Word: batting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Teen Commandments, as revealed in Bat Out of Hell...
...star who's just been kneed by the school football coach -- could belong only to Marvin Lee Aday, known to the world as Meat Loaf. First as Eddie the zombie biker in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), then as star of writer-arranger Jim Steinman's ambitious album Bat Out of Hell (1977), Meat Loaf gave clarion clout to rock's first decadent period. The Bat LP sold oodles; one cut (Two Out of Three Ain't Bad) was a hit single; another (Paradise by the Dashboard Light) became an influential proto-video. And for a moment...
...film Streets of Fire. If the Druids had needed jingles for their oak-grove revelries, Steinman would have been the man to write them. But his songs needed Meat Loaf's urgency to lift their rude majesty to Ouch over High C. So the old colleagues reunited for Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell . . . It earned the obligatory pan from Rolling Stone ("low-octane operatic drivel") and seemed as likely to hit the Top 40 as the piano stylings of Richard Klayderman...
...turns out that the savants had a lot to learn about retrograde, reprobate ^ rock 'n' roll. Bat II slipped through a crack in the pop Zeitgeist to occupy the No. 1 slot on Billboard's album chart, above Nirvana and the other pricey rockers half Meat Loaf's age (46). Somebody must like this stuff, someone who remembers what rock once did -- and still could -- sound and feel like. Three, maybe four chords; an amoral homily twisted into a catch phrase; adolescent yearning and ecstasy so confused that they become harmony...
...right, nobody is young anymore -- certainly not kids. And the speaker of Bat II's songs is a bit frayed by time. In I'd Do Anything for Love (but I Won't Do That), it's the woman whose long wish list needs to be satisfied ("Will you cater to every fantasy I got? Will you hose me down with holy water if I get too hot?") and the man who must oblige. He must also face mortality. In Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are, he is haunted by three pushy ghosts...