Bon Jovi — This House is Not for Sale
Shortly before the release of his band’s thirteenth studio album, This House is Not for Sale, Jon Bon Jovi sat down with radio jock Howard Stern and noted his displeasure at still not being in the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. He blamed this snub on unnamed influences within the Hall, who had a grudge against him, principally for having sold so many records.
This exchange nicely encapsulated where Bon Jovi the band, and the man, sit circa 2016. Disregarded in any history of rock n’ roll you might wish to peruse (Bon Jovi are generally either painted as the point where 80’s hard rock goes pop, or as part of the hair-sprayed garbage that Nirvana blew off the charts in 1992), Jon Bon Jovi wants nothing more than to be taken seriously, whether it’s by the Rock Hall, critics, or music fans.
In order to aide his quest Bon Jovi has spent the past 14 years in a kind of po-faced fugue, jumping off with 2002’s post-9/11 album Bounce, and then into a series of turgid, humourless, U2 and Coldplay-mimicking records about the state of the world. This sequence was only broken by their 2007 country sojourn, Lost Highway, not coincidentally a period that produced the only two Billboard top forty pop hits for the band since 2000’s quite good Crush.
All this came to a head on 2015’s Burning Bridges, an album containing new songs but also various left-overs and outtakes, operating as a clearing of the decks for the band. They officially said farewell to longtime guitarist Richie Sambora, and marked their last album with original label Mercury records, as referenced in the torturous cynicism of the title track (“Here’s one last song you can sell”).
This House is Not For Sale is therefore meant to act as a fresh start for Bon Jovi, but rather than using the opportunity to re-orientate the band back to the hook-laden arena rock that is their strength, the band’s leader seems stuck with a not insubstantial chip up on his shoulder.
Occasionally songs rise out of the murk — the title track rocks along like cut-price latter-day Springsteen — but in the main everything is draped in echo-ey guitars, keyboards and a somber and slightly bitter tone. Even when a song like “Born Again Tomorrow” espouses positive messages, it feels slightly hackneyed due to the to the sound — where everything feels like heavy lifting.
Jon Bon Jovi has serious matters on his mind, and shorn of his main musical collaborator, Sambora, the hooks which could lighten the mood of previous albums are all but gone, resulting in a tiring listen, and possibly their worst album yet.
And really, this is a shame, because the songs from Bon Jovi’s peak, often maligned, and undoubtedly in some cases overplayed, actually hold up well on their own terms. If Jon Bon Jovi was willing to lighten up and lean onto even some of the dumb fun of those early records it would help alleviate the somber mood and dead ends of This House is Not a Home no end.
