Album Review: John Mellencamp, "Whenever We Wanted"

Changing your surname more often than Elizabeth Taylor isn't exactly a credible rock and roll move. JOHN COUGAR, latterly JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP, releases his 10th album Whenever We Wanted in the guise of plain old JOHN MELLENCAMP - not such a difference but it matters!

Emerging from the shadow of his SPRINGSTEEN clone tag with Lonesome Jubilee, John self-produced Whenever..., as he did with Big Daddy. He's a chap who certainly knows what he wanted - no mistake.

"Love and Happiness" boasts a lyric of world turmoil belying its title. Throughout the vocals lay back, the guitars scythe in at given moments, inflecting a purpose into events. There's a good five or six singles here, each one as proud as "Jack n Diane." Catch a load of "Now More than Ever," "Last Chance," or the title track to catch my drift.

John Mellencamp - still at the pinnacle of the Great American Dream.

Grade A minus

Joe Mackett
Riff Raff
January 1992

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!