Ringo Starr: Bad Boy : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

To say Bad Boy is a very bad record almost misses the point: Ringo Starr's solo career has never had much to do with talent. His only successful post-Beatles album, Ringo, played around with this notion by casting him as a jet-set Candide, lost in producer Richard Perry's purposefully overblown showbiz setting. Subsequent LPs strip-mined such an obvious, one-shot concept bare: the music and the material grew steadily worse until even Starr's sole asset—his bemused, skeptical charm—began to wear thin.

You really can't blame Starr. After all, it literally isn't his fault that he's an ex-Beatle and has to go on dutifully cranking out these turkeys year after year. But Bad Boy isn't even passable cocktail music. The tracks—four of them culled from his disastrous TV special—are too inane, and the arrangements too limp, to manage the backward merit of credible offensiveness (though, to be fair, his dreadful version of "Where Did Our Love Go" comes close). The shoddy packaging only underscores the pointlessness of the whole project.

There's something disheartening about the spectacle of Starr and his erstwhile cohorts, over-stuffed with money and fame, lurching through the motions like this. Bad Boy is ersatz trash, but a record like Wings' London Town is trash with pretensions, which is worse. At least Ringo Starr has the grace to admit he really doesn't know why the hell he bothers. But he isn't even very likable anymore, and that truly is depressing.