The prevailing American beliefs about sex, love, and commitment were, for many years, encapsulated by the 1977 Meat Loaf song “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” The epic Wagnerian rock duet plays out in three acts: First, a young couple hooks up in a parked car, and the guy pushes the girl for sex. Then the girl declares that, before they go further, she needs to know that the guy will love her until the end of time, which, under duress, he promises to do. Finally, from some point in the future, miserably tied together, the two sing that the end of time can’t come soon enough.

The song stretches for about eight minutes, an absurd length for a single, but it managed to become such a staple of classic rock that, two decades after its release, as teenagers, my friends and I had learned the w

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