“You Give Love a Bad Name” by Bon Jovi

"You Give Love a Bad Name" kicked off Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet in 1986, the first single from the album, and on November 29 of that year it gave the band their first number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and Desmond Child wrote it about a woman who leaves her lover in the dust, and Bruce Fairbairn produced, with Bob Rock engineering and mixing.

It's arena candy with a sharp edge: a stop-start blast of a chorus, David Bryan's keyboards, Alec John Such and Tico Torres pounding the floor, and Sambora cutting loose on everything from electric and acoustic guitar to guitar synthesizer and talkbox, with the whole band shouting backup. It was still kicking decades later, re-entering the charts at 29 in 2007 after Blake Lewis sang it on American Idol.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.