On a site spending a lot of words on The Who and Bruce Springsteen it is peculiarly interesting to touch upon the views of Jim Steinman. For when speaking about these artists it will be fairly natural to draw parallels to the classical opera tradition and eventually recall the name Richard Wagner - unfortunately a theme on which neither Pete Townshend nor Bruce Springsteen has much to say themselves. But when it comes to Jim Steinman these parallels are very much reflected upon by the artist himself. Steinman is an admitted Wagnerian and explicitly aiming at a synthesis of rock and classical opera. Well, to him there isn't even any essential difference between these traditions.
This whole issue became very clear, when during an interview for Rolling Stone Magazine in 1984 Steinman revealed, what had been his three greatest musical experiences: "One was Bruce Springsteen at the Bottom Line, one was the Who the first time they did 'Tommy' at the Filmore, and the third was seeing the Wagnerian opera 'Tristan And Isolde' at the Met right across the street there." (Christopher Connelly: Producer Jim Steinman's Total Eclipse Of The Charts). Since Steinman is a clever and acute analyst, there is something very enlightening about his putting these three experiences on the same footing. It might be common knowledge that The Who's Tommy intended a fusion of rock and opera, but as Steinman points out in the same interview, there is also a remarkable 'operatic' feature in Springsteen's music - especially around 1975, which is when he performed at the Bottom Line.
Alas, while Steinman is certainly right in seeing, that rock isn't as radical a break with tradition as it has often been thought to be, he might be accused of interpreting this tradition in a rather vulgar fashion. As it is clearly shown in his music and bluntly stated in his interviews, Jim Steinman is a great lover of the grotesque, baroque and excessively passionate. He is also an inspired ironist and a convinced defender of showmanship as opposed to realism, and all of this obviously lies behind his choice of Meat Loaf as his favorite performer. But doesn't that mean, that Steinman is attracted to exactly those (real or imagined) features about opera, which make the majority of rock listeners hate it - artificiality, sentimentality, a lack of nuances and an inclination towards emotional extremes, which make you wonder whether it's all just mannerism and make believe? As a matter of fact, these really seems to be the features that Steinman adores about opera - and which he readily praises with an ironical devil-may-care attitude, that some might call "post-modernististic".
It bears witness to the genius of Jim Steinman, that he actually managed to transform his notion of opera into a wealth of popular rock music. But it might very well be a caricature of Richard Wagner that he is celebrating, and in any case, the 'operatic' element in rock seems to be developed in a more tasteful direction by e. g. The Who. Jim Steinman has such an appetite for expression and such immense capabilities as a poet, composer and producer, that the question inevitably arises, whether he really posesses a corresponding amount of inner stuff to express. This is no easy question, since Steinman's poetry is definitely not soulless - on the contrary, it is consequently agitating for some rather original values centered around zest, paganism and eroticism. But playfully moving between the poles of bombastic emphasis and ironic distance his music is constantly running the risk of delivering attitudes without sincerity, passion without content, intensity without extension in the personalities and lives of it's spectators. To borrow a phrase from Matt Johnson, one could accuse Jim Steinman of turning rock-n-roll into a "pornography of despair".
We probably wouldn't present Jim Steinman on this site, if we didn't find it so scandalous, that nobody knows about him. As further elaborated elsewhere, Solid Rock is basically about pointing to some music and saying: "Listen to that, it will have something to give you, it will enrich you as a person". Well, it is not that this would be straightforwardly a lie to tell about the music of Jim Steinman. But it wouldn't exactly be the truth either. The only thing we feel almost certain about is, that Steinman himself wouldn't take this problem too seriously. Making you a better person? Steinman would very likely rest his case with making you bad for good.