thing is that most people don’t know that the band it

 ROCK SOLID .38 Special performs during the sixth annual Air Force Materiel Command Freedom's Call Tattoo June 25, 2010, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. (Photo by Ben Strasser, U.S. Air Force; Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons) Hey, a new feature! ROCK SOLID is going to be the semi-regular music column, but it's overall mission is going to be a little different. Sure, it'll have overlooked stuff, and classic material, and more, but for a while, it's going to be devoted a bit to one idea: in the pursuit of cool music, I think a lot of us become snobs. We don't mean to do it. Hell, a lot of us gravitated to our music tastes BECAUSE they were outside. It's history, really. Kids gravitated to rock and roll because it was different than what their parents liked. Metal, punk, goth, hip-hop, disco, college rock, alternative, fucking ska . . . there's a bit of that in almost every genre. Music was (and still is to a lot of kids) central to identity. The