Ooh, I feel icky… I just finished ripping five Bon Jovi cd’s to mp3. I have this sense, which I’m sure is merely classist outrage, that I’ve sullied my music library at work by adding music which includes three different recordings of Living on a Prayer and You Give Love a Bad Name. One of each versions is from a downright scary “alternative folk-style” album (This Left Feels Right) on which all BJ’s major hits are stripped down to the studs and rebuilt as alt-emo acoustic bedtime songs, hardly recognizable as the original leather-knickered arena anthems. What’s Bon Jovi without something to sing along to, lighter aloft? When my ripping app connected to CDDB to download all the track names, it categorized the album as “folk-pop.”

So why would I do this? Well, for the sake of corporate community. I maintain an mp3 share at work that around five of us contribute our personal music to. We’ve got around 320 albums and 4000 tracks so far; our only rule is that no music is to be copied off the share. In any case, the Bon Jovi contributor has provided a lot of great music in the past, primarily latin alternative like Ozomotli, Cafe Tacuba, El Gran Silencio, and Jarabe de Palo. So when he hands me five new cd’s to put on the share, his biggest single donation, I look at them, and gack!

I would love to be the sort of person who wouldn’t blink at another’s taste…but I’m not sure what principle I would tack that desire on to. Wanting everyone to feel included? I think that must be it. The countering desire is a cocktail of superiority, aesthetic concern, and a desire to be hip. If this share, even though communal, is somehow also an extension of my taste and personality, its content matters. But I’m also suspecting that some of my criteria for what passes for hipness or taste are wanting. It’s about image: I wouldn’t care that much if a contributor asked me to put a bunch of obscure and annoying artists into the mix, yet the dangers of those bands inflicting themselves on the curious digital wanderer is much greater than the possibility of someone who wouldn’t like Bon Jovi deciding to listen to it.

The difference is that people know who Bon Jovi is. And the worst is (if we’re really honest) that Bon Jovi isn’t really that bad a band, they’re just out of vogue. And why out of vogue? Because they fail to successfully reinvent themselves. Obviously they’ve tried, but what may have worked for Rush (basically turning to easy-listening) isn’t working for them. I can’t really imagine them going the Metallica route and appealing to the alt-grunge crowd either. They were always too pretty. Think, how many of the other blush and mascara/denim hunk rock anthem bands have made a successful transition into this millenium? None that I can think of.

But back to the topic of snobbishness. Everyone’s got their sentimental guilty pleasure. An album or book or film that you pull out every long while and treasure for its ability to take you back to a differently complicated time. Maybe it’s a Chicago or Gene Loves Jezebel album, or that William Shatner novel you return to. To truly qualify as a guilty pleasure, it can’t be something mediocre with camp qualities, something that’s widely accepted as a cult classic, like The Monkees or Red Dawn or something like that. It has to be something that the general public decided was lame within two to five years of its first appearance in the public spotlight. Geographically, Bon Jovi doesn’t really qualify, since there are large zones of the US in which they are still quite acceptable fare. I should probably come to terms with the fact that they are just passe in my own small frou-frou demographic.

Truth is, there was a time when I kind of emulated the Jon look myself. Picture to come.