written for Cher, the singer initially disliked the song upon hearing a demo and turned it down. Warren claimed in 1991: "I got on my knees and pleaded. I told her I wasn't going to leave the room until she said yes, and finally, just to get rid of me, she did." In 2014, she further added: "She really hated [it], but I held her leg down during a session and said, 'You have to record it!'" According to Warren, Cher reportedly responded: "'Fuck you, bitch! You're hurting my leg! OK, I'll try it.' Once Cher sang it, she gave me this look like, 'You were right'." Critical reception Gary Hill of AllMusic retrospectively wrote that the song "has a crunchy texture to it, albeit in a poppy, '80s Starship sort of arrangement." The Daily Vault's Mark Millan noted it as a "soft-rock anthem". Music & Media described it as "a well-produced FM sing-along." Music video The music video for "If I Could Turn Back Time", directed by American television director Marty Callner, takes place on board the battleship . It depicts Cher and her band performing a concert for the ship's crew. The video was filmed in Los Angeles on Friday night, June 30, 1989, while the ship was stationed at the former Long Beach Naval Shipyard at Pier D. In the video, the band plays on the foredeck, and the ship is rigged with spotlights, light racks and strobes. Cher's son, Elijah Blue Allman, 12 at the time, appears as one of the band's guitarists wearing dark glasses and a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt. The Department of the Navy had granted permission for the music video shoot because of its potential for boosting Navy recruitment: the Navy did not have a budget for TV ads in 1989. The Navy initially selected the battleship for the video. However, New Jersey was out to sea when Callner needed to do an initial site survey, so he toured her sister ship, Missouri, instead. During Callner's visit, Missouris public affairs officer, Lieutenant Mark Walker, convinced him to change the filming location to Missouri. Cher's outfit for the original video, a fishnet body stocking under a black one-piece bathing suit that left most of her buttocks (and a tattoo of a butterfly) exposed, proved very controversial, and many television networks refused to show the video. MTV first banned the video, and later played it