The Incredible Genius Of Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” (1984)
So it’s Sunday night, and I’m chilling at home in Queens after spending a relaxing weekend in New York. On Saturday I visited my father in Harlem, and on Sunday I watched football. Then I cooked burgers for dinner. All in all, it was a chill, satisfying, rejuvenating couple of days.
It’s around 8pm now, and I just fed my cat Copper. She’s a four-year old Tabby that I adopted from an animal shelter in Queens, and she’s the light of my life.
Copper and I are both chilling on my bed now, and I’m contemplating what to do next. Then it hits me, in two white hot lightning bolts.
First, I want to listen to music.
And second, I want to specifically listen to “Heaven” by Bryan Adams, which was released in 1984, when I was a ten-year old budding Generation X’er.
I take out my phone, cue up the YouTube app, and punch in “Heaven.”
Boom! Bryan Adams appears on screen, in all his sexy white boy Canadian splendor, wearing tight blue jeans and a Gap-type white T-Shirt. He’s got big blond hair, and a big voice to match.
The truth is, whenever I listened to Bryan Adams as a youth, I imagined myself hooking up with all the beautiful women he hooked up with in his videos. Because I was still pre-teen, but my loins, my heart and my mind told me these women could make me feel good. And I knew Bryan felt the same way.
As the song and video progress, the gorgeous blond 80’s chick protagonist leaves her boyfriend on the street after he gets busted for a DUI, and it just so happens that as she exits the car and looks up, no other than Bryan Adams himself is playing in a concert at a theater down the block.
So our unnamed beauty makes her way into Adams’ concert, and stands in the aisle and listens to Bryan sing. The intensity with which she stares at him could burn a hole through the universe.
Then Bryan belts out:
Baby, you’re all that I want
When you’re lyin’ here in my arms
I’m finding it hard to believe
We’re in heaven
And as he does so, the band’s guitarists unleash a wickedly hard set of chords and rock that presages the grunge music of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam that would emerge in the early 1990’s.
Because it’s true that Bryan Adams was a certified platinum pop star and a teen idol in the 1980’s and 1990’s. But he also played hard music at times, including on such hits as Cuts Like a Knife, the iconic 1983 hit that introduced Adams to the world and that detailed in raw visceral terms his pain at a failed relationship.
There’s one more thing I want to say about Bryan Adams, and it’s important. Bryan Adams’ voice was so perfectly imperfect, so raspy and flawed, so atonal and yet magesterial, sounding so much like someone who smoked, even though I don’t think he did, that it’s just one of the most beautiful, mellifluous, and romantic voices I’ve ever heard. It totally and completely encapsulates the splendor and excitement, along with the cheesiness and hilarity, of the 1980’s.
And for that we Gen X’ers can all be grateful.
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