Quote:
Originally Posted by jmfreeman
Safe Sex is a fine song. I haven't heard it for some years but I think it would need a little more reworking than merely changing 'girl' to 'boy' in order to work here, though.
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Yeah, that was kind of my initial reaction to hearing that choice as well. Meat may understand a song one way as an actor, but Jim certainly has his own entirely separate character-related intentions when he writes it, and -- in my opinion -- he didn't write "Safe Sex" for a guy at all.
(Warning: strong opinion follows. I do not claim it's the right or the only opinion, just how I see it.)
There's a way Steinman writes 'guy' songs and a way he writes 'girl' songs, and in my observation, they almost never intersect. For that reason, you could make one of either kind into a duet,
maybe, but completely switching gender is tough.
In his songs, the men are heroes, or at least someone insecure who desperately wants to be the male power fantasy he projects, whereas Jim's women are "a twist on the Madonna/whore complex" personified; they're either powerful (or self-empowered), mysterious, playful women who know what they want and how to get it, someone to be put on a pedestal (think, say, the narrative voice of Bonnie Tyler's "Rebel Without a Clue" or "Good Girls Go to Heaven" as performed by Pandora's Box and in the early version of
Bat-musical), or fragile, vulnerable, more-than-a-titch broken women, not to be admired but pitied (at best), who are a shiner and abusive mate away from a TV movie drama (a good example is any version of "All Coming Back" that's not a duet), with very little nuance in between.
You can't really take a song written in the 'female' Steinman style and give it to a male performer, unless they're gay and owning the non-stereotypical male aspect (read: Tyce Green, to name at least one), it's a heavily tweaked duet, or it has a new lyric. In my opinion, Jim never puts men in the position the singer of "Safe Sex" is in, so just swapping gender in the appropriate lines isn't a big enough shift. It would really need to be a duet or have a new lyric.