All Hail Rob Harvilla

In the months after my son came into my life, I was spending a lot of wee hours alone washing, rinsing, cleaning, wiping, and reloading so that my wife could get a few hours of sleep here and there. I had never paid much attention to Spotify’s podcasts, but, thanks to long hours standing at the sink, I had run my normal podcast content to empty and I took a chance.

I’m so thankful. Rob’s “60 songs that explain the 90’s” did cover insights about the music of my teens and twenties. But Rob’s writing and his angle of attack on the questions of music are inventive. His tone and personal anecdotes enliven and draw out laughter. Some episodes drew me straight away because I loved the song under the microscope (Portishead’s “Glory Box”); some I hate-listened (Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Kinda Life")¹ ; but the one that I avoided the longest wound up being a powerful showcase about what makes this show so special: Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”

Most people only know one rock music critic: Lester Bangs. He’s name-dropped in an REM song and is a framing device in Almost Famous. It’s for good reason, he pioneered the personal, no-holds-barred, passionate music critic/reviewer persona. While there are many reviewers (Hi! Greil Marcus), there was only ever one Lester Bangs and, like Plato or Kant, pretty much everyone else in the same job description is acting in response. So Harvilla is definitely operating in the channel that Bangs pioneered, but with his “Aw shucks” Midwestern pedigree, and his kids, and his minivan full of kids, and his vibrant memories of a pre-kid youth spent in Oakland in NYC, it’s got a maturity with a dash of wistfulness that just works.

Harvilla excels at taking the listener on a journey to discover the essence of a song or artist. Sometimes there are insights that just slap you in the face like a trout thrown by Lew Zealand:

Harvilla’s genius is taking a song that’s known by everyone, tracing its musical/spiritual/artistic ancestry, finding an interesting theory or nugget of insight, and then running forward time as lensed by that theory until we hit the moment the song arrived. As we witness the song’s arrival through our new lens, it seems obvious, banal, even logically necessary. It’s truly a gift.

For example, in his coverage of Pantera’s “Walk.” One of his lines of musing is something like:

Pantera is a band from Texas that plays metal. But really they’re a boogie band. [What Rob? You’re high as a kite] And that’s not surprising, Texas is home to…[in my mind: holy shit, they’re metal ZZ Top]…ZZ Top.”

OK, but what’s left to be milked out of “My Heart Will Go On (MHWGO)?” In Harvilla’s capable hands, plenty, as we’ll see. Backtracking from “A song known by everyone that’s bigger than life sung by a woman with no restraint,” Rob goes back to her titanic theatre-anthem precursor…through the 90s, past the 80s, right smack into the mid-70s and …Meat Loaf with “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” What do we discover there? The art of interpreting Jim Steinman songs.

Jim Steinman was one of Meat Loaf’s frequent collaborators and the icon behind the biggest (not in volume of sales or volume, but in Embiggenitude) songs ever as well as the rock opera Streets of Fire (fuck yeah).

So that’s the song that’s bigger than life bit. But why is Céline so….Céline?² .

Run it back past the soup self-mythology about poverty, and La Belle Provence, and over a dozen kids, and disrespect from critics for decades. And then run it forward and watch her, by sheer force of will, ignore all the critics, and get to 1997.

An unstoppable force meets an unstoppable song. Double unstoppable.

This brilliant dual-rail construction of the song railroads us inexorably to 1997 and MHWGO. She is ready to become the song and the has been prepared for that moment by resisting the haters for decades. The structuring of the argument is 👨‍🍳 💋 wonderful.

The greatest compliment I can pay her is that she turns every song she sings into a Jim Steinman song.

So from a structuralist analysis of the essay, Harvilla is special. But then look at the language:

On Meat Loaf…

“Dune, the novel, has less plot than ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light.’”
“They are…trading freckles. They are barely 17 and barely dressed.”
“[On not understanding the sexual subtext] I thought Paradise was an external place, like Six Flags or the zoo, maybe.”
“And bummer ending to Meat Loaf’s career. By 1993 the public no longer had any interest in pompous sit-com length power-ballads with sentences for song titles sung by a quavering ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ alumnus who looked like a WWF heel, Meat Loaf was over. No I’m just kidding plays “I would do anything for Love (But I won’t do that)”
[After playing song sample] “Holy shit! I almost drove my mini-van off a cliff on my way back from the outlet mall yesterday when that chorus hit.”

On Jim Steinman…

The wind beneath so many rock opera wings, Jim Steinman

If you have no idea what Jim Steinman looks like just picture an inconceivably awesome dude…who spent every last second of his 73 years…popping a wheelie on a motorcycle…picture 73 year long uninterrupted motorcycle wheelie…
Steinman wrote grown-ass man symphonies to god
Steinman songs aren’t movies they’re extended universes, they’re franchises, they’re theme parks
Steinman wrote every song like it was a new book of the Bible
One does not simply sing a Jim Steinman song, one must wring a Jim Steinman song from the Earth much as King Arthur pulled the fabled sword from the stone; One must wield a Jim Steinman song as Captain America wielded Thor’s hammer at the end of “Avengers: Endgame”
Quoting Meat Loaf: " You can’t just have a great voice and sing a Jim Steinman song, you have to become a Jim Steinman song; you have to be the song; you don’t sing the song, you are the song

Céline

… sings her songs
- …like they owe her money
- … like she’s a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm
- … like she’s Marshawn Lynch … in the NFC playoffs…against the New Orleans Saints
- … as if the listener were Sisyphus and she were the boulder
- … as if she’s going to make the whole world cower in the storm cellar
The greatest compliment I can pay her is that she turns every song she sings into a Jim Steinman song.

Now this is a standout episode, but other episodes (more than 60, in fact 120!) range in coverage from hip-hop, to fad, to metal. I would say no episode is without some staggeringly good insight about how a song sounds, was written, or feels.

Lauren bought me his abridged book that covered the 60 songs, but seriously, Rob, just give us the full essays, dude. Most every trope, word, or exegesis is worth reading. Or perhaps Barb Harvilla, mother to Rob, who makes humorous appearances in the show and the tour of the show: Please ask Robby to find a publisher to publish the essays in their full form. ❤️

Footnotes

This actually is probably my second-most favorite because of the pull-quotes Rob reads off which actually cause him to break into unplanned laughter that’s so sweet and good-natured about a really heinous comment. You are walking, living, breathing cheese.
You know that someone is a big thing when the only adjective to describe the noun that points to them is that noun, but as an adjective