Joan Jett - The Hit List
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Free Music Notes for The Hit List
Free Music Review: COVERING THE BASICS
Hit: 4 Stars
Since nearly all of leather-clad pre-Riot GRRRL Joan Jett's biggest hits were cover versions anyway---even I Love Rock and Roll was originally an English hit for the Arrows---an entire LP of rock classic remakes makes perfect sense. Numerous artists have released all-cover platters of their fave influences, including the Ramones and Rush, but Jett's ripping trip through time is one of the genre's best. The smartly titled Hit List showcases the Blackheart Babe's crunching, glam-punctuated takes on AC/DC's DIRTY DEES DONE DIRT CHEAP, ZZ Top's lusty anthem TUSH, and even PRETTY VACANT, from fellow punk pioneers the Sex Pistols. For contrast, the Kinks' doleful tribute to Hollywood's past, CELLULOID HEROES, and Nazareth's biggest number LOVE HURTS also get the nod. Like Brownsville Station before her, this Suzi Quatro protege can give nearly any oldie, be it TIME HAS COME TODAY or ROADRUNNER, the Gary Glitter treatment and make it seem like her own idea. This SOUNDS like Joan Jett's greatest hits, and you'll have so much fun listening, you won't even care that none of them really are.....RATING: FOUR BLACK HEARTS Free Music Review: Very dissapointed
Hit: 1 Stars
Well, the CD title says Hit list, and these songs are hits from 70's and 80's. But Joan Jett couldn't deliver any of these hits as good as it should be, on all songs here, her vocals are very lame & weak. Musicianship sucks, I know Blackhearts can play, but here it's just a dissapointment, maybe, this album is the greatest mistake of Joan Jett & B's career. Avoid this CD. Free Music Review: Rockin'
Hit: 5 Stars
The whole cd is worthy of praise. Not often do I buy a cd I like every song on it. This is one of those.Free Music Review: Actually this is Joan Jett covering other people's "hits"
Hit: 4 Stars
I stumbled on "The Hit List" by Joan Jett because I was checking out covers of "Time Has Come Today" by the Chambers Brothers. So I knew that it was a cover album and not to be confused with a collection of her hits, but I can certainly understand why anybody who picked this up without seeing the play list would feel there had a bait and switch perpetrated on them. When I first started listening to this album I was thinking that Joan Jett has one of the most distinctive sounds in rock and roll. It was not until we got to her cover of the Kinks' "Celluloid Heroes" that the volume level got turned down enough to really focus on Jett's vocals. But for the most part it is going to be those songs where she powers through the songs, such as ZZ Top's "Tush" and the aforementioned "Time Has Come Today" that stand out. When she slows down for CCR's "Have You Ever Seen Rain" it seems rather strange, because we have come to expect a specific sound from Jett and when she does something different, slower and more measured, we take it as just cooling down before she revs up again. If there is a happy medium between the two on this album it would be the cover of the Doors' "Love Me Two Times," mainly because of the rollicking guitar licks. I would have put "Roadrunner" by the Modern Lovers on that list, but Jett had already done a version of it four years earlier on "Good Music."
It is not surprising that Joan Jett would do a cover album given the success she had with Sly Stone's "Everyday People" and Tommy James & the Shodells' "Crimson & Clover." The reason for the success is that whenever she is singing somebody else's song she has always remained Joan Jett, a point that "The Hit List" amply demonstrates as she plays songs from AC/DC, the Sex Pistols, and Nazareth, most of whom are clearly kindred spirits.
Free Music Review: Collection of covers is superlative Jett
Hit: 5 Stars
Yes, I'd heard "I Love Rock and Roll" many times, and the title track to Good Music, as well as two singles from Up Your Alley, but I'd never had the gumption to get any of Joan Jett's albums. Well, I ordered this back in 1990, thinking that with a title like that, it was a greatest hits. When I got it, I found it was an album of cover songs. Many of the songs I recognized, and those I didn't, I fell for and went out of my way to discover who originally did them. Years later, when I bought Flashback, I was surprised at how many cover songs Joan had done. Oh yes, and she did Tommy James' "Crimson And Clover" as well.On to The Hit List. I heard her version of AC-DC's "Dirty Deeds" before the original so my bias is here. This is as hard-rocking as the original, with crunching guitars, and even a sax (!) in the middle.
She really evinces the knife-twisting pain of "Love Hurts" in power ballad mode. After doing a song like "Little Liar" from Up Your Alley, she's more than capable of interpreting this classic.
One of the hardest rocking numbers is her take on the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant", again appropriate as she did their song "EMI" only doing it as "MCA" to reflect the label she was on. She blazes through this without the intense and in-your-face whiny Rotten vocals, but with dignified energy.
Her take on the Kinks' ode and warning to movie stars, "Celluloid Heroes" puts in her emotional oomph in the ballad on how by virtue of being dreamers, everyone's in show biz, or dreams of being one just by watching the silver screen, and she sings of a few stars out of the "some who succeeded, some who suffered in vain." Key lines: "I wish my life was a nonstop Hollywood movie show/a fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes/because celluloid heroes never feel any pain/and celluloid heroes never really die."
That it contrasted by the grinding version of ZZ Top's hard rock blues number "Tush" and a harder-edged version of the Chamber Brothers' "Time Has Come Today", whose original version I heard over and over for TIME magazine ads on TV.
I haven't heard the original of Jimi Hendrix's "Up From The Skies", but given what I heard of Hendrix's material, Joan seems to do a decent version. Guess I better buy Axis:Bold As Love and find out.
Her cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Have You Ever Seen The Rain?" is more straight ahead and not as bombastic as Bonnie Tyler's rendition from Faster Than The Speed Of Night. However, there's a harder edged guitars in the Doors' "Love Me Two Times" that sets it aside from the original.
A new version of the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" finishes up the album, and judging from the album, it seems a harder rendition, she's got the power, the AM, the FM, the fifty thousand watts of power, oh yeah!
What's also interesting are two songs that didn't make it here, a cover of The 1910 Fruitgum Co.'s "Indian Giver" and "Be My Lover" by .... I don't know. Info from this was gotten from Flashback, but as for the Hit List, it's clear that Joan easily acquits herself, putting the right amount of hard guitar on the rockers and emotional sensitivity in her voice in the ballads, and with her longtime producer Kenny Laguna doing the honours, it can't be bad. This is probably the best cover songs album I've bought.