Jim Steinham (Image: Facebook)
There’s thunder in the sky, and a killer’s in the bloodshot streets, and Jim Steinman has passed on, taking much of the ’70s with him.
The writer of Meatloaf’s
Bat Out of Hell, of
Bad For Good, of … er …
Bat Out of Hell Two, and numerous other classics including the insane
Total Eclipse of the Heart has gone, at the age of 73. Who dies at 73 these days. It’s almost gauche. Twenty seven or 52 or 90, please.
But how do you memorialise a man, the bulk of whose work was done in bubblegum pop turned into mini-operas, like Bayreuth done out of spun sugar? From one angle the man’s work was ridiculous. Yet from another it’s a triumph, wringing from mainstream American popular culture one last triumph, the culmination of a culture of self-confidence and continuity, the point at which the country, the empire, was still revelling in its own capacity to create a culture that conquered the world, but only through a parodic version