Stuff your Dad likes: power ballads
V-day is coming up, which means you’re either in love or lonely and miserable.
Jacob Zinn can’t give you fatherly advice, but he can eat the Valentine’s Day candy you bought for your girlfriend.
By Jacob Zinn
[contributor]
You know it’s coming up soon. That one day per year when you’re either in love and affectionate or you’re lonely and miserable: Valentine’s Day.
With Feb. 14 approaching, couples young and old are giving each other flowers, planning romantic evenings and buying lubricant by the bottle. While you might be courting someone with chocolate and roses, your dad may have courted your mom with power ballads.
Extreme’s “More Than Words”; Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home”; Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)”. The sole purpose of these songs was to get into women’s pants. Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” may be the sappiest, most cliché power ballad of the era, but it opened a lot of … opportunities.
There’s a good chance you might have been conceived to one of these songs.
However, odds are your dad had better taste in power ballads than the hair metal ones. Aerosmith’s “What It Takes” or “Angel” might’ve been rotating on his record player.
Or maybe he was more upfront with sexually explicit and implicit songs like Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” or AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long”. Perhaps he traded Warrant’s “Heaven” for a slice of that sweet “Cherry Pie”. (Oh yeah!)
Either way, power ballads got him laid. He may not like power ballads, but the down-tempo, three-chord, lyricized high school love notes were saturated with just enough passion to bring star-crossed lovers together. And if your parents got married in the late ‘80s, you can bet someone requested “I’ll Be There for You” by Bon Jovi at their wedding.
Now that power ballads are often only played as joke songs at weddings and karaoke nights, they’re no longer the genre of choice for bedding mates.
But your dad doesn’t know that. If he digs out his crate of vinyl records from the basement, it might be to set the tone of the evening.
Whether or not you have a date on Valentine’s Day, I highly suggest that you make plans to go out and stay out past curfew until you’re certain both of your parents are asleep. You’ll thank me later.
