When Daphne was 8 years old, she fell in love with Total Eclipse of the Heart and its grand guignol video. "Arthur Fonzarelli's got an army of clones", indeed.
Just recently, when Daphne was very depressed, Tricia made her dissolve into helpless fits of laughter with her impromptu rendition of It's All Coming Back To Me Now, a song which had meant a lot to her in her young adulthood. (A song with two insane videos - the Céline Dion himbo motorcycle ghost version, and the Pandora's Box Ken Russell-directed goddamn BDSM soft-porn video.)
"This Corrosion is ridiculous. It’s supposed to be ridiculous. It’s a song about ridiculousness. So I called Steinman and explained that we needed something that sounded like a disco party run by the Borgias. And that’s what we got." - Andrew Eldritch. (By ridiculousness, Eldritch means that the lyrics are supposed to be a pisstake of the vapid Goff bilge churned out by his erstwhile partner W. Hussey.)
Much like Vostok Lake (and the Sisters of Mercy, come to think of it), the work of Jim Steinman is essentially ridiculous and yet bad-ass. It's about all those feelings you have when you're a teenager which you're supposed to be ashamed of when you're an adult. If you're lucky, you never grow out of it.
Steinman and his large friend took Bat Out Of Hell to 40 record companies and got laughed out of the room before Todd Rundgren finally got the joke. So fuck the Industry of Slavery and Theft, also too.
Congratulations, Jim, for making it to the punchline. If there's a Rock and Roll Heaven, I know who I want behind the mixing desk.
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