I Love Rock'n'Roll

"...so come and take your time and dance with me...yeeooow!"
Seems like that's the one Joan Jett song that gets played on the '80s station in Houston more than anything else, but there is this one other song that was a big hit for her...



"I think of you every night and day, you took my heart, and you took my pride awayyayayay..."
For the uninitiated, that's "I Hate Myself For Loving You." That one and "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" are the only two songs from her that I've ever heard, but I love them both. I think "I Hate Myself For Loving You" was one of the best songs to come out of the '80s, and I hated, hated to see NBC and Faith Hill make a damned commercial jingle out of it. I don't know if it merits quite the same level of outrage as the Old El Paso Co. butchering Marty Robbins' "El Paso" in an attempt to sell some "crappy burrito boxed dinner," as Country Standard Time's Robert Loy so artfully put it a few years back, but it comes pretty close. Come to think of it, I think he's got the right idea:

Maybe we should thank the censors and the pitchmen too lazy and blasphemous to write their own jingles. They certainly have turned us on to some great music and art.

Or maybe we should hang them.

Call me crazy, but I think some songs just deserve better than to be twisted into a jingle to sell something. "El Paso" and "I Hate Myself For Loving You" are just a couple of them. Even if they're on vastly different levels.