Why Meat Loaf Mattered: A Salute to Horsepower, Hormones and Heft

variety.com:

Chris Willman Music WriterAmong Meat Loaf’s critical defenders — which, as you may have realized if you’ve paid much attention over the years, is a very niche market in the world of rock tastemakers — there’s a word that comes up over and over again, employed as a sort of backhanded compliment: “ridiculous.” I’ve used it myself, and fairly recently.

It’s a qualification meant to convey that we know rock ‘n’ roll is not supposed to be about Wagnerian grandiosity, eight-minute song lengths, singing that even a tenor at the Met might say could be toned down a little, fantastical Richard Corben cover paintings, 24-track recordings that can sound like 124… or that word that most strikes dread into the hearts of music critics everywhere: “suite.” If you’re going to profess your love for (or even just tolerance of) “Bat Out of Hell,” it’s necessary to preface or succeed that admission with a quick acknowledgement that you get just how silly it all is.

But is it, really? “Bat Out of Hell,” at least, among Meat Loaf’s catalogue, does not have to be patronized to be defended. Of course, it doesn’t have to be defended, anyway: 14x platinum in the U.S. (and supposedly 40 million-plus worldwide) pretty well defines “Dave Marsh-proof.” In this case, though, if there was a split between popular and media opinion, there’s a case to be made that it was the public that got it dead-right. “Bat Out of Hell” is one of the greatest rock albums of all time — no asterisks necessary.

And OK, sure, pretty ridiculous, in a certain sense… but not in the way that word is usually taken to mean, which is: camp. Granting that this is a record teetering between a smirk and slapstick for a good part of its running time (anything written by Jim Steinman.