#68 - Let's Make It Baby

Artist: Bon Jovi
Album: None (Demo)
Other Versions: The original has talkbox (demo for New Jersey), the non-talkbox one was recorded later (demo for These Days)
Era: Going strictly by when it was written it would be "hair metal" but soundwise it fits in much better with These Days and the "moody rock"era

Lyrics

My mission for tonight is to write this without dissolving into a mushy little puddle. It's harder because I'm already pretty mushy from Lost (it was a Jin/Sun episode! Shirtless Jin! JIN SPEAKING ENGLISH!) but I think I can handle it.

I'm not even going to write about the non-talkbox version. I think I've listened to it maybe once, and I don't think it was all the way through. There are a lot of songs with talkbox that would be just as good without it, I don't think this is one of them. I think it adds a lot to the mood, it dirties it up, and that works really well with how blatantly sexual the song is. This one needs to be dirty.

Jon and Richie were either getting laid too much or not enough when they wrote this one. I'm leaning towards the former, because they wrote it in the late 80s when they were on top of the world. If they weren't having lots and lots of sex it's because they didn't want to, not because they couldn't get any. I don't think this is a song borne of sexual frustration.

Here's my reaction the first time I heard this:

"Ooh, I like the talkbox. This is a sexy beat. DID HE JUST SAY 'I'M GOING DOWN'? Holy Jesus! Me likey!"

Yeah I'm pretty easy to please.

This song has really, really sexy instrumentation. It's got a slow beat and it's deep and throbby (throbby is so a word) and it kind of vibrates. It's very much a song about sex even if you take away the oh-so-subtle ("I wanna taste the sweat/running off of your body/get the sheets all wet/I want to make you feel naughty" being perfect examples of "how to be subtle" [if you miss the sarcasm there I will not be held responsible]) lyrics.

Speaking of the lyrics, I love them. Subtlety be damned. This song makes excellent use of not just the meaning of words but the way they sound. When he says "it's getting harder, harder, harder to keep you away" it's because there are a couple different things you think of when you hear "hard" in this context. This song plays on connotation and the culture of sex and words in relation to sex. It's not just dumb horniness, it's really intelligently sexy.

Jon's voice in this song is perfect. He sounds the way you'd expect him to during sex if he's a talker (assuming you think about these things enough to have an expectation). He's husky and sometimes it sounds like he's trying to force the words out while his body's focused on other things. And the backing vocals in the chorus, the higher-pitched "ba-ay-by-y" are my favorite backing vocals in the history of everything.

The two best parts of the song:
1. When Jon, near the end, is doing "don't tell me you love me/tell me you want me" and totally loses his concentration. It sounds like he's getting off (or close) right there in the studio and it's very powerfully sexy.

2. The very end when Richie says "I want to fuck you" into the talkbox. Just in case the rest of the song wasn't subtle enough. I like that he says that, because if I had a talkbox I'd spend all my time saying obscene things into it, and now I feel less alone.

My Rating: 10/10

I was gonna save the "sex" song for 69 but that's way too predictable. So for #69 I'll be doing one of the songs from the first two with a David Bryan (or Rashbaum because he didn't change his name for the first album) writing credit.

• Love Lies
• Breakout
• Only Lonely
• I Don't Wanna Fall to the Fire

I would like to point out that no way am I giving a decent, coherent review of "Only Lonely" without spending several paragraphs trying to do the video justice. Just a heads-up/warning/whatever.