Bon Jovi: New Jersey (1988) Review

Bon Jovi were sitting on top of the world in 1988.

And this is precisely what makes New Jersey such a strange album to review.

On paper, it’s absolutely loaded: huge production, peak-era Sambora guitar work, and a run of singles most bands would kill for. It’s also historically ridiculous — the last rock album to generate five Top 10 singles on the US Billboard Hot 100, a milestone that still stands some four decades later.

And yet, it disappoints. Not because it’s bad, but because predecessor Slippery When Wet set the bar so unattainably high that, when you’re chasing perfection, “good” can feel like a comedown.

Mission Impossible?

We’re not saying New Jersey is a failure.

It has three undeniable cornerstones in Lay Your Hands On Me, Bad Medicine, and I’ll Be There For You, which was more than enough firepower to cement their status as one of the world’s biggest rock acts circa 1988.

Instead, the problem is simpler: Slippery When Wet made Bon Jovi sound effortless in a way that New Jersey cannot match. There’s a audible sense of tension and strain — between ambition and pressure, between “do it again” and “do it even better” — which runs through the record from beginning to end.

"I'm just the singer of a long-haired rock and roll band."
Blood On Blood

The Singles Steal The Show

If there’s one band throughout rock history who understand hit singles more than any other, it’s Bon Jovi.

This is where New Jersey truly excels because, with huge riffs, relatable melodrama, and choruses engineered for mass singalongs, the trifecta of world-beating singles on New Jersey manage to capture the very essence of the late-’80s hard rock scene.

The gospel-soaked lift of Lay Your Hands On Me is the grandest experiment they’d conducted to this point in their career. It’s offset beautifully by the theatrics of one of their best power ballads in the form of I’ll Be There For You; a track elevated to even greater heights by the dual vocal duties of Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora.

Finally, bouncy lead single Bad Medicine takes the route of pure party rock propulsion. In some ways, this track could be seen as Bon Jovi’s take on Motley Crue — albeit a considerably more polite one, from a band that you could introduce to your Grandma without any concerns they’d throw her TV out of a window or snort powder off her mantelpiece.

Either way, it works.

Uneven And Unbalanced

New Jersey’s real problems start once you get outside the singles.

A handful of tracks feel like they were assembled under pressure rather than discovered naturally — verses and choruses that don’t quite belong together, glued by key changes that disrupt the flow. Wild Is The Wind and Love Is War are the clearest examples: both have strong components, but the joins certainly show.

And in chasing the “next” mega-moment so aggressively, sometimes the songwriting forgets to breathe. From this perspective, the most frustrating near-miss is Living In Sin — a ballad that contains an outstanding chorus of classic Bon Jovi scale, but never quite provides the support structure it deserves.

Fool Me Once…

The inconsistency isn’t a mystery — it’s the cost of keeping the machine running.

For while one of New Jersey’s lasting visuals shows the band sitting under a banner proclaiming “We’re back!” in giant letters, the truth is they’d never really been away.

After the unexpected eruption of third effort Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi decided to extend the supporting world tour in order to maximise their commercial reach, and then — with just a three-week break to recover from two years of extensive touring — carried a new-found weight of expecation and an unshakeable feeling of jet lag straight into the follow-up.

This was a near catastrophic re-run of a mistake they had made only three years earlier, when their management team persuaded them to “strike while the iron is hot” but cutting a follow-up to their 1984 debut in the midst of a gruelling Asian tour that had them playing six concerts per week for an entire year.

Crucially, unlike 7800 Fahrenheit, the material on New Jersey is simply too strong to suffer the same fate — although it does perhaps explain why it sometimes feels as if the band are trying to force square pegs into round holes.

Wait… Cowboys?

It might be the record that almost tore them apart, but it’s also the one that made them cowboys.

Encouraged by the success of Wanted Dead Or Alive, Jon and co. began to lean into Wild West imagery harder than ever before.

It’s very effective at times — for instance, the over-sized rocker Stick To Your Guns offers considerable heft, and Blood On Blood is a productive friendship anthem which the band themselves considered the best work of their career to date.

But with no fewer than six of the album’s twelve songs adopting cowboy-related themes, the real issue here is repetition. There’s only so many times you can ride into town before it starts to sound like fancy dress — the lacklustre Homebound Train never really becomes what it’s reaching for, acoustic effort Love For Sale is all saloon chatter with diminishing returns, and Ride Cowboy Ride is a simple throwaway that should’ve been left on the cutting room floor.

This is New Jersey’s central problem in miniature; a few great moments, surrounded by long stretches of road where it feels like the band are scrambling for the next big idea while the tape is still rolling.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

In hindsight, New Jersey is celebrated as the final hoo-rah of hair metal’s mainstream dominance.

The first cracks in the make-up had already began to show a few months prior to this album’s release, with the sudden surge in popularity of Guns N’ Roses’ seminal debut Appetite For Destruction — a record that carried a raw edge and an element of danger that made the “party rock” of their peers look outdated overnight. Hot on the heels of GN’R’s rock reset came the emergence of grunge, and these two grittier styles would spell doom for hair metal.

Bon Jovi were one of the few bands to survive this seismic shift in the rock landscape, and they did it by making a series of smart changes to their sound that their rivals either weren’t capable of seeing or weren’t capable of pulling off. 1988’s New Jersey is the final snapshot of them as hair metal’s default setting — big hair, bigger choruses, and a production shine you could use as a mirror.

A Clash Of Styles

Originally titled Sons Of Beaches, this album was set to pick up where its predecessor left off.

However, Bon Jovi’s decision to drill deeper into Wild West storytelling saw the creative process take an unexpected left turn at the halfway stage.

You can feel the joins where the best offerings from these two very different concepts were forced to occupy space on the same setlist, as the record tries to bounce straight out of harsh tales about the lonesome life of a gunslinger into feel-good stadium rockers that attempt to recreate Slippery When Wet’s carefree outlook.

This decision causes New Jersey to trip over its own feet — because while nobody can deny the ambition behind efforts like Stick To Your Guns, it can’t help but feel out of place alongside decadent anthems which celebrate the simple joys of living for the weekend, such as huge lead single Bad Medicine, and the infectious 99 In The Shade; a track that uses the album’s previous title within its lyrics, and even references the fictitious duo Tommy and Gina from previous smash Livin’ On A Prayer.

"Somebody tells me even Tommy's coming down tonight, if Gina says it's alright."
99 In The Shade

Bon Jovi – New Jersey

It may never fully escape the shadow of Slippery When Wet, but New Jersey is still a solid record.

Indeed, its trio of world-beating singles would likely have been considered “career highlights” by many of their late-80s rivals.

But for Bon Jovi, their uncanny ability to pen radio-hogging hits meant these songs were just the latest additions to a long line of unit-shifting singles, most of which would eventually occupy a spot on one of the greatest Greatest Hits albums ever made.