power, ants and scarves
Tuesday, June 19, 2001

In their attempt to create a personalizable, modular summer schedule, VH1 created a show called "What's My 20?" Basically, the idea is to use internet polling to create customized countdowns of various types of songs and videos. Upcoming episodes will include the best lead singers, the top songs from movies, the best cover song (whatever that means), etc.

For the first episode, they had the top power ballads, which were as follows:

1. Bon Jovi "Always"


2. Journey "Open Arms"


3. Aerosmith "Dream On"


4. Def Leppard "Love Bites"


5. Guns N' Roses "Don't Cry"


6. Poison "Every Rose Has Its Thorn"


7. Extreme "More Than Words"


8. Skid Row "I Remember You"


9. Heart "Alone"


10. Warrant “Heaven"


11. Van Halen "When It's Love"


12. The Scorprions "Still Loving You"


13. Kiss "Forever"


14. Mr. Big "To Be With You"


15. Styx "Babe"


16. Tesla "Love Song"


17. Motley Crue "Home Sweet Home"


18. Cheap Trick "The Flame"


19. Night Ranger "Sister Christian"


20. Whitesnake "Is This Love"

I will admit that I hadn't even heard of a few of the songs on that list, and strongly disagree with a few of the others. For example, Extreme's "More Than Words" is, in fact, a straight ballad done with two acoustic guitars. Whatever it is that makes a power ballad, that song is strikingly out of place in that list.

The show had two parts: one was simply presentation of the videos, and the second part had snippets of the videos with commentary from the artists. One of the interesting things to come out of it was that a surprising number of the artists utterly loathed the songs for which they became so well known -- for example, "More than Words" pretty much destroyed Extreme, Heart can't stand the video for "Alone" (the director spent his time maximizing one sister's breasts and minimizing the other perfectly normally sized sister's girth by focusing only on her face) and Cheap Trick loathed "The Flame" so much that they refused to perform it in concert.

A couple of interesting things about that list. With the sole exception of Aerosmith's "Dream On", no song on the list is from before 1980 or after 1990. Whatever defines a power ballad, apparently people stopped making them, or at least stopped making them well, after 1990. ("Dream On" manages the interesting trick of being both before 1980 -- original release year 1972, with a re-release in 1974 -- and after 1990, with an orchestral version released in 1992. And a side note: for years and years, I thought the title of that song was "Sing, Women".) Power ballads apparently had a very precisely defined era.

That definition makes the list slightly more sensible that it would otherwise be. After all, what reasonable list of power ballads would exclude Kiss' "Beth", or Alice Cooper's "Only Women Bleed"? (For that matter, even with a precisely defined era, those two should have been on the list. I mean, really.) And although I understand why Bon Jovi's "Always" made the list over "Wanted Dead or Alive" (a single spending six months in the Billboard Top Ten will be noticed, after all) ... well, "Wanted" is clearly the better song.

And what about Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart"? For kitsch value, if nothing else!

Random Video Notes:
(1) MTV is creating a show in which many people get to go to the WWF wrestling school to pursue their dream of becoming professional wrestlers. The theme song for this show, for whatever reason, is Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal", as sung by the group Alien Ant Farm. (Really.) The song is also apparently on the "American Pie 2" soundtrack. The video has just entered rotation on MTV, and is an interesting parody of Jackson's "Billie Jean", "Bad" and "The way she makes me feel", complete with light-up sidewalk, moonwalking, crotchgrabbing, and exploding car windows. The interesting thing is that, although they're clearly trying to make it a hard-rock, crash-and-burn type song ... it doesn't actually sound all that much different; it seems that "Smooth Criminal" is a pretty hard rocking song on its own merits. Who knew? I thought the only hard rocking song that Jackson had ever done was "Dirty Diana". (The other interesting thing, which is terribly funny in its own way, is that nobody can hit the high notes like Jackson, and listening to them try is ... an experience.)

(2) You know you're really really gay when you watch Nikka Costa do her video for "Like a Feather", and the only thing you can think for most of the vid is "Man, that strobing background hurts!" and it's only near the end that you realize that all she's wearing on her top half is a scarf that's been enthusiastically taped to her nipples.

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