Bon Jovi And The Spin Doctors: Why It's Okay To Like Terrible Music

Welcome to Earworm, Jen Doll's new weekly tribute to the songs we used to listen to — good or bad, cringeworthy or still surprisingly cool — and haven't quite been able to get out of our heads ever since.

Let us declare this space — right here, right now — a safe spot for talking about the music we used to listen to, bad or good, regardless of the obvious development of our now finely wrought ears. Yes, we're going to confront some possibly terrible music here, and that's okay. The music we prefer (whether we admit it or not) isn’t always in precise keeping with our expertly honed tastes and established musical knowledge and the favorite studied-yet-whimsical band T-shirt we wear out to bars. Sometimes it’s way more nostalgic than that. There are guilty pleasures, yes, and there are the pleasures that it's hard to even feel guilty about because they’re just from another time entirely. The nuts and bolts of the music have become secondary. What these songs are about is their connection to the past. With music, we earworm our way back in time, but rather than deny this — that we were young once, and maybe we are less so now — we should embrace it.

Hearing a song listened to years ago can tap into a long-ago time in our lives, transporting us with the merest note, lyric, guitar riff, spoken-word solo. With those songs, we can go back ourselves, albeit temporarily, remembering the atmosphere and mood, who we were with, what we were wearing, even what our surroundings smelled like, and all the emotions we felt. And how awesome is going back in time to a song of your youth? You're typically better off from your remembering vantage point of today. I mean, at least now with the Internet you can google the lyrics. Your last best meal was probably not on hot dog day. You are not plagued with an affection for hair-band singers in tight spandex pants. Probably.

But seriously, in the case of Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” — shot through the heart, and you're to blame!, some pretty heavy-handed but also, you know, kind of revealing words about heartbreak — what I remember most is the elementary school cafeteria, all bench seating and white plastic tabletops, where I first heard the song. It was playing on someone's jambox, or possibly over the school intercom, because it was hot dog day, a cause for celebration if there is one. I remember the smell of hot dogs laid over the smell of whatever abrasive cleaning agent was used to mop the floors. I remember my friends: Tonya, whose mom packed her a bag lunch in a single Ziplock that contained her peanut butter sandwich, chips, and an apple, which meant everything was covered in jelly when she withdrew it from her backpack, and Mike, the boy I had the crush on, the smart one with the glasses and the neatly packed recyclable lunch sacks. I remember that a lot of kids sang along, and I tried to, too, and we rocked, or we thought we rocked. Afterward, though, when I repeated the lyrics to someone, they pointed out that I’d gotten it all wrong. “Shot through the heart” was a good start, but afterward I fumbled: “And you’re too vain. You give love to America!” (Patriotic!)

Lyrics notwithstanding, today I firmly believe this is about the perfect song for a 10-year-old, with its music video pyrotechnics and simple repetitions, the surprisingly joyful whoa whoas and the intense part at the end that’s very nearly spoken word poetry. Say what you will about its quality and the value of its warning message about falling for someone who's gonna do you wrong, to me and my younger self, this is a song about doing what you do with aplomb and big hair, even if you don’t know the words.

I asked three friends to share their most indelible songs of summers past, in a mini-investigations into which songs matter to us and why. (These friends are all of about my own age, which is probably why I had some pretty formative memories related to their suggestions, too.) Maris Kreizman, the creator of the Slaughterhouse 90210 Tumblr, picked “Ghost” by The Indigo Girls — oh, yes — which she says, “Will always make me think of being 17 and riding around New Jersey in my Honda Civic, screaming the lyrics because I was so devastated that my boyfriend Larry had cheated on me. He was a bastard.” But! "Listening to it now is sorta like putting on an old comfy pair of jeans. I think 'Ghost' smells like one of those car deodorizer trees."

I listen to "Ghost" now, and, yep, I’m in a car, too, driving around with my best friend Paige and sipping from an Evian bottle full of a mixed concoction of boozes stolen from my parent’s liquor cabinet back when I didn't know that mixing blackberry schnapps and tequila and vodka and gin and part of an old beer might not be the best plan (sorry, Mom and Dad; sorry, everyone), and, yes, there’s something about this song that’s wonderfully sad and soothing and, sure, cloying and obvious, but that only means it's ideal for a teenage girl who’s just starting to consider longing and loss and that not everyone is who they first seemed to be. The first line is “There's a letter on the desktop that I dug out of a drawer,” and yet, who among us writes letters? Who has desktops!? It doesn’t matter. This song is pure nostalgia and it always was and in 400 years some robot superhuman with lasers for hands will uncover it in a landfill and listen and weep, sad-happily, along with it.

Author Kevin Smokler picked a song I can’t criticize, "Ohh Child" by The Five Stairsteps, because I really do think it’s beautiful. “It always reminds of going to the movies in summertime and stepping out into the sunlight from a dark theater, the relief of knowing there's a lot more daylight than you thought, and a rather obvious metaphor for the increased daylight of the future, a better and brighter tomorrow," he says. Lyrically, there’s not all that much going on in this song, but the heart and soul is in the harmony and those impossibly melodious voices, and, oh my goodness, how awesome is that video? La la la la la la la la la. All these years later, he says, "it reminds me that summer isn't just about endless possibility but very real acceptance of limitations. Summer is the only season we mourn the end of, the only season that we can imagine being over before it’s even begun.” Aw.

Then there’s Kate Carpenter, a freelance writer, who reminded me of “Two Princes” by The Spin Doctors, which, how could I, or any of us, forget? As much as I've tried, that song stays with you like a weird smell you can't shake no matter how many times you shower. The repetitive beats of the beginning, and throughout, and the lyrics, both totally meaningless and somehow knowing, at least, at that time, burrow into one’s brain unstoppably: “One, two princes kneel before you. That’s what I said now. Princes, princes who adore you Just go ahead now.” It’s not a perfect song, it's not even a particularly good one (and it was in fact voted one of the worst of all-time), but who cares! It was the ‘90s. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. “When this song plays, I'm immediately reminded of a summer afternoon when I was 16," she says. "I had the windows rolled down because it was beautiful and sunny out, and I loved driving with the wind in my face. I'd recently broken up with a boyfriend--or, rather, he had broken up with me--and I was having a rare 'who cares about him, I'm single and it's a beautiful day and I love this song' moment." Even today, "I always get a blast of young-free-wind-in-my-hair when I hear this song,” she says. And now it’s going to be in my head for the rest of the day. What, exactly, is a princely racket? (Sorry, everyone.)

As for me, my summer song, with a particular nod to the theme of driving-like-we-were-16-again, is The Beastie Boys’ “So What Cha Want,” as played over and over again in a black four-door sedan filled with three of my best friends as, in the summer between sophomore and junior year, we drove through the streets, windows down and A.C. blasting, singing as loud as we could and talkin' boys. We had just gotten our driver’s licenses and were free to roam the streets of our small town independently on wheels, and everything was possible, or at least, if it wasn't, we didn't yet know it, which is kind of a wonderful place to be. Indisputably, this is an excellent summer song, and still is today, but when I hear it again today I am not in New York City in 2013. I am in that car, and I am having what can only be described as a great time.

Jen Doll's first concert was Skid Row and Bon Jovi. She writes for The Atlantic, The Hairpin, New York Magazine, the New York Times, the Toast, and elsewhere. Her first book is due out from Penguin/Riverhead in the Spring of 2014. She's on Twitter — @thisisjendoll