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I Like Rock n' Roll
from: citypaper.net
by M.J. Fine
It may as well be a federal law: If you don't love JOAN JETT's "I Love Rock n' Roll," you just don't love rock 'n' roll. With just two verses, a dirty riff and an endlessly repeated chorus, Jett sauntered into a bar, fed the jukebox and scored some jailbait kid and seven weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 in the spring of 1982. A dime went a lot further back then.
"I Love Rock n' Roll" wasn't her first single and she wasn't the first to have a hit with the song. (The Arrows were, seven years earlier.) But as the title track of her second album with The BLACKHEARTS, it turned an OK album platinum. Evenly split between covers and originals, I Love Rock n' Roll sounds more '50s than '80s, and the best songs were written before Jimmy Carter took the White House. The title track, for sure, and the other single, Tommy James' "Crimson and Clover." "Nag," a modest hit for The Halos in 1961, undercuts Jett's tough but crushworthy vocals with sweet boy-group harmonies. And the Christmas standard "Little Drummer Boy," of all things, ends the record in a surprisingly stadium-ready arrangement.
Jett's own compositions are pure filler, more notable for their image-shaping titles than for the tepid tunes written around them. The midtempo "Be Straight" sounds like Lesley Gore with a mild case of rabies; the boys answer Jett's snarls like Army privates with most of the spunk beaten out of them. "(I'm Gonna) Run Away" plays on her roots in The RUNAWAYS, and "Love Is Pain" is a blueprint for the more overt bondage references that would come later.
Song-for-song, Jett's latest effort, SINNER, is stronger in almost every way. The rock is harder, the lyrics are better, the filler is higher quality and The BLACKHEARTS are younger. Longtime collaborator KENNY LAGUNA has twice as many co-writing credits as on Rock n' Roll, but Kathleen Hanna (with five) and Paul Westerberg and Linda Perry (one apiece) put their stamp on the more memorable numbers. The single is great — Carmen Electra co-stars in the video for Jett's cover of Sweet's bisexual anthem "A.C.D.C." — it's just not quite a classic. "I Love Rock n' Roll" is gonna outlive every one of us. The album's nonessential, but 25 years from now, the song will still be totally worth the going rate on the jukebox, baby.
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