In defense of "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You"
Is it really one of the worst songs of all time? Not in my opinion.
I’ve really been into Heart these days, thanks in large part to my attempt to recreate a Heart mix tape that I made and listened to until my ears bled in 1995. I think I have most of the songs that were on it, plus a few more because it’s longer than 90 minutes which was the limit of most blank cassette tapes at the time. The order of the tape is lost to time, but I mostly listen to it on shuffle anyway. I’m seeing Heart this November and I could not be more excited about it. But here’s the thing, I have a dirty little secret when it comes to Heart. And I’ve decided to come clean. This is the post in which I defend what in many people’s minds is indefensible – Heart’s 1990 hit “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You.” You have been warned.
I remember reading a post over at PopDose years ago that singled out “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You” as one of the world’s worst songs. And I can kind of see where they’re coming from. There aren’t many songs that seem as universally vilified as this one. Ann and Nancy Wilson mention in the liner notes of their live acoustic album, The Road Home.
Actually, we had sworn off [“All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You”] because it kind of stood for everything we wanted to get away from. It was a song by Mutt Lange, who we liked, and it was originally written for Don Henley. But there was a lot of pressure on us to do this song at the time. As it turned out, it was huge for Heart and so people wanted us to do it for these shows.
So they stripped it down and got rid of the bombastic production. It kind of works, but for me, I’ll keep my late 80s/early 90s bombast thankyouverymuch.
The biggest complaint about the song is OHMYGOD IT’S ABOUT A ONE-NIGHT-STAND. And it is. The song’s narrator uses a man she meets on a rainy night to get pregnant and only sees him again years after the fact. The reaction seems to imply that this is the first one-night-stand in the history of rock music ever. Embedded in this is also one of the main points of the argument in the PopDose post – that the early 90s were still the time of the rise of AIDS and that one-night-stands would strike fear in the hearts of men rather than excitement. The whole thing conveniently overlooks the fact that songs about one-night-stands are not new and there are certainly plenty of songs about them recorded by men – notably in the country music genre, but in rock and pop as well – but heaven forbid a female perform a song in a similar vein. I love how men would get outraged over the narrator’s act, forgetting that he did not have to put his unprotected penis inside her and leave a deposit at the bank. It truly makes me wonder if there would have been similar outrage if Don Henley had recorded it. Alas, the world will never know.
Here’s the thing about the song – it’s catchy and fit in perfectly with radio at the time. I always feel like Heart is unfairly maligned for having the nerve to create music during the 80s/90s that sounded like music from the 80s/90s. I don’t know if it was a perceived “pop-ification” of a rock band or what, but it has always bothered me that they are held to an impossible standard. Now, to be fair, the remainder of the singles from the album didn’t do as well at radio, sure, but they didn’t have the promotional push that a first single traditionally got at the time. I love the smooth opening of the song and Ann wails like a motherfucker on it because she possesses one of the best, if not THE best female voices in rock music. No, it’s not “Straight On” or “Magic Man”, but it’s pretty good Heart by late 80s/early 90s standards so people should just enjoy the song and not clutch their pearls so much over the lyrics
The one thing that does piss me off about the song is the video. It continued in the tradition of stretching Ann Wilson out with a fancy camera trick because she dared to be a bit Rubenesque in an industry that (even then) wanted its women to have no curves at all. Even stretched, out, it would be a crime for the camera to stay on her for longer than two and a half seconds.
Overall, I really started to tune Heart out around this time. I loved their Desire Walks On album from 1993 that I think I was the only one who listened to and the previously mentioned The Road Home album sparked a major Heart renaissance 1995ish. After that, I didn’t like their albums as a whole any longer, maybe a song here or there. I listened to Ann & Nancy’s memoir, Kicking & Dreaming, which I enjoyed very much and really got me back into their music again. Like I said, I know it’s very fashionable to bash Heart’s late 80s output but it’s solid pop-rock music and I, for one, will continue to enjoy it. And that includes “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You.” I just wish it was in the set list for the show I’m seeing but hoping for that in 2024 is very, very foolish.