The Best Of ... Meatloaf's 'I'd Do Anything For Love'

Karaoke is undeniably the champagne of evening activities and no one wants to shame this art form by singing the wrong song. When it comes to karaoke though, picking a good song isn’t good enough. If you’re going to karaoke right, you need the BEST song.

Amateurs might tell you there is no best karaoke song; it depends on who’s singing. Direct those clowns to the tee-ball field because they’re obviously not ready for the big leagues. Not to get too existential, but with the right song, karaoke isn’t about you, the singer. It’s about us, the karaoke community. It’s about the guy in the pink popped-collar polo turning to the chick with the sleeve tats and freelance design career to say, “Dude, I love this song,” and her replying, “Yeah, man. Yeah.” Karaoke’s about bringing people together. It’s about the basic human love of a cheesy song we know by heart and the fundamental need to publicly display that love. It’s about singing your heart out and not caring if you did well, but knowing you did good by the people who heard you.

What song could possibly be magic enough to pull off this kind of mission? Some obscure indie hit known exclusively by people with blunt-cut bangs? An oldie only available on LP? It’s nothing at all that arcane. The right song is probably no further than your dad’s CD collection. Take out Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell and put on the first track. It’s “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” and it’s hands down the ultimate karaoke song.

The song has all of the rock, roll, and rage that makes for good karaoke and it cranks up the ironic awesomeness with the earnest passion of lines like “I’ll never forgive myself if we don’t go all the way tonight.” It’s a classic, but not overplayed. So when those first piano keys and digitized bike roaring noises sound, there’s a perfect balance of surprise and nostalgia. Plus it’s a duet. An unspoken rule of karaoke is the more voices, the more better.

All of that makes “I’d Do Anything For Love” great, but this isn’t about great karaoke songs. This is about the best karaoke song. What takes Meat Loaf’s mid-’90s opus from great to the best comes about six minutes into the karaoke version. The woman is singing. She loves her man, but she’s been burned before. Can she trust him? She’s testing her limits, setting ground rules, and then she asks the question that every woman wonders but is too afraid to utter. The question written in all of our hearts. “Will you hose me down with holy water if I get too hot?”

Meat Loaf, with his uncanny sense of female pathos, doesn’t let her leave it there though. After she gives throaty voice to the uncertainty inside every woman, the most poignant part is repeated. “Hot.” As the karaoke singer, the conveyor of this universal question of overheating and trust issues, you not only have to sing it with the dignity it deserves but hold out that microphone to the audience so they too can repeat the word “hot” and experience the sheer magnitude of its meaning themselves.

And that’s it. That second “hot.” That word the entire room sings in unison. That moment when what you, the crowd, and Meat Loaf won’t do for love all synchs up. That is when “I’d Do Anything for Love” shirks off the desperate grasps of George Michael’s “Faith” and Cher’s “Believe” and transcends from the crowded shelf of great karaoke songs to its own pedestal, claiming its rightful place as the best karaoke song of all time.