Meat Loaf never goes out of date

[meatloaf-unofficial]

Now I really like this! Meat Loaf never goes out of date!
(I hope this hasn't been posted before... as I canny quite remeber )

Date: March 10, 2008

I'm gonna hit the highway like a batterin' ram on a silver black phantom bike. Just as soon as I've filed this

Blasting through the timewarp... Meat Loaf in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, May 1974. Photograph: Cine Text / Allstar

The first rule of Meat Loaf is that it's now OK to like Meat Loaf. In fact it's de rigueur, especially since he has a new movie out - Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise - in which Meat:

plays Canada!

faces a potentially career-threatening controversy!

avoids any mention of Jim Steinman!

When the Spice Girls' bus driver helped abort a drunken car-jacking recently, a young female colleague of mine - part of the much-heralded Spice Generation - commented, "Holy shit! Meat Loaf's a hero!" For me, the Meat has always been a hero - the personification of proper, pompous, pretentious, overblown, self-consciously grandiose, wall-of-sound-shattering, truck-driver-gear-changing, sweaty, fat, white-shirted, jet-motorbike-with-bat-wings-riding goth'n'roll.

Meat's music was like early Springsteen with an aching hard-on and atomic-bomb balls. Every song started with gentle foreplay, then rushed rapidly to an earth's crust-shattering climax. And then another earth's crust-shattering climax. And then a climax where the earth actually exploded. Then a quiet bit. And then a climax where the very fabric of the universe was rent asunder. And so on. It was like music with all the bits that suck taken out and all the bits that rule underlined. And given exclamation marks. With a very thick marker pen.

I loved Meat. I was alone. A poet on BBC2 - pale with fear, thin nostrils distended with contempt - articulated the disgust felt by Britain's pale, sensitive, posy-sniffing critical community when he dismissed the video for Bat out of Hell as "fascistic". In the music press, young Fotherington Thomases queued up to deride Meat's cod-operatic oeuvre as schlocky, cheesy and melodramatic - as if these were bad things.

Alas my attempts to champion Meat in the era of pious lumberjack junkie grunge and lank-fringed Manc insouciance were rejected by the man himself in two disastrous encounters. The first came on his tour bus where I asked if he'd ever been asked to play a dame in a pantomime. Meat started going on about Cervantes and commedia dell'arte and the harlequin as metaphor.

I said, No: Mother Goose.

This went on for a while and ended with Meat roaring "Don't you lecture me about ~~~~ing pantomime."

Which was when the photographer knocked a cup of coffee in his lap.

The other time, I wrote a video treatment for Meat full of lots of hot, breathless tosh about how we were gonna reclaim the Meat from the cold dead hands of the Alan Partidge-esque Hard Rock Café crowd and place him on polished ivory plinth in rock'n'roll Valhalla next to Ozzie and Noddie Holder.

This reportedly made Meat "go mental".

Meat does not have a sense of humour. The gods never do, Meat is not self-aware in the postmodern sense. Meat does not do irony. Meat is the anti-Bowie. If Meat ever decided to create a fantasy alter ego he would call it Meat, and it too would lack a sense of humour. Meat knows that subtlety is found in the dictionary between shit and syphilis. He knows it in the same way a wolf knows it must drink the blood of the lamb.

Now, decades too late, Meat is officially cool. He has joined the Monkees and Motown in that special category of corny pop it's now OK to like - even though all the cool kids despised the shit out of it when it was actually fresh. The same thing happened to The Police. And Gary Numan. And if it can happen to Gary Numan it can happen to anybody.

Welcome, one and all, to Meat Land. I've been expecting you.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/20...meat_loaf.html

[belladonna-took]

Fascinating article Ross..though it went a bit scary at the end!

[lorenzoduke]

That was probably the single best article on Meat I've ever read. This guy gets it.

[Cpl Mickey]

Brilliant article. Well done Ross

[Siobhan]

Quote
"Meat does not have a sense of humour."

huh? he must be mistaken...

good article though

[lorenzoduke]

Originally Posted by SOC2292

Quote
"Meat does not have a sense of humour."

huh? he must be mistaken...

good article though

I guess he was more referring to the 'in-character' Meat rather than offstage, and him avoiding irony in his vocal phrasing, even on the more humorous Steinman lines like crackerjack box etc.

At least I hope so - anyone who's seen an interview with Meat should know he's got a great, self effacing sense of humor.

[Battybarb]

Originally Posted by SOC2292

Quote
"Meat does not have a sense of humour."

huh? he must be mistaken...

good article though

I agree totally ,good article,but"Meat"has no sense of humour...WTF...he has a great sense of humour on and off stage..