I was just a kid when I first heard "Bat Out Of Hell", so the reasons I loved the record early on were the reasons you would expect from a kid. It sounded pompous and ridiculous, it had a guitar that sounded like a motorcycle, and there were sex jokes scattered throughout the lyrics (even if I didn't grasp all of them at that age). It was probably the first time I had heard music blended with sarcastic humor, and it made me feel like part of a club who 'got it' to listen to something everyone knew wasn't cool, but yet couldn't turn away from. It was subversive to be a Meat Loaf fan while everyone else was listening to Nirvana, which was as yet above my understanding.
On the surface level, people heard the jokes about there being "no Coupe De Ville hiding at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box", and thought it was cute. It is, but they missed the deeper picture, the one about how we use cliches to cover up complex emotions, and the one about how promises are only for as long as we can keep them.
That last bit is what continues to haunt me about the record. It happens in the climax of "Paradise By The Dashboard Light", when Meat gets fed up and sings, "I'm praying for the end of time, so I can end my time with you." It's one of those rare lines from a song I wish I had written myself. There is so much contained in that one sentence, it's a shame the song gets obscured by people remembering the baseball play-by-play as a narration of sexual frustration.
What is a promise? To boil it down, a promise is a way for us to say a feeling is immutable, that it will never change. But this is a foolish thing to do, because we can't guarantee any such thing. Our feelings are subject to the whims of chemistry, and to guarantee that a love with always burn as hot and as strong for all of time is to essentially brand yourself a liar. There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, the eternal flame needs a steady supply of fuel, and love is an active state of mind. Every moment we are in love, we are choosing to love that person. That is both the good and bad, because it might make love sound ephemeral, but it also means every day that person gets to know they have still been chosen to be showered with affection.
There is a dilemma in the line Meat sings. On the one hand, he doesn't want to break his promise, because promises are marks of character. If he doesn't follow through, he is revealing himself as a less than ideal person. If he does follow through, however, he would be making himself miserable solely to live up to an ethic. In that case, we can imagine she would know he didn't want to be with her, and wasn't in love with her anymore, so would she even be happy with that arrangement? I would think not.
But that isn't the only big question we tackle. In "Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad", we're faced with this bit of realization; "I want you, I need you, but there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you". Now we're getting at the very heart of what love is. If you want and need someone, is that not a form of love? Or is passion the only thing we think of as love? It's a question without a true answer, as it will be up to us to determine whether that is enough. The song might sound like a joke on first glance, but we're being confronted with a true existential question.
That gets muddled later on, when the line "can't you see my faded Levis bursting apart" was used as Meat was singing about how obvious his love should be. It's a different angle, but the same issue we are addressing. Love and lust are two different feelings, and too often the fairy tale image we have of a relationship conflates them. Even in these songs, as we are asking ourselves what is really important, the talk confuses exactly what we're aiming for.
That confusion is normal, though. Words can't capture the full extent of an emotion, and even in our own minds the narration of our lives we hear is only a facsimile of what we are actually feeling. Jim Steinman wrote these songs to work through his own thoughts and feelings, and perhaps it was the frustration of trying to understand our emotions that led him to adopt his sarcastic persona. If he better knew how to explain himself, he might not have felt the need to make us laugh.
Or perhaps he merely realized how absurd love is. To think that one person can fulfill your every need and desire for the entirety of time is a belief in odds so long they can't be calculated. The music on "Bat Out Of Hell" is absurd, and it has to be. That's the only way subjects like love and death can ever make sense. When we take the little things, and blow them up to ridiculous proportions, we begin to understand that nothing is as important as we make it out to be.
And that includes music. For most of my life, I've been listening to "Bat Out Of Hell". It's absolutely one of the most important albums in my life, but when I stop and think about it, what's actually important is the way the album has made me think. It wasn't the music, no matter how many times the songs have run through my mind. "Bat Out Of Hell" was a learning experience, and I only learn more as time passes.
Then again, maybe I'm over-thinking all of this.
No comments:
Post a Comment