Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.
“All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love to You)”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #3 in March 1990.
Three albums into an impressive comeback, Heart were ready to get weird. And “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You” is fucking weird. Written by Robert “Mutt” Lange during the peak of his commercial stranglehold, “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You” tells a story not often told in eighties pop: a casual encounter from, the woman’s point of view and its consequences in which, thanks to the gusto of Ann Wilson’s performance, the woman has agency. She regrets nothing. Despite his callousness, she misses this magic man — specifically, she misses this hitchhiker’s sexual prowess. The chime of the guitars is pure Mutt Lange, and there’s a coldbloodness to the arrangement and production that mirrors the dude’s dismissal of his lover.
So far so good. But that same coldbloodness flattens the effect. What remains is a sour and rather masochistic view of feminine longing that could only have come from a man’s pen. To her credit Wilson struggles, wrenching any pathos from the scenario she can; she invests the “I didn’t ask him his name” with a lust and loneliness that are quite beyond what Mutt had in mind. And there is no band. There is no Heart. Projecting in a vacuum exposes the performer to camp. Imagine Joan Crawford marooned in those increasingly desultory movies after the mid 1950s. In the last section “All I Wanna Do” goes from loony to addled: the woman confronts the hitchhiker with their child, the product of their night of passion. “I’m in love with another man,” Ann reminds him, slathering that Wilson vibrato over the third word. It’s one thing to introduce your child to his father; it’s another to visit the father, child in your arms, and long for him to sex you up again, perhaps that same night with your child in tow. Any one of those bits by themselves is plausible — of course it’s okay to fantasize about the guy years later, even dream about meeting him when he’s working the graveyard shift at the Motel 6 off I-10. But Mutt’s imagination, shaped by contact with Def Leppard and The Cars, can’t assemble these discrete bits; the arrangement fails him. This tale of sexual self-sufficiency stands revealed as yet another story about A Woman Who Wants Love.
“Actually we had sworn off it because it kind of stood for everything we wanted to get away from,” Ann said later about “All I Wanna Do” when these hand-me-downs embarrassed them. The followup single “I Didn’t Want to Need You” was an unofficial sequel but did rather less well. I’m not surprised: writer Diane Warren wouldn’t know subtlety if it was strapped to a wrecking ball. Despite my conviction that bands know shit about their own music, the Wilson sisters are correct: Joe Elliott could’ve sung “All I Wanna Do” and it would’ve scanned better, for from “Runaround Sue” and “Maggie May” to many hip-hop singles pop music is replete with examples of young men corrupted by the Devil Woman. The first person to whom Mutt Lange offered “All I Wanna Do”? Don Henley.
Humanizing The Vacuum 