Why didn't Bon Jovi resonate with critics at the height of their fame?

In the new docuseries Thank you, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, fans get an all-access pass to the life and times of one of the biggest pop rock bands of the '80s and '90s.

Today on Commotion, music critics Maura Johnston and Niko Stratis join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to discuss whether the four-part docuseries does justice to the band's rise and enduring legacy.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: It seems kind of bonkers to me, Niko, that an album as successful as Slippery When Wet was not even nominated for a Grammy. It's one thing to not be loved by critics, but it's another thing for the establishment to also discard you in the same way. I'm curious, why do you think critics and also the pop establishment didn't like Bon Jovi?

Niko: I mean, they kind of existed outside of two different worlds, right? They looked like a metal band, but they're a little bit too pop. They kind of sounded like a pop band, but they looked a little bit too metal. You think about the Grammys at the time, they're still sort of coming around to bringing in a lot of different genres of music into the fold, and they're very much about to be at a turning point themselves.

They were a band of the people, right? Their early manager said, "We go out and we bring ourselves to the fans. We don't ask the fans to come to us." There is a lot of fan service in Bon Jovi insofar that they really sort of did their work to connect with people wherever they went, and they were so much more about the fans and that sort of thing than they were the critics or what have you. I feel like we see shades of it in the modern era…. But they didn't really live in a place like that. They sort of carved their own path of being both pop and metal at the exact same time.

Elamin: You know what that reminds me of, Maura, out of all things, is Shania Twain, you know? Because when Shania came out, the country music establishment was like, "This isn't country. We're not interested. Get it out of here." Critics bristled a little bit at the notion that you would use Def Leppard drums to create country music. So, there's something transgressive about actually stealing the pop moment for yourself like Bon Jovi did, like Shania Twain did, but that doesn't mean the critics are always going to love that kind of treatment, right?

Maura: Yeah, I think that's true. I also think that there was definitely a bias against the type of music that they were doing. I think part of it was kind of rooted in MTV era bias of being suspicious of anyone who was too pretty. You saw it with Duran Duran, too…. And what Niko talked about with them being too metal for pop, too pop for metal — also then being kind of these strivers, which I feel like rock criticism at the time kind of looked down on that, in a way, for new bands…. They didn't have that kind of remove or aloofness that made them seem cool. Even though a lot of people thought that they were cool, the people who were kind of arbiters of whether or not someone was cool were like, "you try too hard." And I think that's a big factor.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.