“Wasted Youth” is just “Love and Death and an American Guitar” from Bad for Good with some different sound effects. I don’t even know that it’s a different recording of Steinman’s voice. (Though I will say that Steinman was able to deliver it at least very nearly identically live a number of times and so it could be a new recording easily enough.) I still love it, but I don’t really have anything new to say about it here. I do think “Love and Death and an American Guitar” is a better title and really I think the next song, “Everything Louder than Everything Else” probably should be titled “Wasted Youth,” but that’s a pretty minor quibble.

As soon as Steinman’s rant finishes with, “You’ve got a hell of a lot to learn about rock and roll,” Eddie Martinez’s guitar jumps in with some huge power chords to signal our transition to the next song. Todd Rundgren, Kasim Sulton, and Max Haskett together shout “Wasted! Youth!” a few times and then Lorraine Crosby joins them in some wordless background vocals and Rick Marotta’s drums jump in. Meat Loaf shouts, barely in melody, “I know that I will never be politically correct!” over drums and bass only. The huge guitars play the main riff again. Then he shouts “And I don’t give a damn about my lack of etiquette!” and the riff plays again, joined by some “doo-doo” background vocals.

For the rest of the verse, this pattern continues, with Meat Loaf shouting almost tunelessly and basically having a call-and-response with the guitars and wordless backing-vocals. He essentially rants that nothing matters to him except for music, suggesting that everything is meaningless anyway and so you may as well do what you enjoy.

The pre-chorus is a bit quieter as Meat Loaf calms down a bit to make a call to action to join his revolution: “So sign up all you raw recruits/Throw away those designer suits/You got your weapons cocked, your targets in your sights/There’s a party raging somewhere in the world/You gotta serve your country, gotta service your girl/You’re all enlisted in the armies of the night.” And in the chorus, everything now at full volume including a very convincing synth saxophone, he explains that he’s not here for power, his health, the glory of anything at all, or wealth–he’s here just because music and life should both be played at full volume and screams the title six times.

A softer, bluesier part follow, with the guitars cutting way back and the backing vocals going along with Meat Loaf instead of adding more sounds as Meat Loaf’s mood takes an abrupt turn, explaining what authorities think of him: “That I’m just another case of arrested development and just another wasted youth.” We get back to the sound of the first verse for him to shout that he won’t act his age.

At this point, we head to a bridge section of Meat Loaf shouting, “A wasted youth is better by far than a wise and productive old age,” punctuated by stings of guitar and synthesizer, while the “Wasted! Youth!” backing shouts return. This song is a bit of a dizzying array of sudden-but-small shifts and as a result is kind of a mess.

After Meat Loaf’s statement of purpose, I think he finally delivers the punchline of the song at the third verse’s opening: “If you want my views on history then there’s something you should know:/The three men I admire most are Curly, Larry, Moe.” It’s the other side of the coin to the “live life to the fullest! Damn tomorrow! Stay a teenager!” attitude that the rest of the song and, indeed, rock and roll evinces that it also doesn’t want any deeper thoughts about anything. That the Three Stooges are the three most admirable men in history has to be in the running for the dumbest thought ever expressed aloud, and that’s the point: if you’re really going to take this philosophy seriously, that’s where it ends up.

If it seems crazy to dismiss all of this shouting as parody, I do feel like one other part of the lyrics backs me up. He says he isn’t “in it” (The meaning of which is never entirely clear, but I take to mean rock and roll.) for anything we can come up with but he doesn’t really say what he is “in it” for. When it seems reasonable to expect him to say why he really does it, he starts the line with “but” to set up that expectation but only says “I’m in it ’til it’s over and I just can’t stop.” I submit that he has eliminated essentially all possibilities by saying that he’s not after power, health, glory of anything at all, or wealth. Denying the others is normal enough, but most rock songs would claim to be in it for the overwhelming glory of rock and roll or something like that. By saying “I’m not in it for the glory of anything at all,” he denies even an idea like that.

It’s kind of a sloppy song, with sudden musical shifts that seem to come from left field and a confusing lack of structure, but it’s one of the purest encapsulations of Steinman’s satire of the rock and roll lifestyle. It’s also just one of the loudest, most obnoxious rock songs ever recorded, and that’s also saying something. It’s a ton of fun and the chorus is still catchy as all hell, but I think it’s one of the weaker tracks on Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell.