Word: meat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rock in its giddy, roiling infancy. The singing voice is familiar too. That pure tenor -- its piercing power and excellent elocution suggesting a glee-club 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...
...several off- Broadway musicals and created some wondrously pretentious, infectious numbers for Bonnie Tyler (Total Eclipse of the Heart) and the 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 America...
...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 in the U.S. 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 catchphrase; adolescent yearning and ecstasy so confused that they become harmony...
...heavenly choirs, sleigh bells and mausoleum echoes of Phil Spector's wailing Wall of Sound. The lyric lines are long and chatty, with more pomp to the bomp. Bat II is the '50s, '60s and '70s, packed in steel and wrapped in Mylar. Or go back even further. Meat Loaf is not quite Jussi Bjorling, and Steinman ain't no Wagner, but in rock terms Bat Out of Hell II is a Gotterdammerung you can dance...
...hours' drive from the southern city of Guangzhou, where bustling construction sites and rows of town houses, factories and shopping centers line the road through the Pearl River delta. In Shanghai, China's New York City, shop windows are crammed with chic imports, electronic pagers and fancy cuts of meat...