Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, by Rax King

August 21, 2022 4:09 PM

In an oral history of Bat Out of Hell that appeared in Classic Rock magazine, Meat Loaf has claimed that two Ivy League professors performed a “psychological test” in the “U.S. Medical Journal” (all quotations sic) to determine the subjects’ state of mind, using the album as a litmus test. Per Meat Loaf’s interpretation of this test, any listener who doesn’t like Bat Out of Hell is psychologically unsound. This sounds exceptionally incorrect, but as a lover of this album, I agree that its emotional highs and lows feel informative. I trust people more when they admit that they love this album as I love it; I trust them less when they offer the same old critiques of it, the predictable way my proto-irony guy did. “Meat Loaf?” he said doubtfully when I made my suggestion. “I can’t have that in my Spotify history.”
posted by The corpse in the library (1 comment total)

I thought it was going to be much more lighthearted than it ended up being. It's funny, but it also has a lot of grim material re sex, and marital abuse.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:14 AM on August 22, 2022