Lightning reviews: September

Aesthetic value, pleasure and play, George Washington, and Bon Jovi.

1: New Jersey, Bon Jovi.

Beatles, Stones, Bowie, Zeppelin, come on, move over Boomer, when will 80s hair metal bands get the attention they are due? I remember the hours spent, in the MTV glow, waiting for their videos to come on. I remember “Blaze of Glory” and Young Guns. I’m a cowboy. On a steel horse I ride. I have been thinking about beauty. It is time to give peak Jovi a re-listen.

But ugh, what a let down. The usual complaints are about the attitude, or the persona, the band project in their music. It is self-satisfied; it is “weight-room ready buff-rock.” And it fails to convince: when Chris Molanphy wrote (in that same article) that “Bon Jovi as working man’s music” is “too much to stomach,” he presumably means that the songs are trying to project a working class persona, and do not succeed. Certainly when Bon Jovi sings, on “Blood on Blood,” of fake IDs and stealing cigarettes, it sounds like someone copying other people’s well-worn cliches, not like someone manifesting their own lived experience. Bruce Springsteen could pull off being a serial killer from Nebraska in a song; Bon Jovi can’t even pull off being a kid from New Jersey.

But it is not remarked on enough how much the music itself sucks. “Lay Your Hands on Me” is build around a lumbering riff that never gets anywhere, despite Jon Bon Jovi’s shouting “c’mon!” to urge it on. Track 2, “Bad Medicine,” is in the key of E, and in the chorus (“Your love is like bad medicine, bad medicine is what I need”) the melody soars all the way up to…A, the fourth tone of the scale, and then hammers away at it, until a note that should be only mildly dissonant becomes a bee stinging you in the brain. It’s a sick dog stuck in a cage. The riff on “Homebound Train” is, I think, supposed to remind you of a train, but it sounds like a train stuck in the mud (“Locomotive” by Guns N’ Roses leaves it in the dust).

Hemingway (as Lieutenant Henry) wrote “I’m like a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty and knows he’s no better,” and maybe the tragedy of Bon Jovi is that they don’t know they’re no better. But New Jersey does have one of those two-in-ten on it: “I’ll be there for you.” There is a reason Ashton Kutcher sang it to win back Amanda Peet in A Lot Like Love. Sure, the line “You say you cried a thousand rivers, and now you’re swimming for the shore” makes no sense (rivers have banks, not shores), but the desperate hope, the I’d-jump-off-a-building-for-your-love in the song, is real. Every time, it hits me in the gut.

2: Let’s be Liberal: An Alternative to Aesthetic Hedonism, by Antonia Peacocke, explained with crappy pictures¹

Suppose you are looking at a painting.

In your mind is an experience of the painting.

In the good case, it is a pleasant experience. It has that warm, orange glow of pleasure.

Aesthetic hedonism says: it is in virtue of the pleasantness of this experience that the painting has “aesthetic value.” The pleasure means that, as an aesthetic object, the painting gets a big thumbs up.

Aesthetic hedonism goes farther, saying that everything that has aesthetic value, has it in virtue of the pleasantness of the experiences one has during a “complete, correct” appreciation of the thing’s “sensory features.”

Peacocke thinks this is too restrictive. Being pleasant is one way for an experience to be valuable, but it is not the only way. So why not loosen up, and allow those other ways for experiences to be valuable to redound to the benefit of the objects of those experiences? Let’s be liberal, and say that everything that has aesthetic value, has it in virtue of the valuableness of the experience one has during a complete, correct appreciation of the thing’s sensory features—whether or not that value is due to pleasure or to something else.

One wants examples of some of these “something else”’s. Peacocke writes: