twain  begins with a statement that will seem controversial when you consider that his job here is to champion British music while Bart cheers for the Stateside artists:

I agree that Oasis suck*.

They are a bunch of grunting no-marks, worshipped by people who most frequently listen to music on a small transistor radio covered in brick dust and plaster. To clarify, I mean builders. To clarify further, I mean the kind of builder who treads mud all over your new, white shag pile carpet, abandons your plumbing halfway through and pisses in your sink when no one is looking.

But if you were to take the amount that Oasis suck and multiply it ten billion times in a Star Trek replicator, flush it down a French public toilet so that all that accumulated suck spent fifty years marinating in garlic turds and Euro-trash tampons – you would still only have a tiny fraction of the suck that Bon Jovi suck.

Bon fucking Jovi.

Those poodle-headed soft metal peddlers are a pox on song, with their wailing and fret wanking and talk box solos. They take beautiful things, like authentic folk, country and blues, and polish it in the studio until there is nothing left but hair and air. And they never, ever go away.

100,000,000 (American) Bon Jovi fans can be wrong. Bon Jovi give rock a bad name.

But, I generalise. To properly communicate just how terrible Bon Jovi are, let us look at the lyrics from just one of their execrable songs. To wit, the dementedly idiotic Wanted, Dead or Alive:

I walk these streets, a loaded six string on my back
I play for keeps, cause I might not make it back
I been everywhere, still I’m standing tall
I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all

I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride
I’m wanted dead or alive

Originally, I was going to deconstruct this segment line by line, but there’s so much to ridicule here that it would be as facile and mean an exercise as tripping up the slow children as they get off their special bus. And it’s not just the lyrics… the claim that they wield a weapon of such rockin’ power that all should tremble before them. It’s the delivery too – the whiney, shiny, slimy slickness of it all. It’s a mere imitation of music. Bon Jovi rock in the same way that Las Vegas has an Eifel Tower or Cher has a face.

And that’s before you even start to consider anything but the music. Their sense of fashion, stuck permanently in the shoulder-padded 80s, their bombast and seriousness, their Spinal Tap stage shows. And, perhaps worst of all, Jon Bon Jovi himself – a preening Philly pretty boy; so vacuous and so vain he gave his band his last name. Well, the last name he anglicised from “Bongiovi”…

Ultimately, the last laugh’s on him – ‘cos the band’s shit. 

While Bon Jovi continue to sell records and tour the US, the collective musical taste of the great American public must be called into question. Like the dead bird in the bottom of the well, they taint the entire water supply.

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* I will be using the British grammatical convention here, where I refer to groups in the plural. So Oasis suck rather than “sucks”, as do Bon Jovi. Only more so.