- #Elton john rocket man song meaning movie#
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(“Blue Moves” deserves your scorn, but spin the sprightly “Jump Up!” again before writing off the era entirely.) He was still prolific, but for the first time his often-crummy records aroused suspicion that he was merely exploiting his audience’s devotion. The late ’70s and early ’80s were a sketchy phase for John, who’s spoken freely about his substance abuse at the time not unrelatedly, one gathers, this was also the period when he fired his core band and even broke up with Taupin for a while. He was that good then, and he’s that good now. To take in his excellent farewell concert, in which he jumps from the sunburned Americana of “Tiny Dancer” to the disco-flecked “Philadelphia Freedom” to the swooning space operatics of “Rocket Man” is to buy into the fantasy that this person experienced all these things and then lived to write about them. Indeed, it’s our belief in John’s authorship - our willingness to think of him as the throughline - that allowed him to get away with what does distinguish him from his peers, which is the astonishing sweep of his catalog, particularly his output from 1970 to 1975. (No doubt his gender helped in this respect.) As “Rocketman” demonstrates, “Your Song” was just a piece of paper stuffed in an envelope until John got ahold of it.īut it’s a testament to the emotional clarity of John’s music that, for all he shares with master interpreters such as Cher and Celine Dion, he’s more widely regarded these days as a rightful member of rock’s auteur class, no different in terms of esteem than Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen or Paul McCartney. Obviously, John’s melodies and grooves contained their own power.
How odd, in retrospect, that this was the wave that delivered John to fame after all, the guts he was spilling - and with a camp sense of razzle-dazzle that may well have scandalized Crosby - were technically Taupin’s. rock royals turned out to see John that August, including Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley and all three members of Crosby, Stills & Nash - precisely the singer-songwriter types, not to mention the Me Decade sex symbols, that the Troubadour came to symbolize at a time when pop was preoccupied with the idea of sensitive artists spilling their guts in song.
#Elton john rocket man song meaning movie#
Much is made in the movie of Elton’s breakthrough at the Troubadour, the venerable West Hollywood hangout where in 1970 he played his first shows in America. Their system wouldn’t surprise a veteran of Broadway or the Brill Building, where singers don’t write their own songs. “Rocketman” is thorough in its telling of the partners’ collaboration, from their meet-cute at a diner (after being paired by a music publisher) through their development of a process, unheard-of in rock, in which Bernie mails lyrics to Elton, who then sets them to music - and typically with as little effort as in that scene about “Your Song.”
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Where sex for Mercury is represented as a source of shame, Elton is shown enjoying himself in bed (and in a recording studio’s tape room) with another man - a capitulation to the woke sensibility of a modern audience, perhaps, but an important driver of a narrative in which we’re meant to understand that Elton is speaking his truth in “ Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” his deeply moving song about freeing himself, at least for a while, from the punishing illusion that he was straight.Įxcept, wait, hold on: As any serious fan knows, John didn’t write the words to “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” Taupin, his longtime lyricist, did. “Rocketman” centers John’s gayness in a way that feels especially welcome in the wake of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which treated Freddie Mercury’s sexuality like an inconvenience.
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The result is an unconventional movie about an unconventional career - one that invites us, at a moment when John is on a lengthy world tour he’s calling his last, to consider everything beyond his prodigious talent that might’ve prevented this 72-year-old genius from ending up here.įor starters, there were the obstacles not of his own making: the loveless childhood in which a pop star’s crucial self-belief is all but stamped out of him the hardly-great looks of a gap-toothed fellow balding before his time the sexuality of a gay man in an era when even show business enforced a code of public secrecy.
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