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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It rocks, 15 Aug 2005
Tonight we have, nostalgically speaking, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and she can rock. I love the way she sings "you." She just bites it off. She makes you believe she loves you and hates you just by the way she sings it: "I still dream 'bout JYOU." She of the black boots, chains and the junior high school lyrics, e.g., "Fake Friends - you don't lose nothin when you lose fake friends." (Listen closely to the lyrics and you will hear the SAT word, "sycophants.")This album has most of her big hits including "I Love Rock and Roll" with the oh so apropos lyric, "I said what's your name? He said it doesn't matter, cause it's all the same...He musta been about seventeen...and he was with me, me, yeah ME!"). It also has "That's Why I Hate Myself for Loving You" which is just perfect. "You want in and I want out, and that's what love is all about" is also just right and lyrically interesting. It doesn't have "I Wanna Be Your Dog" which is pure six-pack rock, or the bland, but kind of interesting, "Ridin' With James Dean": "...Rebel without a cause/You got so much to say...Tell me how you feel/Tell me what you see/Ridin with James Dean." Too bad. But it does have "Hey, little liar, I believe in you" which is sooo cute. "Hello, Mama, Hello Daddy/Cherry Bomb!" Some of the songs appeared on the earlier albums, "Album," "Bad Reputation," "I Love Rock and Roll" and "Up Your Alley." All of this seems right since I suspect that her managers thought she had a kind of back street sex appeal similar to the Billy Joel of "Uptown Girl." I think they were right. Joan Jett is the kind of girl who would appeal to the uptown boy from Harvard Yard, I suppose. She is kind of interesting. I recall when she was really big in the eighties that rebelling junior high school girls imitated her slavishly the way their rapacious sisters imitated Madonna. Jett was the spiritual sister, musically-speaking, of bad-girl actress Kristy McNichols. Her fan club (mentioned on the label) is Bad Reputation Nation--"Bad Reputation" is also a lyric from the song, "Victim of Circumstance" (included). The teeny boppers really made her, but she was good anyway, ironic and almost innocent despite the boots and the chains. "Hey jack it's a fact they're talking in town/I turn my back and you're messing around...I hate myself for loving you/Can't break free from the things that you do." These last two lines pounded out in a Pink Floyd Storm Trooper-rally tempo (as with a megaphone). I can see the fans on their feet, waving their arms. She's billed on the CD blurb as "the female Chuck Berry" and "the last rock and roll star." The last track is "Love Is All Around," the theme from the Mary Tyler Moore TV show, done up tempo and in a hurry. "Everyday People" is another song on this album that sounds a little like it should have been from a TV sit com. Joan Jett punches it out, but I thought, she's really just a sweet kid pretending to be bad.
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