Caught a drift of the old album Bat Out of Hell by Meatloaf wafting out of a cafe yesterday, and tried to think of why it could have been so popular, and how it seemed to defy easy classification at the time, enjoying this massive crossover appeal. I think at heart, it put into a modern context the old successful musicals like Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun and Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma; touching into something in the American psyche that’s not exactly wholesome like apple pie, a fair dose of flaws, but somehow redemption tags along in the back pocket.
Behind the pretense and the campiness, there are kernels of truth within the kitsch , ambiguous verities of light seeping through the cracks that make the work compelling. Again, in that tradition of the American flavor of unrestrained restraint, simplicity and strength; Hellzapoppin, Tobacco Road and something in the air of Gershwin and Copland. An indestructible energy that is uniquely American and dips generously into all the immigrant cultures that defies a normal and conventional understanding of logic. Nothing adds up but somehow it makes sense, in the way innocence is disavowed in the most direct and unpretentious manner at the same time transgressing the canon of the American innocence industry.
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