Task: Sentiment Analysis
Input (English): Live fast, die young, stay pretty....... . Like so many of the albums I now find myself trawling for, my first copy of The Slider was on good old 12" vinyl. In that original incarnation it only included the first 13 tracks now included on the CD release. "Thunderwing" and "Lady" were, if memory serves me, first aired on the B-side of the "Metal Guru" single, while "Cadillac" (the great single-that-never-was in my opinion) never really seemd to find a home it was happy with. In feel it probably belongs with the sparser-sounding "Zip Gun" than with the lusher "Slider" or "Tanx" production. Purists may argue that "Electric Warrior" is the T.Rex album to own if you're only going to have the one, but it is essentially a transitional album bridging the gap between the earlier Tolkienesque folk period and the Glam that followed and ends up being neither one thing nor t'other. "Slider" lies firmly in the latter period and is as good an example of the strengths and weaknesses of Marc Bolan as writer and performer as you are likely to get. I can think of nobody else in the modern period who has been able to extract such a variety of results from the basic three-chord blues riff. It's a well documented fact that Bolan would have loved to be Elvis, and on the strength of this perhaps he wouldn't have made a bad job of it. It's too easy to treat some of the lyrics harshly, branding them "pretentious" or "unintelligeable", (although if it were early 20th century poetry it would be called "hermetic" and treated with reverence), but that's what Bolan was all about from first to last. T.Rex are probably pretty much of an unknown quantity to most American listeners outside of "Get It on" (with it's title inexplicably censored for transatlantic consumption). Here in Britain for 3 or so all too brief years he was the epitome of a pop star. "Slider" more than any other album illustrates what he was about before succumbing to McCartney's Syndrome and putting the wife on keyboards
Output (English): POS