Skid Row could have cut this song at the 3:30 mark, after the acoustic guitar kicks back in and appears to signal a ready-made outro to the song. But what separates “I Remember You” from the rest is the way they stretch the cliché to the extreme and thus break it. The song is relentlessly bombastic and hits all the glam metal power ballad tropes: an acoustic intro, a pretty boy crooning, a wheedly guitar solo, thunderous drums heralding power chords galore. The beauty of “I Remember You” is its ability to subvert that cliché by transporting the listener back to the days of teenage romance through its absolute commitment to both the power ballad cliché and the teenage love cliché. This is Skid Row ’s cliché of choice: the bright shining sunburst of teenage love, tenderly recalled and codified into a five minute power ballad. Describe it, and the clichés come crawling out: butterflies in the stomach, head over heels, broken hearts, walking on air, they’re “the one”. The cliché of teenage love is ingrained across the cultural psyche from Romeo and Juliet to Dion and the Belmonts to Katy Perry because it’s a feeling nearly all of us have felt.

Most clichés, when you peel them down, say something about the human experience that is so universal that it loses profundity through repetition and becomes trite. Fatally clichéd art, though, is eminently forgettable.īut the funny thing about clichés is that they’re clichés for a reason. Even “bad” art can have its unique appeal - take the hubbub surrounding “The Room”, for example. To create something that is merely a retread of tired paths, challenging nothing, too bland even to be hated is the ultimate artistic failure. Cliché is one of the worst mistakes an artist can commit. The Achilles heel of the power ballad is its maddening tendency to mire in cliché - but, paradoxically, “I Remember You” manages to subvert kitsch and bludgeon cliché through its absolute screaming dedication to its own cliché.

The glam metal explosion yielded more than its fair share of sappy power ballads, but one reigns above them all.

Ill remember you skidrow